Build the Brand Identity
The Need for Brand Identity Change
Brand is an all-encompassing concept. Everything a company does contributes to its brand—from its actions and presence to how it communicates with the world. At its core, Brand is perception. For individuals, a personal brand manifests in how people behave, appear, and speak. For companies, it shows in their actions, presence, and messaging.
In 2023, Headway evolved its approach by requesting deeper provider engagement (imagine your laptop not just helping you write a research paper, but also asking to review it). However, our brand identity—how we communicate and present ourselves—hasn't evolved since early days to align with our company strategy.
As we aim to be more than a tool—a provider’s trusted partner—it’s critical to realign how customers perceive Headway. Our brand must reflect that deeper partnership. Meanwhile, the mental health space is growing more competitive. As we start to saturate the bottom of the funnel overtime, we will need to invest in harder-to-reach audiences at the top of the funnel.
This is our chance to differentiate through a brand that resonates deeply on a human level—especially with providers, who are naturally attuned to emotional connections.
After bringing the Creative Director, Travis, on board, I collaborated with the executive team to form a small task force combining Marketing leadership and the Creative team to evolve our brand identity.
Coming from a product design background, I’m by no means an expert in brand design. Travis and I formed an effective partnership where I supported the team with the right company and user context, resources, and facilitated strategic alignment, while Travis and the team did the heavy lifting to bring the new brand identity to life, shaping how Headway shows up in the world.
Craft the Brand Strategy
We started to look into all the previous research and bringing the existing brand insights together. After a few rounds of exploration and surveying existing users, the team landed on the concept of —
Relationship
“It’s the relationship that heals,” writes renowned psychiatrist and existential therapist Irvin Yalom. Providers—our core customers—know this firsthand, as the quality of the therapeutic relationship is what drives better patient outcomes.
While they build healing relationships with their clients, many providers feel isolated and frustrated by lengthy insurance processes and their relationship with large healthcare institutions. They crave a partner who understands their work—not just another impersonal tech startup. This is what Headway strives for. We’re building and facilitating relationships among our three-sided marketplace: patients, providers, and insurance companies.
This relationship-driven approach became the foundation of our brand evolution. It aligned the core team around three key values that define meaningful relationships: Empathy, Integrity, and Intentionality. These values now guide how we communicate and ensure our messaging and visuals reflect a cohesive, human-centered identity.
Defining Visual Identity
To identify what needed to evolve, we began by assessing our current brand visuals within the competitive landscape and surveying providers to understand their perception.
The discovery revealed two key insights that laid the foundation for our visual changes:
Our visuals were heavily text-based. What was missing was real life, human faces, and emotions—critical elements that help build genuine connections.
Customers primarily associated us with functional values like being useful, efficient, and easy. However, they rarely described us with emotional terms. And if you consider how the best brands make you feel—they always connect on a deeper, more emotional level.
Based on these insights, the Creative team conducted several rounds of iterations and ultimately landed on a direction that resonated with the core team and aligned with our CEO's vision. The new visual language introduced more human details to foster emotional connections and embraces an editorial style to convey a professional, artistic, yet approachable image—striking a balance between warmth and credibility.
The mood board created by Creative team
And it lead to the visual languages which the team explored over website, paid social, product, whitepapers etc.
Defining Verbal Identity
To define our tone and voice, we started by aligning the brand persona with executive team. As we shifted positioning from tool to partner, we asked ourselves a key question:
What kind of partner do providers want?
Would they prefer an insider—someone who lives within the system and serves as their mentor or most trusted colleague? Or would they rather have an outsider—someone who acts as an external agency they can hire?
We chose the outsider direction and established our persona as an "advocate." Providers are good at what they do—delivering care. They need someone who will stand up for them when they can't advocate for themselves. When facing a healthcare system that often works against them, they know they can count on Headway—from navigating legal hurdles to managing payer requirements.
This persona has given us a meaningful foundation to imagine how an advocate would communicate with customers in different situations.
The voice and tone framework further evolved into specific guidelines to guide writing for different channels.
Impact and Conclusion
The creative team partnered with marketing channel owners to launch the new assets across paid social, landing pages, organic and others in H2 2024.
We initially hoped to maintain stable conversion rates during the brand identity evolution, as brand impact is typically difficult to measure quantitatively in the short term. To our delight, the new brand assets significantly outperformed the previous ones across all major channels with more compelling messaging and elevated visuals — and even enabling us to expand into previously untapped channels at the top of the funnel. The promising results have further strengthened the leadership team's conviction to increase brand investment in 2025.
Personally, this was a defining moment in my leadership journey. I proactively pushed for brand investment despite limited executive support early on. There were a lot to navigate to secure the resources and facilitate buy-in at each milestone. Through the team's outstanding execution (big shoutout to Travis and the Creative team), we gradually earned trust and credibility—transforming key stakeholders from brand skeptics into enthusiastic sponsors. This experience reinforced my belief to champion valuable initiatives by bringing the core team and stakeholders along through exceptional execution and solid progress.