Founder Stories: Mark Hannaford, World Extreme Medicine

Mark is, without doubt, my most exciting and derring-do client!

World Extreme Medicine is a global network delivering world-leading medical training and expertise in the world's most extreme environments. Its founder, Mark Hannaford is also an adventurer, pioneer, entrepreneur, leader, and innovator.

He has run expeditions in all five continents, traversed the ancient trade route of Ethiopia’s Amhara tribe, completed the first descent of the Kuiseb River in the Namib Desert, and was recently honoured by the prestigious Explorer’s Club of New York as ‘one of the 50 people changing the world’.

In 1996 Mark set up an adventure challenge expedition company that enabled tens of thousands to experience the thrill of being part of an expedition. Crucially this opened up the means by which charities could offer places on these expeditions to fundraise, and since then, Mark’s company has facilitated the raising over £100m for a multitude of UK charities.

And that experience brought home to Mark the urgent need for medics to be trained in the particular challenges of providing care in extreme environments (think deserts, mountains, deep sea, space, tropical rainforests), so in 2002 Mark set up World Extreme Medicine, a global platform that has since trained over 20,000 medics in extreme medicine.

It now includes the first MSc in extreme medicine taught at University of Exeter, the world’s only extreme medicine annual conference now in its 11th year, and an academy that provides access to training courses and videos from the world’s experts.

And therein lay the problem we needed to solve. With so much to say, across so many sectors and topics the brand had become muddled in its messaging, with a hard to navigate website, and a team at HQ not sure exactly how to rise above the minutiae of the brand.

So how do you create key messaging that has to cover everything from promoting a Space Medicine course, the syllabus for the MSC in Extreme Medicine at Exeter University, and the provision of medical backup to Paramount Studios?

It began with the simple yet immensely powerful brand strategy of ‘pushing boundaries,’ which highlighted their constant quest to challenge physical limits, drive advancements in medical care, and expand the skills and mindset of the entire community through those experiences

This delivered much needed clarity on how best to harness all their services into a more coherent whole, and provided the foundation for a set of key messages that did justice to the diversity of their services.

The brand strategy gave the web agency clear direction in building a new site and the team at HQ a practical framework to communicate the brand.

The results have significant across the organisation - membership has risen by 68%, website users have increased by 40% and take up courses is up by 7%.

“Brand Arrow’s work with us has been very influential in shaping how we now market the disparate elements of our brand - and if he can do that for us, he can do it for anyone!”

Prof. Mark Hannaford FEWM, CEO World Extreme Medicine.

If you're interested in discovering how a brand strategy can capture the core of your business, convey key messages effectively across your brand, and set you apart from the competition, feel free to reach out to me here.

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I founded the specialist brand strategy practice The Brand Arrow® in 2009 and have delivered over 120 brand strategy assignments and my book, What’s Your Point? won silver at the US Business Book Awards. I speak regularly on brand strategy, direct courses for the Chartered Institute of Marketing, and am an accredited Vistage CEO network expert.