Problem
To be effective, the programme will need a fully representational cohort from across the UK. But two thirds of people in the UK wouldn’t trust their own friends and family with their data (ODI/YouGov 2019). And significant proportions of different demographics and different communities remain reluctant or unsure how to engage with digital services.
Just as challenging, the programme represents such a fundamental shift in how to think about diseases. For such a broad public audience it can seem too complex to fully appreciate, too ambitious to be realistic, or be misunderstood as being an existing screening programme.
The brand would need to balance being distinct enough to excite about the potential of the research, but familiar enough to be trusted and accessible to all.
Insight
The programme needed to be positioned as a collective, direct action we can all take now, to benefit future generations of our families and communities. An action to which everyone can contribute something unique, and which becomes more and more powerful through the very diversity of contributions made. To work for every kind of person, it needs every kind of person involved.
Solution
We rebranded the programme as Our Future Health. An optimistic, emotive, everyday promise to which we can all subscribe, can all benefit from, can all advocate for – whether as a volunteer, a health professional, a researcher, a charity, NHS or corporation.
The brand identity is built around a visual metaphor to aid accessible communication of how the programme works, and what it aims to do. A mosaic of simple patterned tiles that can be combined and configured in endless variation and at different scales, which can variously be interpreted as encoded data, as DNA, as patterns of populations or disease, as diversity of the cohort, or as combining to reveal a larger, deeper picture of our health.
The identity has been designed to work seamlessly across platforms for maximum accessibility, and to complement but remain distinct from partner communications and branding.
Results
The new brand strategy and identity has been implemented across all aspects of the research programme for all audiences, including the central digital platform through which all parties contribute. It is also helping to create public and partner engagement with the programme’s current pilot schemes and funding opportunities, and will become used in wider comms activity as the programme enters its public phases post-pilot.
“Our Future Health will be the UK’s largest ever health research programme and has the potential to transform the way we tackle serious diseases. Our brand reflects our ambition to bring together people from all backgrounds and communities across the UK to create community of volunteers that truly reflects the whole of the population.”
