ReBrand ReView: Viventium

Bernadette Bressler, Chief Marketing Officer at Viventium, sat down to chat about the company’s latest rebrand. Stick around for a teardown and peek behind the curtain to see how this brand refresh went from concept to go-live. 

About the company: Viventium is healthcare’s trusted ally for payroll, HR, and compliance, combining innovative solutions with deep expertise in the healthcare industry. Its purpose-built cloud-based platform is designed to tackle the complexity and compliance challenges healthcare providers face, simplifying the workday, every day. Viventium helps organizations hire and retain care staff, improve the employee experience, and drive measurable value. Serving clients in all 50 states and supporting over 500,000 healthcare employees, Viventium enables organizations to focus on what matters most: providing compassionate care. It’s a new day, with Viventium. For more information, visit viventium.com.

Before the rebrand

“Our company was founded over 30 years ago as BDB Payroll; it wasn’t until 2016 that we changed our name to Viventium,” Bressler shared. “That's when we introduced the purple colors and the idea of going from payroll to a platform: a suite of offerings to address—broadly speaking—HR and workforce management,” Bressler shared.

“The roots of the company—prior to the focus on healthcare—centered around a more general-purpose Human Capital Management (HCM), which is lingo that you would typically hear from our competitors.”

The brand name, Viventium, was “inspired by the company’s robust growth—doubling its number of employees in the past year—the new name takes its root in a Latin word meaning living,” according to a 2016 press release announcing the name change.

“At the end of last year, we even further refined our strategy to focus on post-acute healthcare providers with payroll, HR, and compliance. This strategic focus means more benefits for providers that choose us because we’re exclusively focused on healthcare, and so deeply entrenched in the market,” Bressler added.

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A vertical SaaS transition into healthcare wasn’t just a good business idea; it’s a growing trend for software platforms and other businesses to offer industry-specific solutions. For healthcare businesses, in particular, this is an important shift. 

Healthcare businesses require fast-moving product roadmaps that can account for regulatory changes, specific integrations (such as with EHR/EMR systems), HIPAA compliance, secure scheduling tools, and more. 

“We have also brought on specialized expertise in vertical markets and really invested in our product to be tailor-made for the problems that these providers are dealing with on a day-to-day basis. With that in mind, we needed to update our branding, value prop, positioning, and messaging to be aligned with that focus. Our brand supports the business strategy. We wanted to build on what we had, but also take it to the next level, doubling down on this commitment to healthcare.”

Rebranding or repositioning a brand to renew its vows to an industry or service is a great opportunity to build new business momentum. For example, IBM Watson Health became Merative. Salesforce’s 2015 launch of Salesforce Health Cloud (a horizontal SaaS product) acted as a market signal for vertical SaaS platforms to pursue healthcare.

How the brand transformed

One of the most important, yet often overlooked, pieces of the rebranding process is discovery and diligence. Operating off of assumptions and sticky concepts can undermine the process and yield risky results. 

The rebranding process “started with understanding our value proposition, what we bring to the market, and we built off of that. Then, we defined our mission, vision, our value prop, and the visual identity, which is what everybody sees. Following on that, the brand came to life in colors, shapes, logos, and all of that. And then the mission, vision, and value prop inspired the positioning, messaging, tone, and the words that we use to describe what we do,” Bressler shared.

“The work was a combined effort with our internal team driving the strategy for the business. And then, the marketing team takes that and builds on it. With our updated business strategy and market focus solidified, we brought in an agency to work with us on the brand refresh: Gargoyle Factory,” Bressler added. 

An excerpt from Viventium’s brand guidelines, showcasing their primary colors.

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“We also worked with Big Orange Lab on our website redesign, which follows the brand strategy and guidelines that we put together. It brings the brand to life in a tangible way that carries the message to market.”

People often form an impression within seconds of looking at a site, and with that limited opportunity window, marketers have to put forth their best messaging, imagery, and calls-to-action. A health technology website has to:

• Establish credibility and trust
• Showcase its values
• Drive sales and growth
• Serve as a primary digital hub for users 

“I always remind people, the website is—to this day—the number one, most important channel we have as marketers. We get tens of thousands of visitors each month. With the number of impressions that we get through our website, we have to deliver an experience to current clients, prospects, and people who may not even know who Viventium is. The first place they're going to visit is viventium.com. To me, the brand and website go hand in hand and have to launch together,” she added.

How the brand transformed: visual identity

Speaking of their most popular channel, here is a before and after of their website.

The website includes a new Bento-style layout. And instead of showing in-platform screenshots, they show Viventium’s system used in context: on a laptop (where most healthcare admin team members and leaders would be). 

Here are their before-and-after logos. 

The old logo was all-caps using the Roboto font, using a horizon or sun rising through their wordmark. The new Viventium logo uses the Euclid Circular font, a darker shade of purple, and an all-lowercase wordmark with an ombre V mark that captures the breadth of their bright, new color palette. The base of the V resembles a sunrise, with rays casting upward toward a purple sky, building on the horizon and sunrise from their previous logo. This led to the development of its new brand campaign: It’s a new day. With the shift to lowercase, you could think of the lowercase i’s as a signal toward collaboration.

Purple lends itself to signal creativity, luxury, and wisdom, while orange signals energy, warmth, and friendliness. This contrasts with many competitors’ palettes, which often gravitate toward red or blue.

“When you're looking at color palettes, the objective is to maintain some of our legacy, we have some equity in purple. But we wanted to evolve to be more contemporary, fresh, and healthcare-oriented. With this shift in mind, how do we convey more healthcare, like in the lockup with our logo? How can we incorporate a design that feels softer, more approachable, etc, and so everything comes back to the strategic intent of what we're trying to do and then making good decisions from there,” Bressler shared.

To add to the way that the brand expresses itself, Viventium also introduced a new illustration style.

How the brand transformed: verbal identity

More broadly, Viventium’s strategic positioning is much clearer. Their above-the-fold copy read: “Payroll and HR that knows healthcare.” Most of Viventium’s competitors are general-purpose systems that operate horizontally, offering the same suite of services and products across multiple industries. 

Healthcare operators, on the other hand, need systems that operate at the speed of regulatory changes and can easily be tweaked to recognize state-specific overtime nuances, value-based care models, and more. These needs aren’t adequately addressed by horizontal SaaS systems and require a more vertical, boutique approach.

Instead of ping-ponging names and options back and forth, the Viventium team had a different approach in mind. “The decision-making and preparation piece was very strategic and thoughtful. It wasn't ad-hoc where there were different choices. It was very strategic and methodical in terms of leading with the business strategy. We did a very thorough competitive analysis on what other brands look like, what they sound like, how they talk, etc… to compare against. We also had client interviews and research to understand how we can stay true and deliver on the strategy and the purpose of our organization,” Bressler added.

An excerpt from Viventium’s brand guidelines, showcasing their mission statement.

An excerpt of Viventium’s brand guidelines, showcasing their brand values.

Viventium’s brand voice and tone is similar to that of Ally Bank, and for good reason. Their brand purpose is “to be a relentless ally that always does right,” not to mention that their brand color palette is also centered around purple. 

An excerpt of Viventium’s brand guidelines, showcasing their brand character.

“We also wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to really differentiate further, and set ourselves apart from the competition. I mean, what a great chance to see what they're doing and how to kind of not only convey our healthcare focus, but set ourselves apart from the competition in a way that gets people to stop and take notice,” Bressler shared.

One of the ways that Viventium evolved deeper into healthcare was on their product pages and messaging. “I think it evolved quite a bit. We were talking about healthcare in a very generic way. With the rebrand, in terms of our messaging and healthcare focus, is incorporating that next-level depth of understanding. We know what’s happening within these vertical segments and use the right terminology, acronyms, and language, which conveys that we do understand your business. If you go to our website, you'll see that, yes, we talk about healthcare in a broad sense on the home page, but if you click into our solutions or the industries we serve, you'll see things like skilled nursing facilities, home health and hospice providers, and ABA,” Bressler added.

This is a screenshot from their industries menu just to show the depth and breadth that Viventium is going to serve each subsegment of post-acute care.

Offering solutions that tackle the top healthcare problem.

“The number one issue across each of these verticals is staffing shortages and turnover,” Bressler shared. The current caregiver turnover rates in post-acute care hover around 79.2% according to the 2024 Activated Insights Benchmarking Report (formerly Home Care Pulse).

“We have solutions that help improve everything from recruiting, hiring, onboarding, day-to-day management, payments, all the way to licensure, compliance, and regulatory tracking, all of which are parts of our solution suite. The big difference now is we're talking about it."

On the other side of the equation, despite these pain points, healthcare business owners (and the industry as a whole) are often averse to technology and adding to their technology stack. 

“Part of it is the job that we do in marketing. Part of it is being aware of better solutions. Sometimes we compete against people who are used to doing things the way they’ve always done them,” Bressler added.

When audiences see the “after” or what their future could look like, it can often change their minds. “There are some outdated solutions out there that aren’t built for healthcare, yet leaders are so used to manual work (like spreadsheets, manual calculations, and other workarounds). Once we have the attention and we're able to  present these solutions to people who are running these businesses, they see the benefits and the advantages of switching.”

One of the ways that they’re helping to solve caregiver recruitment and retention issues is through publishing original research. One of the key findings of their 2025 Healthcare Workforce Management Report is the disconnect between healthcare administrators and care staff.

Viventium report visual as shown in Home Healthcare News.

As shared in Home Healthcare News, when administrators were asked what motivates staff retention, they responded with professional development. When care staff were asked the same question, they said higher pay. The post-acute care workforce is often misunderstood, and Viventium’s research (and solution suite) can help to close those gaps. 

Launching a new brand means a new chapter in the company’s history.

Viventium’s team teased the rebrand launch a week before go-live, giving their audiences a feeling of anticipation of what was to come. 

With 94% of healthcare administrators reporting experiencing or anticipating staffing shortages, coupled with an ever-increasing demand for care, providers are tasked to find new ways and new technologies that can help them optimize their operations.

In launching the rebrand, “our internal teams were so enthusiastic, love the new strategy, and love what we're doing as a company. To have a new brand that's super vibrant, has lots of great imagery, and great messaging, I would say it was very well received internally, and I think that's of huge importance in the overall success of it,” Bressler shared. To ensure that the rebrand was successful internally, all teams were kept in the loop on what was going on and continually reinforced why things were done a certain way.

On the other hand, “Our clients were really excited about it too. We got a lot of positive feedback, and a lot of our partners love the new look as well. We notice on different channels that purple still is a killer color in terms of differentiating. The overall look and feel is something that we're owning right now,” Bressler added.

“One powerful thing I learned throughout this process was the importance of emotional connection. We didn’t see anyone else in the market going for this, and we also realized how important it would be especially for people in healthcare. This shifted our messaging beyond functional benefits toward how we want our clients to feel: relieved, confident, empowered, and accomplished. That emotional lens informed everything we did from tone of voice, to photography style and imagery, giving our brand a more human and relatable feel,” she added. 

If you’re thinking about a rebrand for your company, start with Bressler’s guiding star: “Starting with the strategy, and the building blocks of the mission and vision and who you are and getting alignment from: the CEO, the executive team, and the board in some cases first. Get settled on that. It really helps to pave the way for a much easier process. For me, the brand following business strategy is of utmost importance.” 

To learn more about Viventium, check out their website: https://viventium.com/ 

Interested in seeing how a marketing partner can help you bring your health tech company’s rebrand or brand vision to life? Get in touch with Jenn today.