Rebuilding a brand from the ground up

Client: Cook Hospital
Industry: Rural Healthcare
Role: Brand & Content Strategy Lead
Project Type: Brand Rebuild (Ongoing)

Cook Hospital is a non-profit, critical access hospital set in the rural community of Cook, Minnesota (Population: 534 as of the 2020 census data). It's the biggest employer in the area, and the district it serves covers thousands of square miles across northern St. Louis County.

The Challenge

As of early 2025 when I began this project, there was no cohesive brand system in place. Print and digital marketing pieces were created without a shared framework, delivering a disorganized, fragmented, series of disconnected messages.

Additional challenges of this project included:

• The website was hard-coded and outdated, requiring a full rebuild and redesign

• ADA compliance was nonexistent in nearly all materials

• Extreme budget limitations that reduced the number of resources that could make this project a success

• Initial lack of buy-in from leadership, who were unfamiliar with the concept of branding

Process

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