Visit a typical healthcare technology website and you’ll find the familiar tropes: medical crosses, EKG lines, and sterile color schemes. Amenities Health deliberately chose a different path. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, founder Aasim Saeed revealed why breaking healthcare’s branding rules has been crucial to their success.
Breaking Industry Conventions
“Where’s the Red Cross and the EKG sign and the snake on a staff?” Aasim recalls being asked. “I hate all of that.” This wasn’t just personal preference – it was strategic positioning.
“Healthcare is really bad at experience… If we’re coming in and we’re saying we’re really great at experience, why would we want to look as awful as healthcare does?” Their brand, featuring trees and A-frame designs, makes a statement about their role in healthcare transformation.
Building a Lifestyle Brand in Healthcare
Instead of mimicking healthcare’s clinical aesthetic, Amenities Health took inspiration from consumer brands. “We are trying to be a lifestyle brand,” Aasim explains. “I would wear this… not like every other startup on my jacket type of thing. And then we get people ask us like, ‘oh, that’s cool. Where do I get that brand?'”
This approach serves a deeper purpose. When describing healthcare environments, Aasim notes: “Austere white walls, the bright lights, no matter what day of time it is, you lose the time of day. Everyone’s coughing or sick… This all feels like not what I want to be a part of. But when I look at our logo, I’m like, that’s what I want to feel.”
Strategic Differentiation
The distinctive branding communicates their unique value proposition. “We’re not trying to take over their brand,” Aasim clarifies. “We’re just saying that like, we fill in a gap that you don’t have.”
This positioning helps them navigate the delicate balance of being both innovative and credible: “We are obviously deep healthcare experts, so we’re not going to do frivolous, outrageous things, but we are trying to bring you into a delightful consumer experience which is not where you are today.”
The Business Case for Being Different
Their contrarian branding strategy aligns with their broader mission to transform healthcare experience. Through 6,000 patient surveys, they discovered that not a single patient stayed loyal to one healthcare brand over two years. This insight reinforced their belief that healthcare needed a fundamentally different approach to patient experience.
“We’re trying to show health systems that if you did this, you can move 10% market share and that would be worth $100 million new that year,” Aasim explains. Their brand embodies this promise of transformation.
Lessons for Enterprise Founders
Amenities Health’s branding strategy offers several key insights for B2B founders:
- Different can be better than better
- Brand can communicate strategic positioning
- Visual identity should reflect your transformation promise
- Being contrarian requires deep industry expertise
As Aasim emphasizes, “We are not trying to be just what our conservative market may look like… we fill in the experience gap that you are missing.” In an industry resistant to change, sometimes the boldest statement is simply refusing to look like everyone else.