Branding is often treated as a deep and comprehensive exercise — defining vision, values, and long-term positioning before design work even begins. In traditional brand consultancies, this process can take months and cost anywhere between £5,000 and £20,000, which is often justified for larger organisations undergoing significant change. However, this level of analysis is not always necessary for dental practices.
At Digimax, we come from that world. Our background lies in non-dental branding, where we spent over 20 years working with leading UK and international brands. We learnt how large consultancies operate, how they uncover purpose, and how they build identity systems that last decades. When we turned our focus exclusively to dentistry, we brought that expertise with us — but refined it to suit the real-world needs of dental practice owners.
Over the years, we observed that most dental practices already possess a strong moral and professional foundation. They do not need to spend months “discovering” what they stand for. Instead, they need an efficient, design-led process to express their principles visually and consistently.
Understanding shared values in dentistry
After working with hundreds of dental practices, we noticed that their core values were often remarkably consistent, even if their personalities and target audiences varied. These shared values form the ethical and cultural backbone of modern dental care.
Outstanding dental care: A shared pursuit of clinical excellence, patient comfort, and long-term oral health outcomes.
Honesty and transparency: Ethical communication and treatment planning that builds patient trust.
Integrity: Making decisions in the patient’s best interest, not purely for commercial reasons.
Nurture and care: Creating calm, welcoming spaces that help patients feel at ease and supported.
Education: Encouraging patients to understand treatment options and preventative habits, fostering confidence and empowerment.
Long-term relationships: Seeing dentistry as an enduring partnership, not a one-off transaction.
These aren’t marketing slogans — they reflect the lived experience of almost every successful practice. They are universal principles that underpin patient loyalty, trust, and reputation.
Because these values are so consistent across the sector, a lengthy brand consultancy process designed to uncover them often added limited value. The real challenge isn’t to find the values, but to translate them into a strong, credible visual identity that patients instantly recognise and associate with professionalism and care.
This principle is echoed in research from Hinge Marketing, which outlines that brand strategy is vital when an organisation’s direction or culture is unclear, but when the foundations are already in place, it’s more effective to focus on identity and communication tools rather than full strategic reinvention (Hinge Marketing, 2024).
Distinguishing brand strategy from brand identity
Understanding the distinction between brand strategy and brand identity is key to choosing the right approach.
Brand strategy involves defining who you are, what you believe in, and how you wish to be perceived — typically through research, workshops, and positioning frameworks. According to Want Branding, strategy is “the plan for how you will be different” and “how you’ll win in your market.”
Brand identity, by contrast, is the visual and emotional expression of that strategy — the logo, colour palette, typography, imagery, and tone of voice that make your brand recognisable.
As Hinge Marketing’s framework explains, a full branding process consists of five stages: brand strategy, brand identity, brand tools, launch, and brand building. Not every business needs to start from stage one — those with established values and a defined audience can often begin at the identity stage without loss of quality or meaning.
A streamlined model for dental practices
Drawing on our background in both consultancy and design, we created a streamlined model for dental practices — one that retains professional rigour but removes unnecessary complexity.
Our Core Branding Package includes:
A bespoke, tailored approach.
A concise fact-finding questionnaire exploring your demographic, desired positioning, and overall aesthetic.
A one-to-one consultation via phone or Zoom.
Logo files in PNG, JPG, EPS, AI, and PDF formats.
Colour systems for both CMYK (print) and RGB (digital) formats.
High-resolution logo files suitable for print and social media.
Templates for business cards, letterheads (print and digital), compliment slips, and appointment cards.
A concise set of brand guidelines for consistent use.
Four design concepts, with four revisions available on one selected concept after the brief.
This process delivers tangible outputs that practices can immediately apply, without the prolonged workshops and theoretical documentation that traditional consultancies rely on.
When a full brand consultancy is appropriate
There are occasions where a full branding consultancy remains the right path. In particular, it benefits practices that are:
Undergoing mergers or acquisitions, where two cultures or identities need unifying.
Repositioning significantly where there is confusion around the practice you wish to become.
Experiencing misalignment, where investors are seeking clarity around expansion.
Planning rapid expansion, where multiple sites require a cohesive strategic framework.
In these cases, deeper strategic work helps clarify direction, align teams, and establish a robust foundation for growth.
Applying big-brand principles intelligently
Our experience outside dentistry taught us how leading global brands achieve clarity and consistency through design systems. Those lessons — structure, simplicity, and cohesion — translate directly to dental practices when applied intelligently.
Rather than removing depth, our process removes duplication. It allows dental teams to focus on what patients see and feel — the visual expression of care, trust, and professionalism — while benefiting from the standards of world-class branding practice.
Our position
For most dental practices, brand identity design supported by a focused discovery process is sufficient to achieve a professional and unified brand presence. For practices experiencing transformation or uncertainty, a full consultancy approach may still be appropriate.
Recognising where your practice sits on that spectrum ensures that your branding investment is proportionate, strategic, and effective — producing an identity that truly represents who you are and what patients already value about you.