Rebranding

Established in 2005, Nurseplus is a health and nursing care agency.

They specialise in three areas: healthcare recruitment, staffing solutions for nursing and residential environments and homecare for people wanting domiciliary care in their own house.

We were asked to create a new brand that would modernise their communications and help them stand out in a very competitive sector.

Following a strategic review of the business we came up with a proposition of ‘Better together’. We thought it not only worked well when describing all sorts of partnerships: carer and patient, employer and employee, business and client etc, but also had a duality that alluded to being ‘better’ as a sense of well-being.

It also became clear that Nurse Plus suffered from two associations with its name; ‘Nurse’ evokes thoughts of matronly staff, whilst ‘Plus’ suggests the widespread use of the cross (shorthand for medical) visual commonly seen in pharmacies and hospitals. This was problematic given that only 5% of the staff they provide are nurses, and their workplaces are much more varied than purely clinical environments. We therefore reinforced the better together idea by joining the two parts of the name to lessen the miscommunication.

That was bolstered further with tone of voice recommendations that suggested treating the name as a verb, not a noun, and talking about the care they provide rather than the staff who provide it – nursing, not nurse.

When we looked at the brand identity, we kept coming back to an idea that care is about dialogue – it’s about talking and listening. Whether that’s a patient talking to a doctor, a patient talking to a carer or even members of staff conversing with each other, communication is a fundamental and integral part in the provision of good care. With that in mind, the new logo is made up of two speech bubbles that leave an ‘N’ for Nurseplus in the space between. The warmer colour palette is a move away from the NHS-driven blues and greens seen amongst their competitors.

Beautiful portraiture showing people smiling, happy and delighted with the care they’ve received, replaced the hackneyed imagery of carers helping patients, and the speech bubble device integrates with the imagery to provide a distinctive graphic language and a ‘voice’ for the brand.

The project was encapsulated in a set of brand guidelines along with application to promotional items and stationery.

What we did
Brand strategy / Brand identity / Brand communications: Promotional material / Art direction / Graphic language