How can we minimize the taboos surrounding the demand for psychological assistance through brand positioning?

Núcleo Priori assists people of all ages through neuropsychology and psychotherapy. They believe that psychological counseling is an essential part of health for any person and work with methodologies that make their patients feel sheltered and have a more intimate, personalized support for each assisted.

Our needs assessment survey found that of all the challenges interviewees cited when asked about their difficulty in seeking support from psychology professionals, a large number of people did not search for help because of shame and their perception of psychological assistance as some lack basic information and feared the stigma of mental disorders. Another important aspect in positioning this brand was that they wanted to appeal to children as well, a recently-discovered target audience.

The biggest challenge in this project was to create a visual language that was able to communicate with patients in a casual way, contrary to the standard technical and complicated health market designs. The Priori brand was designed to express the joy, closeness, and care in which all of its employees treat their patients.

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Logo

The architecture of the logo was based on the Galano Grotesque family, which had its terminations edited and rounded to express less aggressive and sharp forms to not lose its solidity.

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Color palete

The chosen colors seek to bring energy to the brand and get away from commonly used colors in the health sector. This is mainly because Priori seeks to be positioned with a more commercial image and to communicate spontaneously with its target audience.

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Tiny targets research

During the research of the concept behind the Priori’s visual identity some concepts and areas of multidisciplinary studies that are intertwined with psychology were taken into consideration, such as contrasting and categorization of emotions, which was studied by engineers, psychiatrists, and historians to discuss how emotions are classified and relate to each other. This is like the work of British cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith who, with graphics and flow charts, can synthesize complex feelings and concepts.

The survey for this project focused on understanding how people would be able to make a creative visual list of four basic feelings that could have their meanings linked to the work of the Núcleo Priori. However adults interviewed had some difficulty in this task–thus fifteen children were interviewed using participatory techniques where they could draw and voice their impression of those feelings. Thus, the children were able to produce better insights on the subject.

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Feelings You Can Touch

The outcomes of the children’s visual forms encapsulated the feelings we wanted to relate to Priori during development, trying to make a visual connection that would allow people to "see" and "touch" those feelings. These visually synthesized representations were applied and expanded throughout the project

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Secondary Visual Identity

While the company was seeking a position that also talk to the child audience, a secondary visual identity was designed. An unfolding of the logo itself, which translates into "emoticons", a popular technological language that according to psychological and neuroscience studies produce the same neurological reactions in the brain caused in people by the contact with real features of other individuals.