As brand partners on SH24 our first activity is to establish a brand strategy in order to understand and define the cornerstones of the brand, its personality and what it stands for.

This means the brand and service can be developed concurrently from a central core, that’s based on user need along with the unique qualities, attributes and ambition of the service.

What is SH24 all about?

The strategy is based around understanding, and gaining insight into three key areas:

Users: who are they? What are their needs? What do they respond to?
The marketplace: who else is doing similar things? What other parallel services can we learn from? How are they communicating? What works? What doesn’t?
SH24: What’s special about it? What makes it different?

To ensure the strategy is grounded in a solid triangulated evidence base, we need to build a picture of these areas from a variety of sources:

Listening to stakeholders and experts

Workshops, interviews and surveys with public health professionals, sexual health clinicians, commissioners and academics give us a expert non-user perspective.

Listening to users

Interviews with people in clinics mean we can learn first hand about people’s thoughts, feelings, anxieties and barriers around sexual health to understand the unmet need. This also enables is to test early assumptions with them around how the brand should look, feel, sound and act.

Existing research and desk research

Reviewing supplied white-papers, user studies and surveys along with our own research into the sexual health related brands and interesting parallel services.

Next steps

The next job is then to begin making sense of all the information, identifying groups and patterns that will ultimately populate into what we’re calling a ‘straw man’ brand strategy framework. The idea behind this is to create a set of core brand assumptions we can develop the creative work from, but with the flexibility to iterate (and pivot if necessary) as the project develops.