Halaxy's galactic rebrand: How Halaxy's new brand helps them take on the world

Brand is the best gig in the world because of one simple thing: our clients. We are lucky to meet so many businesses and rub shoulders with the people busy building, running or changing them. We get to help people, places and organisations capture their story. In what will be an infrequently frequent series of posts we will ask those who experience the value of what we do to explain it back. The rules are simple: five to six questions and minor editing for grammar only. Here’s to the people making it happen. This week we feature Alison Hardacre, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Halaxy.

1. How do you define brand internally?

We see our brand as a crystal-clear representation of who we are as a team and business, what we stand for (i.e. our mission), and why we do what we do, which is to make healthcare better for everyone everywhere. Healthcare is the most crucial industry in society; it quite literally saves lives. Healthcare is also the last industry to digitise, so our brand also represents a much-needed disruption to the status quo – that healthcare can be smart, efficient, and accessible to practitioners, patients and people everywhere. So, just as we evolve and grow, our brand goes through the same process so we can continue to make healthcare better for everyone everywhere. The brand The Contenders helped us develop gives us the flexibility to be across all of healthcare, and to expand from currently 130 countries to all countries in the world.

2. What difference has being clear on your brand made to your organisation?

The branding process on its own was an incredible journey into discovering and shaping our identity as a team and business. It really helped us translate everything we do and stand for, into something tangible - a brand that resonates with our audience, team, investors and the healthcare industry as a whole. Our brand now helps us shape and communicate our values and mission internally and externally. It has also enabled us to be even more creative with our approach to growth, marketing and communications. We specifically got a lot out of the brand strategy approach that Viv at The Contenders took. Her work has really crystallised all of our values as a business and as a team into one timeless document that can guide marketing activities over time.

3. What is the most ‘off brand’ thing you have ever done?

Our mission is to make healthcare better for everyone everywhere, so off brand would be to focus or work on something that won’t help us drive global growth as fast as possible. One example is exhibiting trade shows. We’ve trialled trade shows in the past and realised that it has very low impact in promoting what we do to those attending the event, and an even lower impact in promoting our brand in a scalable way. Not only because we are a tech business but because a trade show does not have significant reach beyond the attendees; when we can spend the time and effort more effectively through other channels.

4. How do you value your brand?

We value our brand based on the impact we have on global healthcare and our capacity to innovate and deliver world-first solutions fast - especially in healthcare where things seem to be stuck in time. Halaxy is the only practice and patient management software in the world that is customised to any profession and any country health system. Halaxy is also the only software package to provide practice management software, search directory and personal health record in the one solution helping patients, practitioners and people everywhere. We measure our growth by sign-ups (we grow between 1% and 5% per week), revenue per user per month, and global scale (number of countries in which we have customers, and number of customers per country).

So Halaxy is really revolutionising global healthcare – our brand represents that revolution, the change for the better in the way practitioners manage their practices and patients manage their health.

5. What is the dumbest thing an agency has ever said to you or asked you to participate in (pull no punches)?

We once hired an SEO company who said to put a Wikipedia logo and a link to Wikipedia – any page will do – on our home page as it will improve SEO significantly...We got rid of them pretty soon after that.

If you would like to see how our brand approach could help your organisation we'd love to hear from you.