Oxford NHSFT Workshop

We were delighted to have been invited to run a workshop for Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust's innovation incubator on ‘Creating a brand’ today.

Tarleton Director, Thomas Averre, presented to the 2023 cohort on the importance of creating a brand and how they could go about doing it. The cohort is made up of early stage companies looking to commercialise their innovation within the NHS and included an interesting mix of businesses working on everything from cardiovascular risk prediction and patient flow software to heart diagnostic tools and gait tracking devices.

Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust innovation incubator 'The Hill'

A brand is much more than a logo, name, website or brochure - it is about your positioning, messaging and external look and feel. A brand provides a useful mental shortcut that your stakeholders will use to recognise and understand what your business is about; it is the accumulation of everything your business does and says. The perceptions others develop will come from a mix of sources - physical meetings, your media profile, online content, exhibition activity to name a few - and influence what action (or lack of action) they take. Are you suitable? Do you seem credible? Have you got the right solution? Are you investable yet?

For start-ups, getting the ‘brand basics’ in place is vital. This means having a basic grasp of segmentation, targeting and positioning and figuring out how you are going to reach your target audience in a memorable, distinctive way with messaging that gets them to sit up and take notice. Think, plan and then execute - no matter how tempting it is to just get going!