True North has captured the ambition of the UK’s largest ever health research programme in a new brand, Our Future Health
Today, millions of people in the UK and around the world spend many years of their later life in poor health. Our Future Health is designed to find out as much as possible about how health changes as people age. Ultimately helping people live healthier lives for longer through the discovery and testing of more effective approaches to prevention, earlier detection and treatment of diseases.
The aim is to recruit 5 million volunteers from across the UK to create one of the most detailed pictures we’ve ever had of people’s health. Volunteers will be asked to provide information and researchers will be able to study this to make new discoveries about human health and diseases. The goal is to transform the prevention, detection and treatment of conditions such as dementia, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and stroke. So future generations can live in good health for longer.
Brand consultancy True North were appointed to develop the brand strategy, name and visual identity, following a strategic pitch involving 40 agencies.
To be most effective, Our Future Health will need to recruit and retain participants from all communities in the UK to ensure that the research will benefit everyone. At the same time, it needs to engage researchers, charities and health professionals to define and develop research studies.
The sheer scale and ‘newness’ of the programme meant the challenge was to make the brand accessible and trustworthy, without over promising or over simplifying – and yet still excite people with the incredible potential of what could be achieved.
“Taking part in the programme will need to become more popular than swimming. So we had to frame this as a simple collective action”, says Stuart Barnes, Strategy Director at True North.
“This is a cause to which everyone can contribute something unique. And by doing so, know that they have done what they can to help their families and their communities live in good health for longer.
Through extensive engagement with the public and stakeholders, True North proposed alternative options to the programme’s original name Accelerating Detection of Disease. The new name, Our Future Health, strikes a more optimistic, emotive tone and makes the programme more accessible.
True North developed a universal visual language, using mosaic-like patterned squares to emphasise how the project is greater than the sum of its parts. The message: every individual has something unique to contribute for our mutual benefit.
Creative Director Steve Royle says of the identity system: “It serves as stylised representations of people, DNA and patterns of disease. The graphic tiles tessellate, interact and overlay onto black-and-white hero imagery of a diverse mix of individuals, becoming pieces of a much bigger puzzle.”
Our Future Health’s Chief Communications Officer, Michael Warren, said “Our Future Health will be the UK’s largest ever health research programme and has the potential to transform the way we tackle serious diseases. Our brand reflects our ambition to bring together people from all backgrounds and communities across the UK to create community of volunteers that truly reflects the whole of the population.”
