Practo banks on the quirky to fortify its digital presence

Practo, a leading healthcare platform, has been strengthening its presence in the social media space with a series of campaigns around global health events. For International Father’s Day, Practo had a quirky take on “Accidental Dads”. The digital campaign involved a funny, tongue-in-cheek video of a condom expanding and exploding in confetti with the hashtag, #BaapReBaap and the message, “Happy Accidental Father’s Day”. 

Promoted on Facebook and Instagram, the video was widely celebrated by the viewers and saw traction of:

1.35 million people reached

0.5 million views

1,000 shares

On World Blood Donation Day, Practo used ketchup and tomatoes in its digital campaign to draw parallels to blood and humans. The idea was simple: Sharing is caring, donate a blood to save a life. 

Practo came up with a quirky and relatable digital campaign for World No Tobacco Day as well. Created in association with digital agency Blue Bot Digital, the video shows a popular Snake game, but the snake is represented as an actual cigarette and how it is consuming people. The message conveyed is” “Don’t let the habit win”. 

Practo’s social media campaigns have been inspired from daily life situations, cities, songs,  special days of the year. The brand is known for its creative content, one liners, puns and interesting imagery, and the connect to pop culture. These are converted into interesting and often hilarious creatives that have a great shareable value. Practo’s social media positioning makes them a very approachable brand as evident from the high level of engagement for its content. Practo creates visuals that are light hearted, extremely relatable and has massive mass appeal. 

In April this year, Practo underwent a rebranding and unveiled its new positioning – ‘Your Home for Health’. Practo’s platform is expanding rapidly and the new brand identity better represents the larger purpose and range of businesses that Practo now has around the world. The new positioning embodies the powerful concept of having a single, trusted and familiar place, where consumers can find doctors and book online appointments, chat online with doctors, order medicines and lab tests, store health records and even read health articles written by doctors. For healthcare providers, Practo is the platform that helps them connect with consumers, provide a better patient experience as well as provide tools that help them manage and grow their practice. 

For the rebranding, Practo partnered with New York-based graphic design firm Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv (CGH). 

Varun Dubey, VP - Marketing & Monetisation, Practo, informed that insurance is a big focus for the brand. He added, “Although we will not be an aggregator of insurance companies or sell insurance policies, we will bring interesting products in that sector which will be announced in the coming months.” 

According to Dubey, “The biggest challenge for the brand in India is that doctors here are not digital savvy and majority of them are not even technologically equipped. The out of pocket expenses is huge in India because people are not adequately insured by healthcare. Being technologically ahead, Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia are growing faster than India and it is a market that Practo is bullish on. People take healthcare seriously in these markets, especially Singapore, as opposed to India.” 

Since the brand offers multiple services now post rebranding, a key challenge will be to manage the complexity of their offerings. Dubey added, “Going forward, the brand will focus on opening the platform to more healthcare stakeholders, including insurers, pharmaceutical companies, medical devices companies and others so they can build new services on top of Practo’s platform and deliver a superior healthcare experience for both consumers and providers.” 

For the new brand identity, the brief to Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv was to create a global brand that symbolised the platform role Practo plays in healthcare. The identity needed to encompass the complexity of Practo’s offerings but at the same time, depict it with exceptional simplicity. 

The new distinctive logo consists of two dots at either end with Practo in the center, denoting that Practo can connect any two stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem – they could be a hospital and a patient, an insurer and a patient, an insurer or a provider and more. Each can now easily connect with the other through Practo. 

In addition to the master brand, Practo also has four product sub brands for its products sold to healthcare providers – Ray, Qikwell, Insta, and Querent.