Background

Practice Plus Group (PPG) are a pay-as-you-go healthcare company who operate their own hospitals and treat both NHS and private patients. With pricing up to 30% cheaper than competitors, the aim was to launch and capture a share of this growing market.

However, the idea of pay-as-you-go surgery was a brand-new concept and largely unknown to many of the over-50s target audience. Secondly, at a brand level a ‘sea of same’ existed that meant a proliferation of healthcare providers all talked about generic ‘care, quality and trust’ against a blue and green medical backdrop of smiling surgeons, hospital equipment and grey-haired couples smiling at laptops.

We had to make a new kind of entrance, one that went beyond just media, and re-framed our entire go-to-market approach.

The Solution

In a pretty big leap for a media agency, we decided that the only way to achieve a successful launch was to create an entirely new brand, Wellsoon, from scratch in four months, conceived and created entirely in-house at Bountiful Cow.

The category needed a brand that felt simple, honest and distinctive in a medical sea of same. Our purpose for the brand was to ‘take the pain of the private healthcare’ and with this mantra we started to make Wellsoon live in every touchpoint from the letters patients received to the website, call centre scripts, advertising, social channels, and even within the 11 hospitals themselves.

Our aim was to challenge the healthcare industry at every turn, pick apart norms and replace confusion with clarity and a much needed dose of down-to-earth.

Instead of a clinical blue and green photographic palette with cliched stock shots of surgeons and happy retirees, we opted for the optimistic warmer yellows within a much more contemporary illustrative style, while our sonic strategy employed the impossibly radiant Let The Sunshine In by The 5th Dimension. 

In less than four months of planning, the Wellsoon brand was born and launched, with activation in every single paid, owned and earned touchpoint. Advertising was hyper-targeted around the brand’s local hospitals and appeared across print, radio and social channels to generate interest and get the call centre phones ringing. And ring they did.