Laurel Centre: a new identity for a team of leading sex addiction therapists
The Brief
As Paulas business had grown, the different service offerings had evolved into three separate entities: Paula Hall & Associates, The Hall Recovery Course and The Laurel Centre all represented various services for treating sex & pornography addiction. To complicate matters further, a fourth brand, ISAT (The Institute of Sex Addiction Training) was used to group all training and qualification services, targeting industry practitioners. Understanding the unique nature of her business, we were challenged to develop a detailed brand strategy, refreshed visual identity and fully responsive website to encompass Paula’s various service offerings.
The solution
Our first step was to define how all the brands would work together. We conducted some initial strategy work, designed to unify Paula and her Associates around a solid purpose and foundation for the leading brand. Using Salad’s own brand model, we reviewed the company vision, mission, values, tone of voice and most critically the positioning and unique value proposition.
A lot of written content is produced, so the renewed values and tone of voice provided critical guidance. Establishing the positioning and proposition led us to two critical decisions – a solution to the naming issues and the subsequent brand-level messaging territories which would ultimately shape a new strapline.
A series of strategic discussions with Paula and key Associates resulted in the decision to invest in building recognition of The Laurel Centre and with a rational strapline of ‘Founded by Paula Hall’, we focused on strengthening the association with Paula herself. However, following a positive reception to specific messaging territories centring themes around ‘expertise’ and ‘empowerment’ we also developed a secondary and more emotive strapline ‘Our Strength is Finding Yours’.
With the strategic work complete, a strong, directional brief was written to direct the significant work packages beyond: visual brand identity creation, website design and build and digital marketing.
The brand was officially launched at the end of 2017 and received excellent feedback. The new Laurel Centre website is outperforming previous sites with 71% of new visitors being driven to the website by a successful PPC and SEO campaign. The new website has generated over 400 enquiries and online bookings in its first 6 months and the live chat is performing well with users already engaging with Practice Management staff and leaving messages out of hours.
“Salad were fantastic at encouraging us to consider opportunities within this project, that we may not have thought about unprompted. It was clear that they weren’t just looking to design a beautiful brand and a functioning website – they were also looking to improve our operations and treated the website as an opportunity to deliver meaningful results for our business.
They also demonstrated sensitivity and understanding around the unique nature of our services and were careful to keep all of our audiences and stakeholders in mind.
The visual brand met the brief whilst encouraging us out of our comfort zone in terms of the new colour and brand marque. The changes received a positive response from staff and associates and it’s certainly helped resolve our identity crisis by delivering a single distinctive and mature face for the brand.”
