By Nick Ramshaw
The NHS Identity is the most instantly recognisable brand in the UK. Yet its use in England over recent years has been inconsistent, leading to confusion amongst the people who value it most. This chapter tells the story of how a better understanding of what the brand means to patients and the public has helped to inspire a new NHS Identity Policy. The Policy in turn has helped increase consistency, maintained public trust and will ultimately help the NHS to save money.
You’ll learn:
• Why understanding your audience is key to brand success
• Why testing branding with users and the public is so important
• Why making it as easy as possible is your best chance of implementation success
Why is the NHS Identity important?
The NHS Identity is one of the most cherished and well known in the world. When applied correctly and consistently it evokes exceptionally high levels of emotional attachment, trust and reassurance.
The NHS blue lozenge logo is instantly recognised and its application directly affects how patients and the public think and feel about the NHS.
All users of the NHS Identity have a responsibility to protect it and ensure they achieve the national standard that the patients expect from it.
FIGURE 1 NHS lozenge
Why is the NHS Identity important?
The NHS Identity is one of the most cherished and well known in the world. When applied correctly and consistently it evokes exceptionally high levels of emotional attachment, trust and reassurance.
The NHS blue lozenge logo is instantly recognised and its application directly affects how patients and the public think and feel about the NHS.
All users of the NHS Identity have a responsibility to protect it and ensure they achieve the national standard that the patients expect from it.
A need for new guidelines
A single NHS Identity was introduced in England in 1999 to help signpost people to NHS organisations and services and to help them identify information which has come from an official NHS source.
The famous blue lozenge had been around since the early 1990s, but its use hadn’t been reviewed since 1999.
A new NHS structure had been introduced with Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and Foundation Trusts, but guidance had not been updated to reflect this.
The existing guidelines (spread over 19 documents) also didn’t include guidance for digital communications – they were seriously outdated.
Some NHS organisations had also introduced their own identities, leading to confusion amongst patients and the public.
With NHS services now being delivered by different organisations, including private sector operators, a new approach was required to provide patients with clear signposting to their NHS services.
New guidelines were also needed to bring consistency and clarity on how to use the Identity in modern communications. Taking a professional and consistent approach is important to the public and helps to create a visual mark of quality. Achieve all this and the NHS would achieve savings in the cost of communications throughout England.
The need for audience insight
For any brand to operate effectively, it has to understand its audience and know how it influences how they feel about the brand.
In the case of the NHS, the audience is extremely broad – everyone in England – which currently stands at a population of 54.3 million people.
The internal audience comprises the 1.2 million people who work directly for the NHS, as well as the third party providers who are entitled to use the NHS Identity.
To understand how the public felt about the NHS Identity, we carried out an extensive engagement programme. This consisted of focus groups, interviews, questionnaires, workshops and vox pops, with both internal and external audiences and stakeholders.
The programme was key to us understanding how people think about the NHS Identity and what they would feel about potential changes in the future.
They’ve got the blue, we can trust them. - Public research, 2015
What we learnt from the public, was that we should tinker with the logo at our peril! When people see the blue NHS logo, they automatically associate it with high quality, free services. The use of colours other than blue and new logos were clearly opposed, as it was very confusing.
The public is generally more brand savvy now than ever before and it understands how identities like this work.
Developing an Identity Policy
To help the 600+ NHS organisations achieve the consistent, national standard that patients expect, we developed a comprehensive Identity Policy.
The new Policy is based on a set of over-arching principles, designed to ensure the interests and needs of patients and the public are considered first and aligned to the NHS Constitution. It also covers who can and can’t use the NHS Identity, how the core elements should be used and the responsibilities for ensuring correct implementation.
The Policy was kept intentionally simple, to help ensure implementation was successful. The Policy principles are clear and easily understood:
1. When applying the NHS Identity, the interests and needs of patients should always be considered first.
2. All applications of the NHS Identity should support the NHS values and the principles of the NHS Constitution.
3. All users have a duty of care to protect the NHS Identity.
4. The NHS Identity is the single, clear way to signpost patients and the public to NHS organisations and services and should be used universally and consistently.
5. The NHS Identity Policy applies to all services which the NHS is accountable and responsible for, regardless of the provider.
6. The NHS Identity itself cannot be used to generate profit outside the NHS.
7. The Policy is mandatory for all organisation that use the NHS Identity. There will be no exceptions.
Ensuring compliance between the Identity and new Policy
With the Policy approved, we carried out a major overhaul of the NHS Identity elements.
The public’s exceptionally high awareness told us we shouldn’t change the core lozenge, use of the Frutiger font or the core colours of blue and white.
What was needed though was a more consistent system for logomarks, a much more comprehensive colour palette with implementation advice and specific help with things like logo positioning and use online.
Practical guidance was also required on the naming of existing and new services and partnerships (of which there are increasingly more), the use of the NHS Identity by primary care providers and the appropriate tone of voice for internal and external communications.
Engaging with brand users
Given the limited resources of many NHS organisations, we found the best way of helping would be to make things as easy as possible.
Our solution was to provide practical tools and assets that users required to achieve higher levels of consistency in their work.
This included the creation of more than 100 visual examples of the Identity in use, logomark asset packs for over 600 NHS organisations and a comprehensive set of online Identity guidelines.
These guidelines are rich in detail and focus on the types of scenario we know the stakeholders face on a day-to-day basis. Everything was designed to make the users’ job easier, to help save time and money as well as improving consistency.
You can find these at https://www.england.nhs.uk/nhsidentity/
The guidelines themselves were extensively tested with users in groups and individually. By asking actual users of the Identity to test the Beta version of the guidelines, we identified not only the usability issues within the website, but also the practical issues in the guidelines’ content itself.
Once the assets had been circulated and the new guidelines launched online, the NHS Identity Team provided help and assistance via a hotline and face-to-face sessions throughout the country.
Have the new guidelines been successful?
The new approach will be implemented over the long term, with materials only rebranded when due for natural replacement. This and the use of the new asset packs, a more consistent approach generally and a new culture of sharing artwork will lead to a significant reduction in the total NHS design spend.
“I’m struggling to put into words just how valuable this experience has been, for us and for the entire NHS organisation. My job is to help everyone implement the NHS Identity more effectively and the early signs are that the guidelines, assets and examples are proving to be an enormous help.”
Julie Haddon, Head of Identity, NHS England
Following an informal launch in late 2016, a number of NHS organisations, Trusts and CCGs are already using the new assets and guidelines, finding them very helpful. The new NHS Identity website was formally launched on 4 January 2017.
Key learnings
In conclusion, this project has helped us to better understand the NHS Identity and how it is regarded by patients and the public.
Knowing what is in the hearts and minds of the public is key to providing reassurance and clear signposting. And of all Identities, the NHS really matters!
A professional and consistent application of the NHS brand helps patients and the public see the NHS as a visual mark of quality.
It was very important then to test our hypothesis and prototypes, in real life conditions with real users, to fully understand the user journey. And finally, once we developed the assets, Policy, guidelines and examples, to make it as easy as possible, in order to achieve better results and higher levels of consistency.
We are proud to have helped in the development of the best known and most loved brand in the country and look forward to helping it grow from strength to strength.
Nick Ramshaw has over 25 years of experience working at a senior level in leading brand and design agencies in London, Edinburgh and Leeds. He is a past President of trade body Design Business Association, a Common Purpose graduate and a governor of Leeds Arts University. Nick led the team at Thompson Brand Partners that carried out a recent fundamental review of the NHS identity in England, creating a comprehensive use policy and detailed online guidelines.
Twitter: @ThompsonBP
Online: www.thompsonbrandpartners.com