Nuffield Health
Innovation
Building a healthier nation through digital transformation…
SomeOne is working with Nuffield Health — the UK’s largest healthcare charity — to develop a new strategic and digital focus amplified across a new visual and verbal brand world.
Nuffield Health offers an extensive network of Gyms across the UK. It also boasts an extensive network of Hospitals.
However many people only know them for one, or the other.
Our job is to join them up in the hearts and minds of customers — and to tell the deeper story of what Nuffield Health sets out to do not just for the individual — but for the nation. All part of a digital transformation project, where we connect a single customer data viewpoint with smart actions.
This is one of our long term projects — and one we are looking to commit to for the foreseeable future.
Winner — Transform 2020 — Best Healthcare Branding
For the last 60 years, Nuffield Health’s experts have been working together to make the nation fitter, healthier, happier and stronger, all for the public benefit.
As an organisation with no shareholders, they invest all income back into their vision to build a healthier nation.
The UK’s largest healthcare charity
The charity does this through outstanding day-to-day services in a family of 31 award-winning hospitals, 112 fitness and wellbeing clubs, healthcare clinics, and over 200 workplace wellbeing services, and through flagship programmes to support communities by widening access.
What makes Nuffield Health unique is the breadth of expertise to provide connected care spanning from personal training and health MOTs to supporting people on their fitness journeys, helping patients recover with physiotherapy or emotional wellbeing counselling, or providing hospital treatments for illness and serious conditions like arthritis or cancer.
Health is a massive subject. And much of it is tackled by Nuffield Health. We needed an agency partner who could seamlessly connect brand to strategy to digital to print. The scale of the project and its complexity means this is no ordinary creative challenge. So we have been delighted to work with SomeOne, who have proven to be anything but an ordinary creative practice.
building a healthier nation
Nuffield Health delivers unsurpassed standards, with a sector-leading 94% of hospitals judged good or excellent by national regulators, unsurprisingly they are trusted by the NHS, private medical insurers, employers and the general public to provide exceptional health and wellbeing services to the nation.
But what also makes them different is a commitment to flagship programmes to widen access, be that improving the lives of hundreds of children with cystic fibrosis through free exercise classes, or by pioneering the world’s largest research project into how exercise can help men recovering from prostate cancer, or by partnering with schools to provide thousands of pupils with free timetabled programmes to improve their health and wellbeing.
They are committed to the vision of building a healthier nation.
a new lead brand partner for nuffield health
Nuffield Health looked to SomeOne to become their new lead brand partner.
Looking at all channels and all communications — SomeOne has partnered with the organisation to develop a new guiding strategy, a new visual operating system for both Gyms & Hospitals — and ongoing guardianship for all primary branded items.
connected health all endeavours
The charity is uniquely placed — not only help people with ongoing fitness at the gym, or treatments at Hospitals — but both.
In fact, Nuffield’s work goes deeper still, with significant work to flagship programmes to widen access, be that improving the lives of hundreds of children with cystic fibrosis through free exercise classes.
Or by pioneering the world’s largest research project into how exercise can help men recovering from prostate cancer
And by partnering with schools to provide thousands of pupils with free timetabled programmes to improve their health and wellbeing.
Our new strategic position for the brand is not limited to activities at gyms, or procedures at hospitals. But to a bigger purpose, where Nuffield Health is inextricably connected to the improving health of the UK.
A new operating system for health
With the new strategic position clear — we set to work developing a full visual and verbal operating system for the brand.
There was nothing wrong with the existing symbol — that is well recognised in and out of the sector — and the signature green stood out well against the competitors. So we built from there.
Working with Colophon, the typeface has been re-cut in a variety of new weights with an extended set of glyphs and has been entirely re-crafted to work better in digital and printed applications.
Infographics
We designed an entire set of infographic systems to enable statistics and data to be more easily digested at speed. The iconography is designed to work in partnership with the bespoke typeface.
This project has already called on many of SomeOne’s skills. It’s rare to see so much of what we can do in one place. But here, you’ll find strategy, visual and verbal design alongside progressive digital and motion graphics. The really interesting thing is, with all of these assets now set up, we’re now about to embark on the most exciting part… bringing it to life everywhere.
innovative brand states
The branding is designed for a digital environment. Brands that engage more deeply, move. So we have created visual assets specifically for channels where movement is possible. From Social Media, to television screens in Gyms & Hospitals.
Three states were identified through research that have been highlighted through the new brand work.
Excite — The Gym — The Swim — The Spin — The Classes — The PT’s
Balance — Physio — Nutrition — Assess —Emotional Wellbeing — GP
Recover — Treatment — Recovery — Mental Health — Beauty — Operation
These three very different states can now be reflected and amplified in the design work.
So the branding in a Gym can be suitably differentiated from the kind of design work appropriate for a hospital environment and audience.
A modern brand should be built to capitalise on its ability to engage. The new moving image work for Nuffield Health breaks new ground in the healthcare sector. That tingle you feel after a workout, the ache you get the next day, the focus you experience… We’ve made sequences that are built on sensations not just sight.
Radical moving image expressions
While Nuffield Health is a brand for everyone in the UK — it is an innovative organisation, continually inventing and developing cutting edge approaches to the best in modern healthcare.
To amplify this, with The Mill, we created a series of moving image assets that have been inspired by one of the three states of: Excite / Balance / Recover.
The animations reflect the states through their movement, colour & form and will be used throughout the brand applications wherever there are opportunities for moving image.
There’s a new way of looking at health, and it’s a connected point of view. One where a visit to the gym might highlight the need for some preventative physiotherapy — or where care from a hospital doesn’t end when you walk out. The brand work we are creating for Nuffield Health also flies in the face of convention. A more finely grained view of branding is enabling us to develop more progressive work attuned to each audience and context.
The tonal flex needed to move between the three states of Excite / Balance / Recover is also embodied by three types of pattern. These assets can be deployed at speed, scale and significance in any visual channel.
Through the creation of many assets, we’re branding spaces, places and surfaces without the need for repetitive logo-centric options.
This is important as Nuffield is a brand that is experienced frequently.
Gyms see customers very regularly — Hospitals have many touchpoints for patients and their families. So it is immediately useful to have more than just a logo to help remind people where they are and who they are being looked after by. A more involving and varied visual brand experience better endures repeated views.
The work on the brand does not exist purely for the customer.
The entire Nuffield Health family benefits from the new approach.
We’ve been working on both the external and internally facing brand, with new thinking rolling out throughout the headquarters and behind the scenes at the Gyms & Hospitals.
All new thinking, strategy, extensive tone of voice guidance and of course all the static visual and moving assets have been housed in an online guideline system to enable the multiple agencies and suppliers to work from a single brand source that is never out of date.
Thank you to Poonam, David, Chris, Ryan, Holly and all of the Nuffield Health team.