People heal when met with compassion. The Compassionate Inquiry approach brings safety to the exploration of self, the present and the past. It can be used to accelerate the healing of individuals, communities and society.
‘Where there is tension, it needs attention.’ This perspective is the essence of Compassionate Inquiry. Every individual needs a compassionate hand that will guide them through the layers of consciousness, mental and bodily states, hidden assumptions, and implicit memories that manifest as poor physical and emotional wellbeing.
Co-founded by Dr Gabor Maté and Sat Dharam Kaur ND, Compassionate Inquiry ® is a psychotherapeutic approach that serves as a tool for healing and their legacy to the world. Developed in collaboration over 30 years, they have now trained over 3,500 people, a global community of 10,000 CI-informed individuals and 300 CI practitioners certified globally. The approach offers accelerated and profound healing – a much-needed intervention in a climate of poor mental health – and therefore CI sought to extend their reach and help more people.
insight & healing
At the heart of Compassionate Inquiry ® lies a thriving and rapidly growing international community of volunteers, interns, facilitators, practitioners, mentors, and educators all reaching people through a vast array of digital communication touchpoints including social media, website, and email marketing. With multiple stakeholders, across markets and cultures, CI set out to create a refreshed brand that would champion all that was on offer and being delivered consistently and cohesively across touch points.
To support the speed at which they were growing, the request was that Mintdeveloped the brand with a view to building recognition wherever CI featured and delivered comprehensive guidelines that would frame all current and future activities.
Mint had previously delivered a strategic brand framework for Dr Gabor Maté; this was used to inform the development of a brand positioning, look and feel for Compassionate Inquiry including strategic vision, values, and tone of voice. Mint also developed and strengthened key and supporting messaging, bringing to life the new look and feel across channels to appeal to their growing audiences.
Compassionate Inquiry as an organisation is committed to creating a more compassionate world. Through teaching the Compassionate Inquiry approach, CI helps people become free from self-generated suffering, and gain insight, clarity and choice in their behaviour. At the project’s inception, we identified the opportunity to build upon the strong foundations and principles in place and harness them in a distinctive and compelling visual brand identity. Starting with the creation of a brand blueprint and roadmap to inform the way forward and capture the powerful emotional cause that ‘people thrive when met with compassion.’
Several distinctive aspects of Compassionate Inquiry’s existing brand demanded preservation. These included the profound visual metaphor of water that was evident in all programme content with water being used as metaphor for so many of the key messages to be translated. There was recognition of the distinctive colour palette of blue and purple among CI’s existing audience and we built on this asset to retain a sense of familiarity whilst elevating the use of colours to better allude to the nature of CI’s work and engage its diverse audience.
Celebrating the ability of water to embrace those in its sphere and to connect individuals with wider communities, the brand marque is designed to inspire a sense of gentle calmness and safety, utilising soft curves as a visual focal point. The ‘C’ of compassion was executed in a wave-like crescent, designed to convey water in motion, with supporting droplets that envelope and cradle the ‘i’ of inquiry. The crescent shaped C of compassion is designed to cradle and envelope the ‘i’ which represents the individual.
Images of water in various states were used to evoke mood and emotion, bringing to life the written metaphor used in the programme as a distinctive brand asset. The ‘ripple effect’ at the core of the master brand is a graphic representation of the spread of compassion that is possible with the approach. We then expanded this principle to form a clear range of sub identities that act as signifiers for the various parts of the CI offer. All utilising a range of ripple and water imagery supported by the existing colour palette with subtle changes to vignettes that make each element unique but part of an overarching proposition.
We refined the tone of voice and key messaging, devising a comprehensive strategy for its potential deployment. This strategy embraced the diverse tapestry of languages, countries, indigenous communities, genders, and other minority groups served by Compassionate Inquiry.
what we did together
- Strategic insight & brand positioning
- Brand creation & tone of voice
- Visual identity system & style guide
the results
- A consistent brand look & feel delivered in a meaningful way globally
- Increased reach and engagement on social media by 10 times
- Supported two new markets launching in 2024
“A great quote to go hear, do we have one from anyone”
