Sunshine Coast Heart Specialists was growing and changing.

In six years, the cardiology practice had grown to nearly 50 staff with rooms throughout the coast. Their cardiologists represented all of the possible sub-specialties within their profession. Within weeks, they would move to new purpose-built premises at Sippy Downs. They were about to open their own coronary CT clinic to the public and a heart murmur clinic to support GPs—both nation-leading initiatives.

The directors realised their geography-specific name would limit their ability to keep growing, and so renaming and rebranding was a strong need.

Their growth had also occurred at such a rate that there was strategic work needed to understand their market share and to form a marketing strategy that would offer them opportunities for segmentation. Growth is reliant on satisfied referring GPs and specialists, and so attention could never be removed from this area.

Finally, such growth was also outstripping their capacity to fill the need. Cardiology is a highly specialised field within medicine, and to grow sustainably, they needed to attract more associates.

The practice needed a new name and brand assets for the business to accurately convey the mission and vision of the business, and to grow the business’s referrer and patient networks.

Our brand strategy drew on customer and referrer interviews, competitor insights and employee workshops, which also helped to define the brand values of the business.

It was clear the practice and the individual directors were held in high esteem by their medical colleagues. They introduced surgical procedures to the Sunshine Coast that were, until then, only practised by a few in major cities. They were introducing clinics and services that had not been seen in regional areas in Australia. This gave us the confidence to be able to propose a tagline that truthfully boasted, ‘world-class cardiac care’.

The second part of the tagline reads: ‘…on the Sunshine Coast’. To compensate for the move away from the regionalisation in their original brand name—Sunshine Coast Heart Specialists—we added it to the tagline. The reason for this is that patients along the coast appreciated the practice was the only place where they could receive the full spectrum of care without having to travel to Brisbane.

Finally, an important branding insight from our research was that patients were on a health journey—sometimes quite a precarious one—and could be experiencing anxiety. Patients told us they appreciated the kindness each doctor showed to them in their time of need. Simply promoting expertise could come across as cold and would not fairly represent the doctors’ deep commitment to quality care. So the Heart HQ brand connects with patients on a personal level and makes them feel reassured that they matter.

It’s this mix of strategy and heart that makes Heart HQ a brand that will stand tall among all the others.

A name, tagline, brand visual identity, website, signage and countless assets that match up with Heart HQ’s brand promise of delivering world-class cardiac care on the Sunshine Coast.

The quality of the brand assets significantly differentiates Heart HQ from all other competitor practices.

Creatively, the brand is modern, refreshing and arguably not what you would expect from an organisation in the medical field – but at the same time, the language is warm, supportive and with just the right amount of authority.