Series of health wins for strategic brand consultancy

Strategic brand consultancy — The Engine Room — has scooped a series of health briefs, as the 21-year-old firm’s presence in the sector continues to grow, worldwide.

The Yorkshire-headquartered agency has been re-appointed by medical diagnostics specialist, 2San. Having experienced significant expansion through the sale of Covid tests, the global firm approached The Engine Room, post-pandemic, with a range of new ‘at home’ wellness and female health kits. With a packaging design project already complete to accelerate 2San’s B2B routes to market, The Engine Room has now turned its attention to the launch of a consumer-facing brand. 

This adds to the strategic rebrand — including renaming — of NHS healthtech firm, Mizaic (formerly IMMJ Systems). Having already provided electronic document management technology to a number of Trusts nationwide, the business — under the steer of a new CEO and senior leadership team — approached The Engine Room to help consolidate and reposition the brand, as it advances its support to digitise the NHS. 

Former client ADL Smartcare — trailblazers in the provision of evidence-based data, research and intelligence on age-related decline — has engaged The Engine Room to rebrand The Lifecurve. The LifeCurve is a simple idea and an app-based toolkit, specially developed to empower people to take better care of their bodies as they approach key markers in their life, and consequently reduce pressure on the NHS as the population ages.

Meanwhile, Leeds GP Confederation — who originally approached The Engine Room to develop its training offer — has undertaken a values-based positioning project. Acknowledging the organisation’s range of services and complex cross-sell potential across a staggering 92 different practices, The Engine Room advised the firm to take a step back. The brief has therefore morphed into a project to redefine its purpose, principles and personality, review its brand architecture, and map its full service offering. By helping GP Confederation visualise its multifaceted structure — a vast comms challenge in itself — the goal is to drive greater advocacy and understanding of the organisation’s work, in turn better supporting the GPs they are here to serve.

The launch of a new online magazine created by surgeons, for surgeons, completes the five-strong project line-up. Surgery International — a digital resource rich with insights, trends and thought leadership articles — represents a new brand that The Engine Room has built from the bottom up, with the potential for it to become a revenue-generating asset with real estate for commercial sponsorships and ad placements, moving forward.

Commenting on the influx of work in the health sector, The Engine Room’s founder and design director Darren Evans said: “We have long been passionate about using brand to drive change when it comes to the health, wellness and social care in society, and our extensive credentials in this complex field — not to mention deep-rooted understanding of global terminology, regulatory landscape and societal challenges — now see us support a growing number of public and private sector brands with important change agendas.

“Innovation is continually bringing new products and services to market, and brand naturally plays its part. But as the needs of the general public — and pressures on the health service — further evolve, it’s also important to redesign processes and propositions too.”

Based in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, ‘design for society’ is an important pillar of The Engine Room’s own proposition. The team is therefore no stranger to the health and medtech sectors, having long worked alongside global scalp cooling pioneers Paxman and CareFusion — which went on to be acquired by BD. An additional two projects — yet to be publicly disclosed — are also in the studio’s pipeline. 

With over 125 years’ combined experience in the team, the consultancy has doubled its headcount in the last three years — particularly strengthening its motion graphics and senior creative expertise. Net profit has also doubled during that time.