5 considerations when developing brands for sensitive subjects

All branding agencies, strategists, designers and creatives consider empathetic connections to the subject matter, audiences and end requirement, among a myriad of things they are dealing with in the wide context of a project. Very occasionally there is a brief that requires much more careful consideration and sensitivity to the approach before creativity can begin.

This was a complex project with a sensitive subject matter and an ultimately highly rewarding output. Here are 5 considerations and learnings we gained while working with MCCAED.

So often we see examples from brand studios focusing on their excellent creative, which we understand and we do it too. It is the last and the most visible piece of the puzzle. But few companies speak extensively around the research and rationale that led them to build a brand in a particular way.

For MCCAED, the brand developed from understanding their rich history, their pioneering research and the development of their methods to help children, adolescents and their families going through the devastating effects of eating disorders.

The Maudsley hospital started in 1915, initially as a military hospital and then as a psychiatric hospital from 1923. In the early 1980s, a single clinical research team at the hospital developed a pioneering method for treating young people with anorexia nervosa, which became known as ‘Maudsley Family Therapy’. In the late 1990s, the group-focussed family therapy method was developed to bring together multiple families for the first time to share their experiences and work towards a common goal.

This established the brand as a proven pioneer. It was the expert, the authority using the power of the collective, be it the family unit or research and professional training, to guide, reassure, and care. It was a brand that needed to show it could listen, gather people together, be supportive, be strong, be encouraging, be learned, be assertive, be educational and, most importantly, successfully rebuild lives.

We often make involuntary assumptions without meaning to. In order to pace ourselves on this, we have a saying at Interstate — ‘assume nothing, question everything’ — which results in us pre-warning our clients that they are going to get questions, and a lot of them. We don’t make excuses for that.

For this project we were encouraged to also talk to those using similar services (patients, ex. patients, their families) to better understand processes, outcomes and where the pressure points were. During the brand development process, the MCCAED team involved their service users for live feedback. Using this feedback, we helped build a wider picture of how a new brand could best communicate, get through to, and build empathetic connections with patients.

The inevitable competitor / landscape mood boards are going to be present in any creative process, rightfully so. But before diving into them, have you exhausted all avenues of discussion with your clients?

We spent a lot of time listening to the MCCAED team, asking questions, discussing internally and going back with more questions (see I told you, a lot of questions involved here) and we discovered fundamental elements that were going to affect outcomes.

For example, in assessing the landscape we noted a number of services and research initiatives that were to be made available to the wider medical community, but compared to these services, the additional volume and breadth of research MCCAED had available was staggering and hugely underserved. In light of this and in the context of the MCCAED service model, it was decided that professional training and its related material needed to be as visible and distinctive as the primary client services.

At this point the balance of developing a highly sensitive client-focussed brand and a pioneering and authoritative professional training and research team began to be equally important.

We are rare in running a parallel Creative Technology team to our brand team at Interstate and this gives us a real advantage in developing brand-led digital solutions to problems, situations or requirements.

In MCCAED’s case, we uncovered a huge volume of amazing content and information, driven by a genuine business requirement, to enable accessibility to both Patient and Professional sides of the business.

For the information to be applicable to each audience, we needed to revise and restructure the information architecture, and segment the audiences into two groups. This revised structure enabled us to focus on building features relevant to each audience, as if they were two different sites.

Supporting the ambition of building a connection and the common understanding that inefficiency is the greatest barrier to use any product or service, the team developed a comprehensive taxonomy applied by tagging and search system within the MCCAED website to enable its use as a tool for professionals to access information efficiently.

In parallel to the public facing front-end of the site, considerations were also made to the structure of the content management system — enabling MCCAED team members to manage content for each audience effectively without any crossover.

For MCCAED we approached this in two key areas. The first was the graphical identity which was developed in a way that removed stigma and gave the MCCAED brand somewhere to go that enabled a unique identity within the master NHS brand and more critically moved away from stock imagery or stereotypical photography. Body image and eating disorders go hand in hand and the approach looked to use illustration to create differentiation in the landscape and empathy with patients and families, without setting unrealistic or cliché benchmarks.

The second critical area was in developing the referral pathways and the professional areas of the MCCAED website infrastructure. Sensitive data handling and information delivery aside, the primary aim was to build a site that encouraged repeat interaction and positioned it as more of a supportive useful ‘tool’ than a simple information display platform.

Words: Jayne Connell

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