How do you win clinicians’ loyalty to a brand when you are not selling them anything?

Natus sells devices that clinicians have to be able to operate. So Natus founded training brands — Academies. Four of them: Hearing and Balance, Vision Care, Neonatal Care, Neuro Training. Each with its own address on the web. Internally we never called them Academies. We called them clubs.

An Academy starts out as an announcement. A logo, a page, a newsletter — and six months later nobody remembers they are a member. What makes a membership real is not the announcement. It is what turns up in the post.

• The logos for all four Academies, and the banners for their landing pages.
• A brochure per Academy — with newly written copy and a proper case for joining, not a list of features.
• One shared registration form for all four, so a clinician decides once instead of registering four times.
• Membership cards with personal embossing: name and member number embossed, not printed. For the Hearing and Balance Academy with the gold "a" from the logo and silver embossing.
• The whole procurement chain: print data, sample cards for approval, a recommendation on quantities, production, enveloping, dispatch.
• Trailers and films for the Academies, plus an expert series that needed new banners for each speaker on a rolling basis.

Four training brands that look like they belong together, and a membership you can pick up. For a single Academy, 2,000 welcome cards and envelopes were printed — we recommended the quantity and the client signed it off as it stood.

Between "we are launching an Academy" and "a clinician has a card with their own name embossed on it in their wallet" sit a logo, a layout, print data, an embossing die, a sample approval, a quantity recommendation, enveloping and dispatch. Nobody runs that chain on the side. It is the difference between an idea and a brand somebody owns.