Erica Sniad Morgenstern, Chief Marketing Officer at Personify Health, sat down to chat about the company’s rebrand. Stick around for a teardown and peek behind the curtain to see how this rebrand went from concept to go-live.
About the brand: Virgin Pulse and HealthComp have merged to provide the industry’s first and only personalized health platform, bringing together industry-leading health, wellbeing, navigation, and benefits solutions. Our comprehensive platform equips diverse and unique businesses – and diverse and unique people – to engage more deeply in health, all at a lower cost. By providing personalized, holistic, and powerfully simple health solutions, we are engaging and empowering people to lead healthier lives. Learn more by visiting: https://personifyhealth.com/
“The main catalyst for the rebrand was the merger of Virgin Pulse and HealthComp. We had two complementary companies coming together,” Sniad Morgenstern added. “We did an audit of each brand and found that it was time to introduce a new brand into the market, to signal that we are a new company (as a combined entity), with a new value proposition.”
To understand the magnitude of the merger, look at what each company brought to the table:
To add to the pressure, “we had our client event, so we we had a hard deadline to get the new brand in front of our clients in a really clean and cohesive way,” Sniad Morgenstern added.
As a result of rebranding, they “have since introduced the first and only personalized health platform to provide third party administration, holistic wellbeing solutions, and comprehensive health navigation – all in one place,” according to their rebrand press release. Chris Michalak, CEO of Personify Health, describes this paradigm as a “one plus one equals three.”
Let’s explore how they went from merger to post-rebrand.
To move the rebrand process forward in a robust way, Personify Health selected Prophet, a San Francisco-based global brand and growth agency, to take the lead.
One major decision that came up early on, was to pick a path forward. Did they want to keep one of the brands? Or create a new one?
“It goes back to the two different companies coming together. Ultimately, we concluded that we are something new (rather than trying to reposition a legacy company). It signals that we are something net-new together,” Sniad Morgenstern added.
“We did a lot of research in a very short period of time, which was really informative and very stressful. We talked to a lot of the major constituents in the mix, conducting member research, client research, market research, but also employee research,” Sniad Morgenstern shared. “We did employee focus groups because we want to be a destination company. We want to be a place that people want to come to work. For me, making sure that the employees were invested and brought along on the journey was actually a very big priority as part of the rebrand.”
READ MORE: Uncommon Growth: A CEO-CMO Dialogue on Brand, Integration and the Future of Marketing
Let’s look at how their verbal identity evolved between the two former brands into a new, cohesive messaging platform.
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Before (Virgin Pulse) |
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Before (HealthComp) |
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After (Personify Health) |
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The messaging in the Personify Health brand is a true representation of the brand’s name. To understand the impact and how compelling the messaging is, it’s important to understand the historical market context. This comes during an era where former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, MD, released the first framework for workplace mental health and well-being.
The most pressing problem is that although employers claim to prioritize employee health and well-being, there’s a gap between employer perception and employee perception/reality. What does that look like?
Personify Health plays a role in closing this care gap. One of the main reasons employee health programs don’t perform better isn’t that they’re necessarily bad; it’s because they’re not personalized. Programs are often designed to be one-size-fits-all, but that doesn’t fit squarely into each employee’s personal life and circumstances.
“Healthier Lives, healthier businesses,” is a perfect tagline, succinctly explaining what they do, who they do it for, and most importantly, how they’re different. It’s also a much more refined version of what both websites used to say. This also plays out in their social media approach.
Tchotchkes are one of the types of items that can make or break a brand. Here’s why Sniad Morgenstern leans all-in on swag:
“I always joke that a lot of people ask, ‘why do you put so much emphasis on swag?’ People need to touch and feel the brand. Part of our rebrand launch plan included time for employees to get merch with the new logo on it. Another part of our first-year strategy was to do more in-person conferences, and make our client event a big splash! Making our brand tangible was an important part of the brand process, and some of our research indicated this too.”
Tap into the five senses with your brand. Now, brands are adopting sonic brands (audio: think jingles, songs, or the Netflix “ta dum”) and even using the power of scent.
“One of the things that we worked with Prophet on was a rainbow exercise. They had us go through the rainbow. On the rainbow, we had the legacy brands (to avoid repetition/confusion). Then, there are competitors, and the market landscape. In healthcare, if you use red, that signals heart health or an alert of some kind. It has connotations in the industry. Coming off of Virgin Pulse, red was a dominant color. We didn’t want to be red. Using the process of elimination, and in alignment with our brand strategy, we landed on deep teal and sunshine yellow,” Sniad Morgenstern shared.
“The sunrise yellow stands for hope and change. The deep teal is really rooted in organic and growth. Those are things that we really wanted to bring together. Then, it became where are our no fly zones? Where do we want to go and be? It was really a brilliant exercise of like, bringing all of that together and creating that identity.”
Here’s a before-and-after of their logos.
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Before (Virgin Pulse and HealthComp) |
After (Personify Health) |
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One of the interesting parts of their brand color exploration, to me, was the intentional elimination of certain colors based on their existing customer base. “We want to partner with them. We don't want to create brand confusion by looking too much like what's already out there,” Sniad Morgenstern added.
As an example, roughly 85% of health plans have blue in their palette, followed by white and red. This made it easier to define their colors. It’s important for brands to take stock of what’s already in-market. Despite the commonality of blue, some brands prefer to lean into what blue means: familiarity, trust, and equity. It’s about knowing what your brand is, and that will tell you where you need to go. Personify Health’s new direction and brand filled a much-needed white space.
“One of the things that I was really inspired to have when we were creating Personify Health was a brand mark. We needed a brand identifier akin to a Nike Swoosh or the Amazon smile. When you see that mark, it needs to distinctly feel like Personify Health,” Sniad Morgenstern shared.
Percy: Personify Health’s brand mark
“That's how we created our brand mark, Percy, what we lovingly call the identifier of the personified P with a little wink. When launching the new brand, we really identified the mark to resemble the feeling that we wanted people to see when they interacted with the brand.” I think it does just that!
Sniad Morgenstern adds that, “it is a journey. Don't try to do everything at once. We staged the launch of Personify Health. First, we introduced it to employees and got their heads and hearts around it. Then, we went to our clients and into the market with it. We didn't change everything out of the gate because we didn't want to pass the burden of change onto our clients.”
“Bring people along the journey and make it really meaningful for them, too. Once you launch, don't expect everyone to know and say your name right out the gate. You have to put a lot of effort behind it. And, it usually takes two to four years for a new brand to stick, so stay the course and trust the process.”
Brandom Thought: I am a huge fan of Personify Health, and personally screenshot most of the assets they use to promote their annual Thrive Summit. It’s the best reference for event marketing I’ve ever known. Check out this year’s landing page here or review the social posts with this hashtag: #ThriveSummit2026 (and 2025 for that matter).
To learn more about Personify Health, check out their website: https://personifyhealth.com/
Interested in seeing how a marketing partner can help you bring your healthtech company’s rebrand or brand vision to life? Get in touch with Jenn today.