Design & Brand Strategy

Outcomes™

The business was faced with:

A confusing brand with a history of short term "rebrands" and business mergers.
Employees feeling embarrassed about the look and feel of marketing materials during sales calls and presentations.
A heavy demand of design requests across the organization with no templated assets to work from.

What I did:

Developed the brand strategy to reposition the business in the market.
Planned and executed a complete identity refresh.
Created video assets, print and digital marketing materials, sales and executive presentations, and tradeshow booths that communicated the brand’s core value with a clear and compelling story arc.

Dive deeper

I designed a wide breadth of deliverables on a day-to-day basis.

While keeping teams fully supported with design, I also led the repositioning of the brand.

Repositioning started with
uncovering our purpose, mission, and vision

Followed by a competitive analysis plot graph to identify market white space.

Using the findings, I identified four qualities to infuse into the brand for stronger differentiation.

Then I infused them into the copywriting direction

They say things like:

Solutions for navigating patient-centered-healthcare.
‍
We deliver innovative solutions that help improve the healthcare journey.
‍
Comprehensive medication management to drive patient outcomes.

We say things like:

Pluto may no longer exist as a planet, but budgets always will.
‍
The Outcomes Nebula — our pharmacist network of 60,000 healthcare pioneers and counting.
‍
We build the software that makes pharmacy headaches poof.

Prior agency effort: before I joined Outcomes, an agency created the first rendition of the visual identity.

But there were problems:

The identity was never adopted by the organization — they questioned its ability to work.
The typeface was too thin, creating problems using it in our pharmacy platform.
The secondary blue did not meet ADA compliance for using as a text color on white, which was necessary for the pharmacy platform and website.
The identity lacked differentiated properties as defined by the competitive analysis.

Identity refresh goals:

Implement competitive analysis findings.
Optimize the logo without teams and customers noticing the update.
Logo refresh (optimization)

What I did for the logo:

New typeface: the brand was scheduled to merge into the Cardinal Health portfolio (Parent Company), which uses Myriad Pro as its brand font. I preemptively transitioned the typeface while giving it a thicker weight to work well at small sizes.
Custom kerning and letter adaptations to optimize the horizontal width for a more compact presence.
Custom “O” that is more proportionate in size in relation to the rest of the typeface.
Color palette refresh (optimization)

What I did for the color palette:

New gradient swatches to lean heavier into tech-industry characteristics as identified by the competitive analysis.
Darker secondary blue for ADA compliance on our pharmacy platform and website.
Darker primary blue to maintain a strong contrast ratio with the secondary blue.

Then I designed new collateral

Who are we, what do we do, why does it matter?

When three companies merged into one brand, employees no longer knew how to answer this.

I used the competitive analysis, purpose/mission/vision work, and cross-organizational alignment to create our first brand video.

I created a draft video and then worked with an agency for voiceover and final edits.

Then I worked across our marketing team to develop a high-level script for how Outcomes works — having a partner agency animate the video.

Even executives were having issues communicating how the business works.

Product portfolio clean-up

When companies merged into one brand, each business had their own product and service names with no strategy across their portfolios. The new brand needed a cleanup that consisted of reviewing current offerings, categorizing them appropriately, and then aligning on names that took into account established equity.

The bread and butter of the business — the Connect™ pharmacy platform.
‍
Old platform identity:

Customers routinely referred to the pharmacy platform as Outcomes, and not Connect.
Platform recognition was clearly tied to the business, not to the intended Connect identity.
The logo was outdated and needed an update to fit the new brand aesthetic.
The tagline, “by Cardinal Health” was no longer appropriate as an offering of Outcomes.
The Connect™ pharmacy platform is the primary revenue generator.
OutcomesOne™ platform refresh

New platform identity:

Leverages a branded house strategy as the flagship offering from Outcomes.
Brings the greatest value proposition of the platform into the name — giving Pharmacists a single platform for every task.
Leverages the distinctiveness of the logo icon for the ability to trademark.

I met with product teams to define categories and align on naming for the whole portfolio.

Naming goals:

Stand the test of time for future products.
Preserve consistency and clarity of the portfolio.

With a strategic brand plan, Outcomes was able to carve their own space in the market and re-ignite their trajectory as an industry leading organization.

Contact me for an interview or to review my portfolio together

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

© 2024 Jake Likewise. All rights reserved.