PORTFOLIO · COOK CHILDREN’S HEALTH CARE SYSTEM
Brand and Creative
“We didn’t want to be the team you called when you needed a flyer. We wanted to be the team you called when you had a goal we could help you reach.”
8
Companies
60+
Service Lines
500+
Physicians
1
Unified Brand
The shift from order-takers to strategic partners didn’t happen overnight. It was a cultural evolution, earned through consistency, expertise, and a willingness to push back when the strategy wasn’t there yet. When the department was renamed Strategic Marketing, it wasn’t just a new name. It was a signal to the entire system about the kind of work we were here to do.
Marketing specialists embedded with different areas of the system built real relationships with clinical and operational leaders. Over time, departments stopped coming to us with requests and started coming to us with goals, then we worked together and made data-driven decisions to develop a marketing strategy. What follows is a sampling of what that looked like across the system, from behavioral health campaigns to vehicle livery, from a beloved mascot’s evolution to a full signage overhaul, from social media to a transport jet.
PATIENT-FACING · COOKCHILDRENS.ORG
From 2017 to today — a website that grew with the system.
The Cook Children’s website is the digital front door to a $4.5 billion health system. Led by the Strategic Marketing team in collaboration with IT, it evolved from a dated, icon-heavy navigation structure into a modern, brand-forward experience built around how families actually seek care. The before-and-after is striking, not just visually, but architecturally. The new site introduced a cleaner hierarchy, updated photography, the new brand identity, and patient pathways designed around real behavior.
POSTER · SOCIAL MEDIA SERIES
PATIENT-FACING · BEHAVIORAL HEALTH
Mental health marketing in a pediatric context requires a precise touch — urgency without alarm, warmth without minimizing, resources without stigma. This campaign for Cook Children’s behavioral health services extended across posters for clinical and community settings and a coordinated social media series addressing specific conditions: ADHD, anxiety, depression, self-harm, behavioral issues, and substance abuse. Each card carried a consistent message, you’re not alone on this journey, while speaking to the distinct experience of each condition.
INTERNAL CAMPAIGNS · APPAREL · STATIONERY
STAFF-FACING · COMMUNITY HEALTH
When the new brand launched, staff didn’t just accept it — they embraced it. That enthusiasm created real demand above and beyond the many typical rebrand materials. Now employees were excited for branded materials at every level of the organization. From a Child Abuse Prevention Month shirt designed for awareness month staff events, to a flu prevention poster that turned infection control compliance into a superhero moment, to a branded thank-you card system flexible enough for staff recognition, patient family appreciation, and vendor relationships — Strategic Marketing became the team that could handle all of it, on brand, every time.
POSTER · SOCIAL MEDIA SERIES
PATIENT-FACING · BEHAVIORAL HEALTH
Mental health marketing in a pediatric context requires a precise touch — urgency without alarm, warmth without minimizing, resources without stigma. This campaign for Cook Children’s behavioral health services extended across posters for clinical and community settings and a coordinated social media series addressing specific conditions: ADHD, anxiety, depression, self-harm, behavioral issues, and substance abuse. Each card carried a consistent message, you’re not alone on this journey, while speaking to the distinct experience of each condition.
PATIENT-FACING · SERVICE LINE MARKETING
HOME HEALTH · NICU · RETAIL PHARMACY · PHYSICIAN NETWORK
Sixty-plus service lines and sub-specialties means sixty-plus unique audiences, with different levels of health literacy, different emotional contexts, and different moments in the care journey. A brochure for Cook Children’s Home Health needed to speak to an exhausted parent managing a medically complex child at home. A kangaroo care poster needed to reach a NICU mother in one of the most tender moments of her life. A retail pharmacy flyer needed to feel useful rather than promotional. Each piece required the team to think strategically before touching a design tool.
PUBLICATION · PROMISE MAGAZINE
COOK CHILDREN’S HEALTH FOUNDATION · DONOR-FACING
Promise is the magazine of Cook Children’s Health Foundation — a publication that connects donors to the impact of their giving through patient stories, clinical milestones, and the human side of a world-class pediatric health system. The health foundation created content; Strategic Marketing designed the entire publication and edited it for voice and brand consistency. Every cover, every layout, every typographic choice was the team’s work.
ENVIRONMENTAL · EXPERIENTIAL
SIGNAGE · MURALS · PULL-UP BANNERS · A-FRAME
Brand doesn’t stop at the edge of a screen or the bottom of a page. Strategic Marketing extended the Cook Children’s identity into the physical environment, from an A-frame welcome sign that greets families at the door, to a Peaks the Dragon growth chart mural that turns a waiting room moment into a memory, to a retail amenities pull-up banner that helps families discover everything from Chick-fil-A to the retail pharmacy under one roof.
ENVIRONMENTAL · SIGNAGE SYSTEM
WAYFINDING · MONUMENT SIGNS · FACILITY BRANDING
The brand had to live everywhere — including on the building itself.
As part of the rebrand, Strategic Marketing led the development of a comprehensive signage system covering the entire Cook Children’s campuses and network, monument signs, primary and secondary wayfinding, directional signs, door signs, emergency signage, and parking. The before-and-after tells its own story: from dated stone monuments with the old logo to a clean, modern system scaled for a growing health system. The team also created signage for neighborhood health centers, specifying both dimensional and channel letter options for different building types.
BRAND EXTENSION · RETAIL
UNDER THE PEAKS RETAIL SHOP · Medical Center Fort Worth
Under the Peaks is the Cook Children’s retail shop in the Dodson Specialty building and it needed a brand all its own, one that lived within the Cook Children’s family while feeling like a destination. Strategic Marketing created the logo, developed the visual identity, and designed the architectural signage drawings to specification for physical installation. The marquee-style sign, with its mountain-peak crown and Peaks the Dragon, gives the shop the character of a beloved neighborhood institution that is loved by kids and staff alike.
BRAND CHARACTER · PEAKS THE DRAGON®
CHARACTER EVOLUTION · USAGE GUIDELINES · NEW MOVEMENTS
He was born in the imagination of a Cook Children’s patient. Strategic Marketing gave him a future.
Peaks the Dragon didn’t start in a boardroom. He started with a child, a patient whose imagination created a mascot the system fell in love with. But as the years passed, Peaks had grown inconsistent. His look varied depending on who drew him. He had no usage guidelines, which meant the marketing team had a hard time saying no when his use wasn’t appropriate. And he had only a handful of poses, limiting how he could be used across the growing system.
Strategic Marketing took charge. The team led a full character refresh iterating through dozens of head profiles, body variants, art styles, poses, and color options before landing on the definitive Peaks. New usage guidelines gave the team the authority to protect him. A library of new movements from peeking over counters to celebrating with a cowboy hat gave the system the flexibility to use Peaks thoughtfully across every context. He is even a much loved stuffed animal available for purchase in the system's on campus Build-A-Bear Workshop! He’s not frozen in time anymore. He can keep growing and changing, just like kids can!
COMPANY · TEDDY BEAR TRANSPORT
VEHICLE LIVERY · INFOGRAPHIC MARKETING · B2B REFERRAL
The brand didn’t just live on paper. It flew.
Teddy Bear Transport, Cook Children’s nationally accredited pediatric transport program, operates ambulances, helicopters, and a plane that crisscross Texas bringing critically ill children to the care they need. Strategic Marketing designed the vehicle wraps for all three, working directly with vendors to ensure the new brand was applied with precision and consistency across every surface. The connecting dot motif and diagonal brand elements that look striking on a brochure look extraordinary on a jet fuselage at 35,000 feet.
Beyond the vehicles, the team produced a data-rich “By the Numbers” infographic brochure for referral partners, translating 14,000 annual transport calls, 6-time CAMTS accreditation, and a 24/7 dispatch operation into something a referring physician could hand to a family with confidence.
The work that doesn’t show up in a gallery
Every piece shown here represents dozens of conversations, strategy sessions, creative reviews, and moments where the marketing team pushed back, stepped up, or figured out how to say something that hadn’t been said before. The rebrand gave us tools. The strategic repositioning gave us authority. But what actually changed things was trust, built slowly, through showing up as partners rather than vendors, every single time.