Neurosensory came to The Animals to launch something Australia’s hearing health sector hadn’t seen before: a subscription-based way to access, maintain and service hearing technology. Our job was to give it a name, a brand, and a way to talk to the people who needed it most.
Hearing loss is one of the most common — and most undertreated — health conditions in the country. The technology has come a long way, but the way Australians access it hasn’t always kept pace. Hearing aids are expensive, the maintenance is ongoing, and for many people the barrier to better hearing is less clinical than it is commercial.
Neurosensory had a plan to change that. After 40 years of caring for Australians through a national network of 24 hearing clinics — founded in Brisbane by Otolaryngologist Dr Anthony Canty — they were ready to introduce a new model: a subscription service that bundled the supply, maintenance and ongoing servicing of hearing technology into a single, simpler offer. It was a first for the Australian market.
The brief
Neurosensory needed a healthcare brand that could carry a genuinely new idea — and a name that could carry it for the next decade.
The Animals were asked to deliver the full launch toolkit: naming exploration and strategy, a brand identity that felt warm enough for a healthcare audience but confident enough for a consumer one, and the sales and in-clinic collateral that would help Neurosensory’s audiologists explain the offer face-to-face.
Oh, and it needed to land in a sector that doesn’t always reward bold creative.
The approach
We started with the naming. Healthcare brands often default to clinical, technical or vaguely scientific language — which makes sense for surgeons, but rarely for patients. After detailed briefing sessions, including direct conversations with the European technology supplier behind the service, we explored a wide territory of names before landing on one that did the work in two simple syllables: ListenUp.
ListenUp captured the dual promise of the program — better hearing technology, and a more attentive way to deliver it. From there, the brand identity, tone of voice and collateral all flowed from a single idea: make hearing health feel less like a medical purchase and more like a relationship.
The results
The Animals delivered the full launch suite for Neurosensory: the approved name (ListenUp), logo and brand identity, brochure collateral, in-clinic poster options, further in-clinic point-of-sale concepts, eDM creative and sales copywriting designed to help clinicians introduce the program in conversation.
The result was a healthcare brand that didn’t sound like a healthcare brand — and a launch toolkit that gave Neurosensory’s team everything they needed to bring a genuinely new model to market.
Why this project matters to us
Healthcare branding is one of the things we care most about at The Animals. The work has real consequences: when it’s done well, more people get earlier help, ask better questions of their clinicians, and stay engaged with their own care. When it’s done badly, people quietly opt out.
If you’re looking for a Melbourne advertising agency that can take a complicated healthcare brief — a new product, a regulated category, a brand that needs to feel human — and turn it into work people actually respond to, we’d love to talk.
