About
The person behind the thinking
A healthcare advisory practice built around senior experience, direct access and practical strategy.
Elevaate Brand was built around a simple idea: organizations don't always need another agency. But they may need another experienced brain.
I started this consultancy because I enjoy helping healthcare organizations solve complex business challenges — and I wanted a more direct and flexible way to do it.
Sometimes the most useful person in the room isn’t on the org chart
Experienced
Strategic
Nerdy (in a good way)
Bio
Mike Chapman is a senior healthcare brand and strategy leader with more than 20 years focused on helping healthcare organizations and medical societies solve complex brand, growth, marketing and engagement challenges.
His experience spans 100+ brand strategy, growth strategy, strategic implementation, creative development and executive counsel engagements. He brings pattern recognition and best practices from working across organizations and markets, combined with practical frameworks and a bias toward decisions that move the business.
His agency leadership experience shaped Elevaate Brand. Clients should be able to access the senior strategic thinking, healthcare expertise, creative discipline and perspective they are hiring for — without paying for layers of people managing the work.
And there is a second belief behind the model: good outside expertise should make an internal team better, not make it dependent..
I make myself useful.
Sometimes that means leading the strategy. Sometimes it means challenging the strategy you've already developed. Sometimes it means helping your team turn a strategy into action. And sometimes it means bringing in people with specialized expertise to fill a specific need.
The goal is always the same: enable your team to be more capable of solving the problem.
CONFUSION IS EXPENSIVE
That’s why I nerd out over brand architecture and naming.
I've spent nearly two decades working with different architecture models — including hybrid approaches — to figure out how an organization can make all of its brands, services, locations and offerings make sense as one ecosystem.
When people can't figure out what belongs to what, what they should choose or why one thing is different from another, the brand pays for it.
Good architecture creates clarity. Good naming makes that clarity easier to navigate. And both can make a surprisingly big difference in preference, trust and growth.
WHAT I BELIEVE
Strategy should create movement.
A strategy isn't successful because the presentation is impressive. It's successful when people make different decisions, take different actions and the business moves.
Strategy should Inform.
Strategy sets the agenda and expectations: what initiatives will move, why we are moving them, who will move them, and what will be measured.
Creatives need direction.
Creative work should earn attention, but attention isn't the end goal. It needs to connect to an audience, an action and ultimately a business objective.
Your team is an asset.
Outside expertise should make an internal team better — not make it dependent.
What’s with the Elevaate identity and two a’s?
You might wonder why there’s an infinity symbol in the identity and two A’s in the name. When I think about what an advisory practice can make possible for healthcare organizations, I see a continuous cycle of Aspiration + Achievement. Aspiration is seeing what’s possible beyond where you are today. With the right strategy and purposeful action, that vision becomes achievement. And achievement creates new possibilities, inspiring greater aspirations and opening new doors.
At Elevaate, we help health systems and medical societies turn their aspirations into meaningful results. We bring the experience and strategic perspective to connect the dots and translate insight into the decisions, priorities and execution that move organizations forward. Then we help them build on what they’ve achieved and aim higher.
Because achievement isn’t the end of the journey. It’s the beginning of what’s next.
A brand isn't really rebranded until people start behaving differently.
I've led over a dozen organizational rebrands, and I've learned that the hardest part usually isn't deciding what the new brand should look like. It's getting an entire organization to understand it, believe it and use it.
A rebrand isn't a new logo. It's a new set of expectations — for employees, physicians, consumers, members, partners and everyone else who has to understand what changed and why it matters.
An approach I used recently was termed “branding from the ground up” by the client — it gave employees the primary role in bringing the new brand to life rather than simply announcing it from the top. We leaned on an army of Brand Ambassadors to help communicate the change peer-to-peer to gain buy-in, foster enthusiasm for the future of the organization and relay feedback.