The Priory Group is the leading public
service organisation delivering innovative and collaborative mental
health services. It has over 55 sites across the UK split into a
number of service areas covering addictions, depression, eating
disorders, therapy, specialist education and fostering, care homes
for older people, specialist care and rehabilitation and secure
services.
The business is constantly changing to adapt to the market
demand for mental health services and a number of customers
purchase services from the different service areas.
by the service areas resulted in an
inconsistent brand identity with the divisions looking as though
they were all separate brands. Priory was looking to undertake a
review of the brand identity and an audit of all existing marketing
collateral with a view to sourcing an agency to:
- Develop a consistent, simplistic,
distinctive and appropriate brand identity for the Priory Group
which allowed the service areas to be differentiated while looking
as though they were part of the same group of companies
- Reflect the brand values of safe,
positive, flexible, innovative and collaborative
- Communicate the brand essence of ‘the
leading public service organisation delivering innovative,
collaborative and value for money, mental health services’
- Over 70% of the Priory Group’s
revenue comes from local government or the NHS. Other funding comes
from self-pay and medical insurers. Therefore it has a range of
different audiences from consumers, medical professionals and the
NHS, to social workers, local authorities, personal injury lawyers,
care managers and local education teams. The new brand identity
needed to appeal and be relevant to each target audience.
The mental health sector is evolving
to meet the requirements of new legislation and to respond to the
increasingly complex needs of service users and how they present
themselves.
As people present ever more complex
behaviour and have greater needs, the mental health care sector
finds itself having to develop progressively more specialist
services local to commissioners and referrers in response to their
requests.
As the Priory Group will continue to evolve its service offering
according to the diverse needs of the population, the brand
identity needed to be flexible and able to adapt as the
service
offering changes. We needed to ensure that the
marketing
collateral effectively communicated the quality,
individual,
specialist care and treatment provided by Priory’s
multi-disciplined teams, to commissioners, referrers and,
in some
cases, the service users,
Due to the Priory Group having a range
of different audiences and a broad service offering within the
mental health arena,
we looked to create a solution with consistent elements to pull
together each of the divisions Ð but at the same time elements to
differentiate the divisions to the different audiences.
The starting point for our solution
was to keep the red and green of the Priory group logo but to
develop a colour palette that fit with these colours to give the
brand a more modern, positive and uplifting feel. We were keen to
avoid the
use of the colour blue which is used extensively in the healthcare
sector.
Each division was allocated a lead
colour so that the area of the business was instantly recognisable
by the colour.
As mental health is a sensitive subject matter we wanted to
avoid using imagery of service users. Therefore we chose nature
imagery to symbolise growth, nurturing, development and well-being.
All brand images featured a combination of soft and sharp focus
elements and the overall style involved a contemporary take on a
sepia style treatment.
To address the different audiences we
changed the tone of the lead title and copy within the document so
that consumer facing collateral had a personalised, discrete
message and
the professional facing collateral had an informative
and
direct message.
An audit was taken of all existing
marketing collateral for the different divisions, to ascertain
where there was potential duplication of content and where savings
could be made. We produced a range of design templates for each
divisions’ marketing collateral to enable a straight-forward, time
efficient roll out across all the required marketing
collateral.
As a result of the rebrand Priory
Group has a cohesive, contemporary brand identity that clearly
denotes the different divisions and reflects the brand’s values. It
can very easily be adapted to add additional divisions as the
service offering grows.
The audit of existing marketing
collateral has led to a 60% reduction in the number of pieces of
marketing material produced going forward. This has resulted in a
substantial
cost saving for the organisation.
Keighley Hill, Central Marketing
Manager for the Priory Group, said:
‘‘We are really delighted with our new
brand identity. Merchant impressed us with their interpretation of
our brief and the resulting identity will give us real stand-out in
a competitive market. Their strong knowledge of the healthcare
sector meant that they understood the sensitivities surrounding
mental health and have developed a modern and distinctive brand
that will appeal to our broad audiences.."