Steripolar –
Taking care
further
A story-led brand refresh helped a family business discover what makes it the best in its industry.
The challenge
When a company asks Duran to help with a brand refresh, we don’t arrive at the scene as know-it-alls who just produce a snappy logo and a clever slogan. Quite the opposite: for us a brand is never a fairytale, but always a true story. That’s how it was with Steripolar, too.
Steripolar is a Nordic medical technology company founded in 1985. Now they wanted to expand internationally and change the way their customers think about them. MedTech is a growing industry where there’s a clear vacuum for a thought leader – but how could this family business from Finland stand out from regular MedTech product distributors?
Strategy work
We began by interviewing the company’s founders and management about their values, experiences, and wishes. Next, we gathered staff from all corners of the organization to take part in carefully-facilitated workshops. At these, was given a chance to speak their minds: there were insightful debates between regional managers, customer service assistants, logistics experts and the marketing department.
From the real Steripolar people, we heard a huge amount of awesome (and fearsome!) stories about the everyday life in public and private medical institutions. As always, the most significant bits were uttered between the lines. We remained vigilant, collected everything, and then withdrew to our own quarters to carefully consider what the true story of Steripolar actually is.
The insight
We came to the conclusion that the thing separating Steripolar from competitors is Steripolar’s active and caring mindset. This attitude can manifest itself in anything: from dropping off a customer delivery after office hours to encouraging politicians to reassess healthcare policies on a scale longer than a single parliamentary term.
What’s extremely distinctive for the Steripolar mindset is caring about real people – because any one of us can sometime be a patient.
In essence, Steripolar’s brand promise is: Taking care further.
When we expanded this promise into a brand story and presented it to the staff we had met earlier at the workshops, an astonished sigh could be heard in the conference room: ‘This is exactly what we are!’
And that’s how it usually goes: it’s nearly impossible to put your own exceptionality into words. It takes an insightful helper with a strategic approach to crystallize a brand’s self-understanding.
Steripolar people truly are exceptional – and now they have in their toolbox a brand strategy that helps them communicate this exceptionality to others, too.
Visual identity and brand guidelines
Based on the new brand strategy and fresh brand promise, we created a confident and credible visual identity for Steripolar. The identity consists of a colour palette, fonts, symbols, and the logical framework on how to apply these in different channels.
Steripolar wanted to retain the familiar blue-hued colour palette it had been using for 40 years, but we brought it into the 21st century by simplifying colour usage and adjusting the logo ever so slightly.
To help Steripolar’s sales and marketing people save time in their everyday work, we created a wide array of ready-to-use presentation and design templates.
We also organized a photo shoot where we captured dozens of unique shots to be used in all kinds of applications. Because by taking care further, you can avoid lame stock images.
At the project’s conclusion, we put all of these elements and practices together into a password-protected online brand guideline that Steripolar staff will be able to utilize for all marketing, sales, and communications needs.
The client says
“The ‘Taking care further’ promise now guides everything we do every day. We want to make a true difference for the patient. Thank you for a quality job and for our continuing partnership!”Mikael Neuvonen Head of Marketing and Communications, Steripolar