Creating a Brand Identity: Case Study

In June, Cheryl Barratt Associates tapped Nancy Burgess Strategic Marketing for a website. At the same time, we recognized the need for creating a brand identity—both visual and verbal.

The Situation

Cheryl Barratt Associates is a niche healthcare consultancy that focuses exclusively on perioperative consulting. Cheryl and her team are experienced professionals who have worked for 15+ years as consultants and have held clinical and healthcare administrative roles. The company provides actionable insights for hospitals, healthcare systems, and ambulatory surgery centers. Launched in 2001, Cheryl Barratt Associates had no website and a simple, basic logo.

Our Actions: Creating a Brand Identity

To start, we identified the company’s brand personality and its style of communication. Additionally, we identified and described three buyer personas. We looked at these personas’ pain points, their challenges, and how Cheryl Barratt Associates offered solutions to these customer challenges.
Furthermore, we studied five key competitors. We compared their logos and thoroughly reviewed the competitors’ brand messaging. These five competitors, all perioperative consulting firms, had similar messages to one another. Their messaging did little to distinguish themselves in the marketplace.
From this exercise, we were able to pinpoint the key areas of differentiation for Cheryl Barratt Associates. As a result, we created a variety of logo concepts from which Cheryl and her team could choose. Some of these featured the blue-green logos of healthcare, while others stood out for their innovative colors.

Brand Identity Results

Logo and Tagline

From among the concepts, Cheryl chose a logo that represented the linking—the linking of people, ideas for improvement, and working together. Rather than differentiating its logo with colors, Cheryl Barratt Associates chose a fresh palette of healthcare blues and greens. The four shade of blues and greens represented the company’s healthcare experience along with its three key differentiators. We chose an informative tagline—rather than an aspirational one—so that potential clients could quickly understand Cheryl’s offering. From this logo, we developed a logo spec (specification sheet) and made logos in various formats for print and digital use.

Brand Messaging

We identified three messaging points that made Cheryl Barratt Associates unique. We called these three differentiators “the trifecta of the Barratt Merit™.”
The Barratt Merit™ is now featured prominently on the Cheryl Barratt Associates website, its company LinkedIn page, Cheryl’s personal LinkedIn profile, and on the back of business cards. This well-thought-out, succinct messaging makes it easy for Cheryl and her associates to speak comfortably and confidently about the company’s services and how they’re unique. We provided a brand messaging platform with a positioning statement, elevator pitch, key differentiators, a boilerplate and more.
We also used this brand messaging and our keyword research to develop search engine optimized (SEO) copy for its website and to illustrate key points through visuals.

Summary

We created a brand identity including a logo, tagline, and messaging platform for Cheryl Barratt Associates. This enabled us to create new business cards, LinkedIn pages, and a new website for Cheryl Barratt Associates that features its differentiated messaging.

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Let’s chat

Interested in developing your company’s brand identity or website? Let’s talk. Nancy Burgess Strategic Marketing will buy the coffee. We look forward to hearing from you!