Looking Ahead To 2025…And Beyond | A Brave New

Here we are, nearly done with the first month of the new year. 2025 is a landmark at A Brave New for a few reasons. We celebrated our 10th anniversary last year so that means that we are officially beginning our second decade! It’s also notable because it gives us the chance to focus, renew our emphasis on the things that matter, and make sure we are moving forward in the right ways.

A Brief look back at the first decade

Looking back on our first 10 years it’s interesting how much has changed and how much has stayed the same. 

Ten years ago, A Brave New was just three friends who were experienced enough to think they could run their own agency, and bright eyed enough to boldly take a chance and do it. Together with my co-founders Polly and Jacob, we made the leap into the future...trusting that things would land right.

People often ask me how we came up with our name. It was inspired by a dinner of Italian food and wine with friends at a restaurant in Fremont. We decided to eschew the generic agency names of the mid-2010s like Periscope for something that encouraged people to fill in the blank after the name. We were A Brave New.

And so, we dove in. We aspired to build a different type of marketing agency. One that wouldn't say it could do everything. Instead, one that would be able to offer big agency experience  without all the red tape that comes when working with a big agency. One that would allow us to make a big impact quickly.

We were off.

Evolutions
Thanks to connections we had, some strategic partnerships, and high-quality work, we began to grow. We also survived all three of us having kids in the third year of business. It was a wild ride but it was also fun and we were making progress.

As we grew, we also evolved. We got our start as a generalist digital marketing agency, doing everything from running advertising campaigns and branding, to innovation challenges within a major Fortune 50 and redesigning websites for major regional nonprofits and cancer centers. We were open to working across platforms — trusting our smarts to figure it out as we went. The work was good but it was hard to gain momentum because we didn't have focus. This led to our first evolution.

In 2017 we made the decision to align our work around three core services: inbound marketing, website design, and branding for high-value B2B customers. This would be the focus over the next 4 years. We were creating strong brands, developing strong inbound marketing programs that were driven by high-quality content and supported by advertising, social media, and a variety of other programs. Then came the next evolution.

Over the years, we found ourselves working repeatedly with two types of companies: healthcare and technology firms. In 2023 we made it official and began to focus exclusively on those two industry sectors. This focus allowed us to build high-quality content every time, work at solving known problems for audiences we served, and overall better serve our clients. This focus paid dividends in results and growth...and led to the direction that we will focus on going forward.

Our Focus Going Forward

In the past 5 years, our work has increased in the healthcare space as well as in the branding discipline. It’s where a significant amount of our expertise lies (and my expertise even before A Brave New) and also the work that we are most focused on. So, in 2024 we decided to make it official and declare that we would be an agency fully focused on branding in the healthcare space. This will allow us to aim our efforts not only on the industry vertical we know best, but also the work that best matches our team’s skills and expertise.

We are fully focused on crafting bold and memorable healthcare brands.

Let’s talk a little about what that looks like in 2025 and beyond:

Focused On Three Specific Healthcare Verticals

Healthcare is a big space, and claiming expertise in all aspects stretches credibility. With that in mind, we’re focusing our efforts on the three verticals that we’ve worked in extensively over the last decade developing both brands and marketing programs.

1. Healthcare Technology 
2. Employee Health & Wellness Programs
3. Hospitals & Healthcare Providers

In addition to these three primary verticals, we continue to work in the B2B technology space serving tech and managed IT service providers because of our legacy expertise in that space.

Solutions Centered Around Branding & Differentiation

We’ve also begun to sharpen our offerings. Here’s an overview of what that looks like:

Building From A Strong Understanding Of Your Audience: In markets that are consistently more competitive and saturated, it can be challenging to reach your audience and tell a story that is compelling enough to attract attention, much less drive action. This is why one of our foundational services going forward focuses on research of all types including in-depth interviews with customers, competitive analysis, and moderated usability testing. No matter the offering, the goal across all of our research efforts is the same: understand who your customers are and what they want– so that you can build authentic connections with them.

Crafting Bold & Memorable Healthcare Brands: Bold and memorable. These are two words that people don’t speak about much within the healthcare space. They are, however, the cornerstone of how we approach branding. These core offerings include brand strategy (defining what makes you unique), brand architecture, naming, visual identity development, brand implementation strategy, and more. Why the focus on these foundational items? Because in the current healthcare world of big company dominance and consolidation, only the unique thrive. Everyone else is missed, no matter how good their product or service.

Activating Brands For The World To See: While research and branding have been core elements of our offerings since our inception as an agency, activation is where we’re envisioning the most evolution. Gone are the days when organizations wanted to outsource their entire marketing program. Today’s agencies need to collaborate and work with internal teams, while providing capabilities that may not exist in-house. Our brand activation solutions reflect this with a focus on web design, video, and extended content programs that may be more difficult to execute with an internal team. Our end goal is simple: provide the internal team what they need to drive growth and contribute with key deliverables when internal capacity doesn’t exist.

Why Does Healthcare Branding Matter?

There are multiple market forces converging that make it more important than ever that healthcare companies make a strategic investment in their brand. We’re excited to be able to walk beside some of them through that process to ensure that they do it right.

Four specific trends in the healthcare space make an investment in differentiated branding more important than ever:

Rapid change and consolidation: In the United States the healthcare sector is dominated by big players (Optum, CVS, Epic, Elevance, and Cerner, to name a few). In addition, private equity is driving significant consolidation both in the technology and hospital/healthcare provider sectors. These two movements make it more important than ever for smaller players (in a relative sense) to invest in telling their story in a differentiated way that showcases the value they provide, as opposed to larger, more integrated competitors. It also increases the importance for larger players to clearly define their brand architecture to best serve the needs of patients and drive growth. 

Rapid innovation driven by AI and technological change: Just like every other industry, AI is driving rapid innovation and change. This has resulted in two specific insights. First, healthcare-focused AI startups are largely telling their stories in the same way. We believe that an investment in branding in this field is essential to help the most effective startups stand up and stand out in the market. On the other hand, more traditional healthcare companies (even in the tech space) who are not primarily focused on AI still provide tremendous value. They need to be focused on establishing their market position so they do not get drowned out by an infatuation with the new and shiny, even as they likely incorporate AI aspects into their business.

The rise of noise, and unfulfilled promises: The current social media environment, and media environment more broadly, has caused trust to plummet among consumers and B2B clients. Because different audiences get their information from different sources and there is increasingly less agreement on baseline facts, the challenge of rising above the noise is even more difficult. A crystal clear, bold, memorable, and repeatable brand strategy and messaging can help with this.

Dissatisfaction with the existing state of healthcare: There is generally significant dissatisfaction with healthcare. We believe this dissatisfaction can drown out the amazing work that many people are doing in this field. Intentional and honest brands that tell their story in a clear and understandable way have a huge opportunity to rebuild trust and make a significant impact.

Excited For The Future

At A Brave New, you won’t find us talking a ton about who we are and what makes us tick. We prefer to focus on solving client problems, producing great work, and sharing what we know in hopes that it will help people get better outcomes for their organizations. That said, I hope you’ve enjoyed this window into where we’ve been and where we’re going.

We couldn’t be more excited about the future and we look forward to collaborating with you there. Cheers!