Healthcare VR Go-to-Market

For years, this healthcare tech company lived in surgical training for medical device companies. Custom VR modules for surgeons, sold to med device partners. But the model wasn't working. Development was too expensive, building custom modules required too many resources, and internal growth wasn't being managed well.

The company made the call to pivot into nurse training. Different product. Different buyer. Different everything.

Instead of selling to med device companies and surgeons, the company was now targeting health systems and nurses. The sales motion changed. The buyer personas changed. And the brand, which had been built to feel cutting-edge and tech-forward for a surgical audience, suddenly felt cold and unapproachable for the people it now needed to reach.

While the content production team developed the product, it was on me to figure out how we'd reposition and show up in this new market.

The existing brand was built for a different world. Everything about the company's visual identity, tone, messaging, and materials spoke to surgeons and med device executives. That audience values precision, technical depth, and innovation.

Nurses and health system decision-makers value different things. They need to know a tool is easy to use, that it won't add to an already overwhelming workload, and that it creates a safe environment to learn in. The old brand didn't communicate any of that.

The visual system was also showing its age. The color palette was limited and inconsistently applied across marketing, web, and product. The typography and iconography lacked the flexibility to work across the range of surfaces we needed to cover. And there was no centralized documentation, so every team was interpreting the brand differently.

We weren't just launching a new product. We were introducing the company to an audience that had never heard of us, through a brand that wasn't built for them yet.

Before any creative work started, we needed to understand who we were talking to.

Mapping the decision makers. We identified the key personas inside health systems who would be evaluating and purchasing the product. Different titles, different priorities, different buying criteria than what the company had sold to before.

Understanding the end users. Nurses are the ones in the headset. Their experience, comfort level, and willingness to adopt the tool determines everything. This work fed directly into the product design decisions covered in the product redesign case study.

Identifying partners. We mapped out partners who could help us sell and build credibility in the space. A major health education platform became our biggest launch partner.

Competitive positioning. We identified direct competitors in the nurse training market and defined the key differentiators we could lead with. What made the platform different from everything else out there, and how to communicate that clearly.

All of this fed the strategy behind everything that came next.

The pivot required a full brand refresh. Not a cosmetic update. A ground-up rethinking of how the company looks, sounds, and presents itself.

Brand positioning. The old messaging leaned on VR novelty. I repositioned the brand around clinical impact and practical outcomes. New positioning statements, a clearer tagline, and messaging aligned with the company's role in healthcare education rather than just "VR training software."

Color system. The previous palette was limited and applied inconsistently across marketing and product. I introduced an expanded color system designed to work across marketing materials, web experiences, product UI, and in-VR interfaces. That included primary brand colors, supporting secondary colors, UI-specific usage rules, and accessibility considerations for digital environments.

Typography. I expanded the type system to support a broader range of applications while keeping it clean and appropriate for healthcare. Outfit as a modern headline face, IBM Plex Sans for accessible body copy, and Quase as a distinctive brand element. Guidelines covered hierarchy, scale, and readability across both web and VR environments.

Iconography. I directed the expansion of the icon library to support product features, educational modules, and marketing materials. Rounded line icons, consistent stroke weights, minimalist geometric construction, all built for legibility at small sizes across digital and immersive surfaces.

Brand architecture. As the product evolved, I documented a simplified architecture clarifying the relationship between the company brand and its product platform. How features should be named, how assets should appear across marketing and product, how everything connects.

Photography. I ran a full product photoshoot to build a visual library that reflected the repositioned brand. The old imagery didn't work for this audience. We needed to show real people in real clinical environments, not sleek tech demos.

Design system documentation. To make all of this scalable, I created a document-first brand guideline system. Positioning, typography, color usage, asset libraries, product and marketing examples, and in-VR brand considerations. One source of truth so marketing, product, and design teams could apply the brand consistently without guessing.

I created a product overview video designed specifically as a sales enablement tool for external partner teams. Partners would be selling the platform into health systems, but they're not as close to the product as our internal team. They needed something that quickly captured what makes the product special, in language that resonated with nurses and health system buyers, not surgeons and med device execs.

The video had to do a few things at once: introduce the company to an audience that likely hadn't heard of us, communicate the core value proposition in the new positioning, and give partner sales teams a reliable asset that told the story consistently every time.

Leading up to launch, we rolled out product teasers that built anticipation in the nurse training space. These were informed by the persona work and competitive positioning we'd done earlier. Not generic hype. Targeted content that spoke to the specific concerns and priorities of health system decision makers.

The launch itself was tied to our key partner, the biggest validation point we had going into a new market.