Making healthcare feel personal
Oscar Health
Brand Strategy, Workshop Facilitation, Brand Guidelines, Art Direction, Visual Design, Design Systems
Brand development isn’t a one-and-done endeavor — it requires continual care and attention.
I joined Oscar Health’s small, but mighty Brand Experience team in 2022 with the charge to maintain and build on the brand’s already impressive foundation.
Codifying Oscar’s Brand Experience
Oscar was founded to create a health insurance company that behaves like a doctor in the family. We had a strong mission and vision in place, and a member-first philosophy that permeated the organization. But, as the company was striving to reach profitability, expanding into B2B products, and navigating questions around the use of AI in healthcare, we needed to ensure our brand stayed relevant and true to our purpose.
Partnering with a Senior Writer, we undertook a deep dive into industry and consumer trends, studied audience feedback, and audited the history of Oscar’s brand strategy. As a human-centric company, the perspectives of our team were paramount. We devised a research approach consisting of seven intimate workshops engaging 30+ leaders across our Business Strategy, Product, P&L, Sales, and Marketing teams.
We sought to understand their perceptions of Oscar’s differentiators, what drove their decision making, and how they envisioned our diverse audiences should experience the brand.
We distilled the research into a few core insights which reconciled Oscar’s history with it’s present iteration.
From there, we crafted a Brand Experience statement that felt true to Oscar’s essence, while also flexible enough to create experiences that resonates with disparate audiences.
The new statement was integrated into our brand guidelines, and used to sharpen our brand personality.
Illustration Library Expansion
Brand is story. A key way the Oscar brand tells stories is through illustration. To keep it fresh, we regularly audit our library, ideate new concepts, and guide the nimble hands of Tess Havas and Nat Thomas at Franklyn to illustrate them.
To strike a balance between empathy and levity in our library, I identified two categories of illustrated scenes: realistic and metaphoric. Our realistic scenes are grounded in true-to-life moments, showing members feeling secure and supported. Our metaphoric scenes go beyond the expected, taking a more playful approach to depicting Oscar’s role in our members’ lives.
We want all of our members (and potential members!) to see reflections of themselves in Oscar’s work. And to feel respected and empowered by those depictions.
To maintain consistency, I collaborated with a Senior Designer to develop robust guidelines documenting our style and philosophy. We consider not just who we depict, but how we depict them. When people feel safe, secure and seen, they let their guard down, and this can be conveyed through their physicality. We pay special attention to open body language, purposeful line of sight, and physical interaction with others.
COLLABORATORS
Oscar Brand Team: Valentina Espana, Veronica Cordi, Craig Damrauer, Libby Denault, Walid Bukhari, Ashely Domers, Sabine Fryd, Kara Kosmorsky, Topher Lorette; Studios: Franklyn, Fern