“Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” – Jeff Bezos
If you are ready to brand or rebrand your medical spa and you want more than the humdrum logo you can get off a popular freelancing website for $5, this blog is for you.
We are going to share with you a branding process that has taken us over 20 years to refine.
It is the formal process that we use with all of our corporate branding clients.
This process is truly all-encompassing, from discovering your brand identity to selecting the right icons, colors, and fonts to make your medical spa shine.
Let’s get going!
First: What Is a Brand?
For starters, we are going to clarify what we mean by “brand.”
What is a brand?
We firmly believe that a brand is more than just a logo.
Your brand is what your customers perceive about your medical spa, who you are, and what you do.
According to Jeff Bezos, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
So who are you?
Answering this question will provide you with the context that you need to put your brand in the format that most people expect it: icons, colors, and fonts.
We begin our branding process by getting to the bottom of this question in a discovery meeting.
The Brand Discovery Meeting
Our brand discovery meeting is a key part of the branding process as it sets the tone for everything that follows.
The goal is to get all of the brand decision-makers in one room and dig deep into the medical spa’s present perception and vision for the future.
Please do not attempt to rebrand your medical spa without the buy-in of executive leadership! This can lead to different ideas about what your brand currently is and what it could be.
We typically ask a long series of honest questions, such as:
- Tell us who you are and what you do in two sentences or less.
- If your brand “promises” something to your customers, what is that promise?
- What kinds of things does the community think about your medical spa? What would you like them to think?
- Given your competition, how are you different? Are you high-cost, but high-value? Do you consider yourselves innovators in the way you do business? Have you changed the way your community thinks about the medical spa industry?
- What are your mission, vision, and values?
Give these questions due-diligence, and you may be surprised by what you learn about your business.
How to Name Your Medical Spa
If you do not already have a name for your medical spa, this is the first step for you.
Depending on the results of your discovery meeting, you may have a great lead on a new name.
Here are some ideas that can help you solidify a name:
- What are competing medical spas naming themselves? Although you (clearly) do not want to take one of their names, this can be a helpful launching pad for your own creative ideas.
- Does the doctor have a strong reputation in your community? If so, you may want to incorporate his or her name in the medical spa name.
- You may want to use your location (city, state, or region) in your name.
- When you were in the discovery meeting, were there any words used to describe your medical spa that resonated with you? For a more abstract naming approach, you could use a noun, adjective, or verb that says something about your medical spa.
For teams using that last approach, we highly recommend pulling up a thesaurus.
As silly as it may sound, we have found some of our favorite client names with thesaurus in hand.
Time for a Tagline
Taglines are opportunities.
If you cannot capture enough of the amazing qualities of your medical spa in a name, you may be able to do it in a tagline.
Taglines are important for your brand messaging.
Once your tagline has been made, everything you write for marketing your medical spa should be able to connect back to your tagline.
This makes it imperative to get a tagline right.
While you are brainstorming a name, take a few of your “second place” concepts and see if they might not fill out your name as a gorgeous tagline.
How to Pick the Right Icons, Colors, and Fonts for Your Medical Spa
If you are not trained in art or design, you may find it difficult to communicate concepts of reputation in visual forms like icons, colors, and fonts.
We are going to outline a few tools to help you start thinking this way.
It all comes down to human psychology and how we mentally and emotionally perceive objects of designed, informed by our nature and our nurture.
Understanding Iconography
The icon is the part of your brand that most people consider “the brand” or “the logo.”
It is the part of the logo that uses form rather than text to visually communicate something about your medical spa.
Your icon may represent aspects of your name, your location, or your mission.
A strong example is a logo we designed for Juneau Youth Services (JYS).
JYS is a mental health service for youth and their families.
When youth participate in JYS, the goal is to inspire hope and freedom for their present and future.
Because JYS is in Juneau, Alaska, and to communicate the freedom JYS youth and families feel when they receive treatment, we used mountains and a bald eagle in their icon.
Icons are extremely versatile–more so than a full logo including all of the fonts and colors.
An icon can be used in a variety of ways, as art on promo products, watermarks on forms, and more.
In your search for a perfect icon, try browsing Pinterest for other medical spa logo ideas or visiting The Noun Project to view icon art created by people all over the world.
Consider making your own board of logo ideas on Pinterest for reference.
Creating Emotions with Colors
We recently wrote an article about the emotions associated with the colors.
There are some emotions that you will want associated with your medical spa, and some that you will not.
Take a quick look at what some colors mean to our emotional minds:
- Red – Red comes in a variety of shades, each with their own distinct meaning! Red could say “temptation,” “stop and pay attention,” “warning” or “danger,” “celebration,” “love,” or “femininity.”
- Orange – Mmm, orange. We often associate this color with tasty food! A gentler version of red, orange can also communicate qualities like “light” and “life.”
- Yellow – Just like orange, red can mean light and warmth. Like red, it can catch attention too. Yellow in its gold form represents wealth, luxury, and rank. In other shades, yellow can mean joy, optimism, or comfort.
- Brown – If you take a natural approach to beauty at your medical spa, you may want to use brown! Brown portrays earth, wholesomeness, the outdoors, organic products, and all-natural ingredients.
- Blue – No, blue does not just mean “sad.” Blue tells our emotional minds to be at peace, reminding us of tranquility, mystery, depth, and strength. It is also used in the health and wellness industry.
- Green – Green can be a hard color to get right. It comes in the most shades of any color in the world and it has a wide range of emotional associations! Green can mean anything from new beginnings to relaxation depending on which green you choose.
- Purple – A mix of red and blue, purple can take on the attributes of both! If it leans in the direction of red, purple communicates energy and intensity. If it leans blue, purple takes on a calmer and loftier feel.
Adobe offers a fantastic online color wheel tool for selecting color palettes.
Colors and how they relate to each other is a science that is governed by mathematical laws.
Depending on what colors you choose, the Adobe tool will automatically adjust the other colors in the palette according to a color algorithm, to keep the palette looking great.
Experiment with the color wheel until you find the exact feel you are looking for.
Matching Typography
You may not realize it, but just like with icons and colors, typefaces matter for communicating the brand of your medical spa.
Once again, different choices will portray different emotional feels.
Let’s talk about a few obvious examples.
Think about a horror film and what kind of font might make it on the cover.
You are probably picturing something scratchy, screamy, disjointed, or broken.
Now think about your favorite online publication and the font used there.
The font that comes to mind is likely clean, sophisticated, and editorial.
Matching typography to the other elements of a logo is often a matter of font study and gut instinct.
Browse through the fonts on Google Fonts and see if anything stands out to you.
You may want to run a list of 3-5 fonts by your branding team to see if they get the same thing you do from the fonts you have chosen.
How to Manage Your Medical Spa Brand
After you have put hours into perfecting your new medical spa brand, you will want to do everything you can to protect it!
That’s where brand management comes in.
At Beacon, we provide all of our branding clients with a style guide that tells the staff what the logo, colors, and fonts are, as well as how they should and should not use them.
This is an important step that you should consider if you want to maintain a strong brand.
Brands can easily be tainted or confused if they are not protected.
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As we mentioned at the beginning of our blog, this branding process is the very process that we use for all of our medical spa clients.
We hope that it helps you and your team clarify your brand!
If you would like to partner with the Beacon team in your branding, we would love to work with you.
You can reach out directly to President Adrienne Wilkerson at [email protected] or schedule a free consultation with her using our Acuity scheduler.
Adrienne has been branding clients in the health, wellness, and beauty industries for over 20 years!
She would be more than happy to talk with you about your branding vision.
