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During the past few months, you may have noticed an evolved symbol and wordmark on our homepage. You might have detected a subtle shift in our brand voice.
What you haven’t seen is the hard work and dedication behind it, nor the tremendous collaboration, empathy, and care we’ve infused into every pixel.
That’s the story I want to share today.
Creating the new mental health paradigm
Since opening our doors in 2016, our team has learned a lot about building a mental healthcare solution that actually works. So much has changed in the last 6+ years, from evolving our precision technology and helping employers and their teams navigate a global pandemic, to being able to validate our work with clinical outcomes and proven ROI.
When our CEO, April Koh, approached the creative team about doing a brand refresh last August, we were thrilled and immediately got to work. Along with updating our website, we wanted to make our brand a differentiator in a growing market.
We've grown at an exponential rate, and as a result, we're serving some of the most recognizable category-leading brands in the world. It was time for our brand to reflect our transformation while reinforcing our unwavering commitment to our members and customers alike.
The vision was to connect with people in a more powerful way while redefining mental healthcare. The evolution of our brand is the result of a passion for human-centered storytelling and a commitment to eliminating every barrier to mental health.
As Director of Content Marketing Lily Betjeman says, “The opportunity is ripe for a real paradigm shift in terms of how we think about mental health. It’s no longer a nice-to-have, it’s really a need-to-have for everyone. We’re really committed to making mental health as accessible as possible and breaking down every single barrier we can to make sure everyone is provided with exceptional care.
“Specifically from a brand point of view, we want to be a human brand. This is mental health. This is the most human it gets.
“We’re talking about people’s inner lives, their inner worlds. At the end of the day, we’re talking to people about people, so we want to lead with incredible storytelling and really resonant, emotionally-driven, data-backed, evidence-backed content and stories.”
Meet our new brand
Our positioning: Precision with humanity
We still have the same name, core values, and offerings, but with an evolved focus and more cohesive guidelines. Spring Health has been doing industry-leading work for years, and updating the brand was our chance to cohere this work around a shared vision.
Our entire brand refresh was guided by our brand positioning statement: precision with humanity. It took us a while to arrive here, but once we did, everything else fell into place:
Spring Health drives precision in mental health. We quickly connect you to a proven, personalized solution that performs no matter what your challenges or what your past experiences with mental health have been. That’s because we’ve done it before.
Spring Health delivers better results, faster—ensuring a significant reduction in total medical spend. We create the most direct access to support for you and those around you.
We break through the jargon to get to the truth—that everyone’s life is complicated and challenging. The data proves how we have helped change the lives of millions of people just like you.
We are committed to building affordable and premium mental health into the human experience and redefining its significance in the world. We transform mental health with rigor, heart, and compassion.
“This notion of precision with humanity captures the essence of what Spring Health is all about, and where it came from, from its roots,” says our Associate Creative Director of Brand Storytelling, Matt Diamond. “It was always about the people, and the way to help people was to be precise.”
Our evolved wordmark
Our updated wordmark is part of a refined and mature visual system that conveys our brand positioning. The custom type purposefully brings together the qualities of a structured and clear sans serif with the crafted human touch of serifs.
The wordmark was the first element that our team really liked, and it became the spark that led to our brand positioning statement. There were a lot of voices in the room on this project, and everyone was invited to share their opinions, which at times made it hard to determine a direction. But that wasn’t the case with our wordmark.
As Matt describes it, “When [our agency partner] Moving Brands sent back this wordmark, it was like, ‘That’s it. That’s exactly what it is.’ And how can we now build everything around the feeling of this, which is precise with humanity?
“It’s playful, but it’s also pragmatic. It has strength but it’s light. It had all of these qualities that we wanted the whole brand to embody, so we used it as our anchor.’”
The leaf symbol offers a nod to our original logo, but with a sophisticated update. The symbol is born from the active meaning of spring.
Not only is it connected to the act of growth through its leaf imagery, but it also alludes to the stories that unfold, that we enable, through the interior lines, which mimic the veins of a leaf but also mirror pages being flipped through in a book.
Our refreshed voice and tone
Our brand voice and tone encompass every instance where we speak about Spring Health, from brand campaigns and UX copy to sales conversations and how our Care Navigators speak to our members.
Our voice is strongly informed by our guiding behaviors:
- Compassionate: We will never abandon anyone.
- Pragmatic: We are clear on how to address the challenges ahead.
- Purposeful: We lead the way, confident in the value of our knowledge and expertise.
By rolling out a unified voice that sounds like a kind, perceptive, and encouraging expert, our teams can communicate compassionately and consistently.
The right fit is everything when it comes to agency partnerships
We found our perfect fit with Moving Brands, an SF-based agency responsible for brand transformations like Netflix, Asana, and Virgin Pulse. Moving Brands led us through a concise process that was accelerated due to our two-month timeline, starting with stakeholder workshops to understand the various perspectives on who we are and our goals for the evolved brand.
Product Design Manager Henry Bayuzick said it best: “Moving Brands helped us look in the mirror long enough to see ourselves the way we really are. Each time we got closer to a decision about color, typeface, or even the wordmark, alignment came naturally. We all instinctively knew who Spring Health was because we could always feel it. Now we could see it, too."
Our Graphic Design Manager, Victoria Albert, tells it this way: “One of the biggest challenges we came across during the discovery phase was answering: Who are we? What do we stand for? Who do we want to be? Understanding that and focusing on answering these questions was instrumental to the success of the refresh.”
The refresh is just the beginning of what’s to come
With our brand refresh complete, we're excited to continue taking bolder action as we redefine mental healthcare. Our aim is to maintain the high standards of excellence we've always delivered for our members, customers, and partners while remaining committed to our values.
It's more critical than ever that we remain committed to our values and embody them in everything we do at Spring Health. Our brand refresh was a collaborative effort driven by passionate and talented individuals who share our values, and are willing to push boundaries to make great things happen.
We’re excited to continue setting the standard for innovation in mental healthcare. Here are six mental health treatment trends you need to know about this year, to ensure quality of care and both clinical and financial outcomes.
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