How it started
Healthcare providers across the nation were facing a significant challenge: Due to ongoing COVID-19 safety concerns, patients were delaying preventive and elective care, leading to more advanced and harder-to-treat cases when they finally sought treatment.
To address this, Clorox Healthcare surveyed 1,700 patients and hospital visitors. They found that 79 percent of respondents felt more comfortable visiting a hospital if they saw signs featuring cleaning, disinfecting, and hand sanitizing products from trusted brands.
How could Clorox Healthcare leverage this data to build trust and improve patient outcomes?
What we did
Program 11 dove into the existing research and conducted our own audience study to help inform our recommendation: an in-hospital program that would remind patients how hospitals routinely clean and disinfect surfaces for their safety.
The a-ha moment: Clorox is only one of many cleaning brands used in hospitals. For the program to work, it needed to represent the full ecosystem of trusted brands patients actually recognize — so we built a strategy around a coalition that included Purell and Mr. Clean.
Because this was the first time competing brands had come together in service of a shared cause, Program 11 served as the neutral agency — working directly with each brand's marketing team to create something everyone could get behind.
Safer Together: That included naming the program itself. We landed on Safer Together — a deliberate choice for a moment when "together" had become loaded with fear. The name reframed proximity not as a risk, but as a reassurance: these trusted brands, side by side, working to protect you. In the early days of COVID, when people were afraid to be around each other at all, that reframe mattered.
And it worked.
How it’s going
Our work with Clorox led to the partnership of four of the most trusted companies in professional cleaning – Sodexo, P&G Professional, Clorox and GOJO – all of whom collaborated on our program successfully.
Our work was embraced and implemented by hospital systems that were seeking to reassure patient audiences of their advanced cleaning protocols.
These hospitals effectively increased confidence about the cleaning and safety of their shared and public spaces. Many assets we produced are so evergreen that they are still in use five years later.
Campaign Messaging
Working hand in hand with the Clorox Health team and using their research and our own audience study as our guide, we first developed campaign name and key messaging concepts that would simply and effectively convey the hospital’s cleaning protocols, and encourage the patient’s help in practicing social distancing and hand washing to ensure shared spaces were safer for all. Safer Together achieved these goals.
Campaign Identity
From there we developed a visual identity — logo, iconograpy, and photography — that could stand out inside a hospital, and also provide a “wrapper” for Clorox and its partner brands. The plus sign symbol that we used as our campaign icon is in four parts, representing people coming together with a common goal of safety and good health.
Original Photography
It was critical that all photography associated with the campaign show accurate safety protocols to ensure our visuals matched our message. At the time, there was virtually no existing photography showing people congregating in masks, so we produced our own photo shoot. Assets created for the campaign included a full suite of digital ads, plus in-hospital posters, door hangs and table tents, and direct mail pieces.
