Advantia Health — Courtney Beglin

Role: Creative Director

Company: Advantia Health

Teams: Creative & Marketing (7), Executive Leadership (12), Tech/Development (2), Clinical (15)

Project: Branding, User Experience, Website Design, Interior Design, Signage, Print & Digital Advertising, Photoshoot Styling and Direction

In January 2019, Pacify was acquired by Advantia Health, a growing women’s healthcare company whose mission is to transform healthcare for all women by setting a higher standard of care and convenience while reducing unnecessary costs. Pacify was purchased not only as the tech solution to drive innovation, but also for the skills and experience of our team; Advantia sought to build an internal creative & marketing powerhouse through the addition of myself as Creative Director and my colleague as the VP of Marketing. Under my supervision, we conducted an extensive brand discovery aimed at crafting a cohesive brand identity that would establish Advantia as a recognizable, innovative, and trustworthy leader in women’s health.

The Advantia Health rebrand launched in September of 2019, demonstrating an 80% preference for the new brand in market research that surveyed over 3000 consumers in our key audiences. Our newly branded marketing campaigns are driving an above-average number of clicks per impressions at a lower than average cost. We’re are currently seeing our Click-Thru Rate (CTR) performing 31% above the 2020 benchmark and our Cost Per Click (CPC) averaging 34% below the 2020 benchmark. The re-brand and new creative & marketing sector were featured as key value-adds in a $45M fundraise in March 2020.

The challenge

Advantia’s design challenges were unique for a variety of reasons. The company grew quickly from an OB-GYN rollup of small practices in the DMV, to a comprehensive women’s health platform providing integrated, coordinated care, powered by technology beyond the clinic doors. Advantia now employs 500+ staff, serving 430k+ patients in 60+ locations across the United States. When our team came on board, Advantia’s brand was out-of-date and out-of-touch with its audiences and evolved mission. We inherited 10 disparate brands of previously acquired medical practices, which operated their own websites independently and hadn’t consented to branding, marketing, or design oversight by their parent company during their initial procurements.

The brand identity articulation we conducted for Advantia needed to not only incorporate the vision of our corporate stakeholders and external audiences, but also accommodate the sensibilities of 10 distinct organizations with varying degrees of brand recognition and loyalty in their communities – some established up to 40 years prior. Taking the approach of a hybrid branded house, we designed an umbrella parent brand so compelling as to win the trust and confidence of our subsidiary companies, which would also support future development of unique products and experiences across digital, tech, brick & mortar, and further acquisitions.

Our research-based, consumer-driven brand

Advantia is focused on providing an end-to-end experience that incorporates the preferences and sensibilities of our patients every step of the way. That meant designing a brand around feedback from our corporate team, our physician leaders and, most importantly, the women we serve. Our brand discovery process consisted of:

A team of 12 stakeholders representing leadership across company channels, who were extensively surveyed on brand vision, consumer audiences, and our peers and competitors
4 phases of design critiques and refinement, during which we honed from 10 logo options, 7 palettes, 5 typographic combinations, 9 illustrative styles, and 7 photographic directions
Market research surveying over 3000 current and prospective patients in our key demographic across the United States
Focus groups with 15 of our physician leaders to contribute feedback on designs and brand vision with their practice managers and clinical teams.

The results - redefining and developing Advantia’s identity

We delivered a parent Brand Style Guide to our cross-functional corporate teams to inform their brand decisions across corporate development, clinical and operations, finance, human resources, and marketing needs. My creative team simultaneously customized Practice Style Guides for each of Advantia’s inherited subsidiary brands, communicating the value of incorporating under the new Advantia Health brand identity, converting their web presence under our expanding WordPress multisite environment, and setting higher standards of measuring marketing and creative brand success.

An uplifting logo

Our logo is the essential expression of our brand identity. It embodies our core values of empathy, compassion, reliability, innovation, and trustworthiness. In designing the mark, we worked with organic, flowing shapes cradled within and between one another. Reminiscent of a welcoming embrace, a budding blossom, and a nurturing womb, the resulting mark is a welcoming, uplifting celebration of growth and support.

In patient surveys, the words most commonly used to describe our new mark were “welcoming, friendly, calming, and feminine,” with many women commenting that it reminded them of a hug. Our new logo represents the unwavering compassion and care that are fundamental in our commitment to our patients.

A welcoming palette

Color is a powerful tool to instantaneously invoke memory, mood, and emotion. Our brand’s color scheme has been thoughtfully curated to appeal to the preferences of our patients, selecting harmonious hues that make them feel calm, happy, and at-ease. From clean, bright neutrals, to rich, sophisticated jewel-tones, this spectrum speaks to the many facets of women that make up our community. We have customized our palette for flexible application in a variety of settings, from print and web, to interior design, to products and apparel.

In patient surveys, respondents commented that they liked how our palette felt “comforting, soothing, gentle, and peaceful,” and would “brighten their day in a waiting room.”

Playful, relatable illustrations

We use illustration to communicate ideas, visualize data, and tell stories to our patients and partners alike. Our new illustrative style has been carefully crafted to convey a sense of friendly inclusivity and approachable innovation; our hand-drawn vignettes employ flowing, open curves, and a cheerful color palette. Simplicity of detail and lack of full-color shading allows for demographic diversity, while the reduction of facial features enables relatability for all women. We serve diverse populations across the country and are careful to represent the many shapes, sizes, and interests of the women in our communities.

Survey respondents felt our new style was “subtly feminine, whimsical, and inspiring.” Many women wrote in that they liked how our illustrations allowed them to imagine themselves in each scene, making them inclusive, approachable, and simplistically elegant.

Natural, representative photography

Photography is a vital tool for representing the diverse communities that we serve, establishing an emotional connection with our audiences, and communicating the values that drive our brand experience. Our photographic style is relatable and inclusive, utilizing natural light and a neutral, soothing palette whenever possible. We depict a mix of candid and semi-candid scenes to help our patients relate to our brand and imagine themselves in each image – all photos feel natural and unassuming, and depict diversity across age, ethnicity, culture, and lifestyle.

Patient surveys showed women found our photographic style “friendly, approachable, relatable, believable, and nurturing.” Photos used on our website and in our communications convey authentic and accessible settings focused on compassion and empathy for every woman’s health and wellness journey.

Building a hybrid house of brands

Redefining Advantia’s brand identity and delivering robust resources across all our corporate channels wasn’t the end of the line. In addition to rolling out the new brand across Advantia holdings and using brand collateral to build a marketing program from the ground up, my team simultaneously began the process of turning over our subsidiary brands one-by-one.

We designed child logos that maintained each practice’s identity while visually incorporating it under the new parent brand, delivered print and digital materials, transformed drab clinic interiors with detailed décor guidelines, and transitioned each practice website onto a new multi-site WordPress environment that our internal marketing and design team manages and maintains. Practices whose data showed significant brand recognition in their markets and bandwidth to continue running their own marketing efforts were left as-is, with the plan to bring them under the parent umbrella once our own internal brand-building could out perform their existing success.

Measurable Success

Branded marketing campaigns

Robust custom resources

Cohesive clinic decor

Better together

Since joining Advantia, my team has built a research-based, consumer-driven brand with a strong reputation that resonates with our audiences. We established brand and marketing guidelines that hold our portfolio of assets to the highest standards; conversations around abandoning old, outdated brands for the Advantia identity have transitioned from diplomacy to excitement. We have built an internal creative and marketing team from two to seven (and growing), who together have designed a new sector of offerings incorporating rich brand content and digital marketing that deliver measurable ROI to our practices.

Currently, Advantia Health proudly averages an NPS of 77, considered excellent in the industry. The upper quartile of organizations (or the top 25% of performers) have an NPS of +72 or higher.

With nearly 2,000 Google reviews across all of our practices, Advantia Health averages 4.5 stars on Google. Our automated surveying tool allows patients to quickly and easily leave feedback which has led to an increase in positive online reviews.

We proudly maintain an average site health score of 82.4 across all 13 websites housed within our WordPress multisite, and are constantly tracking and measuring our web presence for ways to continually innovate and improve.

The creative powerhouse we have built at Advantia allows our clinical teams to do what they do best - focus on patient care and improve health outcomes. From website to ads, they now have access to proven marketing campaigns and branded templates; we’ve provided hundreds of branded resources for practices to leverage and are creating more by the day. With more and more practices under the Advantia brand, we are able to take advantage of economies of scale and efficiencies that come with marketing a single brand. We’ve proven that we’re stronger together, creating a cohesive brand identity that is instantly recognizable to our patients and empowers us to achieve our mission statement - Advantia Health is transforming healthcare for all women.