Healthcare Branding Archives - Page 2 of 4

Healthcare is Human: 4 Reasons to Invest in Interaction as a Marketing & Branding Strategy

May 18, 2018/in Healthcare Branding/by Julie Amor, MHA

Despite the important conversations we’re all having about our changing healthcare landscape, one thing remains constant: old-school customer service still reigns.

Having overseen a busy call center in a large academic medical center for many years, I know those over-the-phone touch points are among the biggest moments of opportunity to build lifetime customers. In fact, a call between a patient or consumer and a member of your staff is more than a touch point. It’s a brand moment, and it is often the customer’s first experience with your brand. Its potential to build relationships—or impair them, depending on how things are handled—should not be underestimated.

Here are four lessons learned about the value of investing in human interaction as a core marketing and branding strategy:

1. You never get a second chance to make a good first impression, so empower your call center staff to be brand ambassadors. Customers will change brands due to poor customer service, even if the product is good. Great marketing and advertising can make the phone ring, but what happens next will make or break the brand perception. A great customer experience at these moments of impact can build a customer for life.

2. Your call center is a point of brand differentiation, so bypass automation and actually answer the phone. Think about how frustrating it is when you call a company and have to talk to an automated voice, work your way through a call tree, or worse yet, stay on indefinite hold. In today’s world of high-tech, robotic, automated phone systems and online experiences, a friendly, knowledgeable voice makes all the difference for your customers.

3. Control how you deliver on your brand promise. Define your promise and ensure it is delivered at every interaction. People used to ask me why we did not outsource our call center. Outsourcing would have been less expensive, required less management time and taken less real estate. I always asked them back – do you want to have control of your brand and how it is delivered? Define how your brand is delivered by optimizing human interaction.

4. Five dedicated minutes with your customer – priceless. Utilize those precious few uninterrupted minutes to build a customer relationship. With the overload of marketing messages presented to customers every day, a few minutes on the phone is time to build a relationship. I like how Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh says Zappos builds its personal connections with customers primarily on the phone: “We’re actually experimenting with ways to get more people to call because it’s such a valuable marketing and brand builder for us.”

What do all these lessons have in common? An understanding that healthcare is for humans, not machines or robots. Invest in the people who are your brand.

4 Reasons to Invest in Human Interaction as a Healthcare Marketing & Branding Strategy. Share on X

About the Author

Julie Amor, President and Chief Strategy Officer for Dobies Healthcare, has 30 years of experience elevating healthcare brands. Share your thoughts with her by tweeting @DobiesGroup, connecting with us on LinkedIn, or by commenting on our Facebook page.

After Rebranding Your Hospital: Five Guiding Principles to Brand Sustainability

November 15, 2017/in Healthcare Branding/by Carol Dobies, MBA

If you have recently launched a new brand at your healthcare organization, you are well aware that your brand is not a logo – your brand is an intangible asset that resides in people’s hearts and minds. It is defined by expectations developed over time though communication and, more importantly, through actions.

While you have good reason to celebrate a successful launch, it is important to know the public unveiling of your new brand is only the beginning. Maintaining what you’ve created is a continuous journey of aligning operations with communications to ensure you continuously deliver an authentic brand promise.

Here are five guiding principles to sustaining your brand:

1. Be a visible leader.

Effective leadership is like oxygen for your brand. It is an essential driving force that ultimately determines whether your employees live your brand promise, and whether your customers experience it.

Take every opportunity as a leader to demonstrate commitment to your brand in words as well as actions, promoting an aligned, shared vision across the organization. Integrate your key talking points into all employee communications. Reinforce your commitment at executive and board meetings by including brand strategy as an ongoing agenda item. Reiterate what differentiates your product or service, and work to ensure those points of differentiation continuously elevate your brand above the competition. Use your brand strategy as a key filter for business decisions, keeping the big picture in mind as you guide your organization in delivering your brand promise. Hold your organization accountable for delivering on the brand promise every day.

2. Measure, measure, measure.

When you developed your new brand strategy, you did so with data from surveys, in-depth interviews and local market studies. You gathered information from your customers, community stakeholders, industry leaders and employees. Similarly, as you work to keep your brand strategy sustainable, it is important to continue gathering input and measuring perceptions.

Insights from data help redefine differentiators, invigorate key messages, rally your team around a brand promise and execute an authentic brand experience that makes positive emotional connections with customers.

Consider a results dashboard to track and trend key data that provide the insight needed to maintain brand authenticity. For hospitals, metrics might include quality indicators, customer engagement activity, brand awareness levels and customer feedback.

3. Keep an eye on competitive activity.

You spent significant time and money developing your new brand strategy and the marketing materials to support it. Your competitors noticed, and they are likely taking action to ensure they’re not left behind. They may be adjusting growth strategies and geographic focus. They may be altering their marketing and advertising plans, possibly increasing their media spending to reduce your share of voice and share of market. Some of this activity will be readily apparent; some will not. It is imperative that you know what your competition is doing in the marketplace and how customers are reacting.

Acquiring competitive information may require significant time and resources to collect and interpret. Hospitals and health systems can consider using soviews+, a competitive media market profiling tool that consolidates and synthesizes the information needed to make informed, strategic marketing and advertising investments, as illustrated in the following video:

Regardless of your approach, it is crucial to dedicate time and effort to understand competitive market activity. In the healthcare industry, NRC Health’s Market Insights provides detailed customer perception reports that can be customized to compare your system or hospital to a distinct set of competitors. This information, updated monthly, is a valuable resource for understanding how your brand is performing. Regardless of your segment of the health industry, measuring customer perception is essential to understanding what actions you will need to undertake as you continue your rebranding journey.

Your #HospitalBrand is a valuable business asset. Maintain & evolve what you have created. Share on X

4. Ensure culture is your brand driver.

The health of your brand internally (your culture) is as important as customer perception and competitive activity – perhaps more so – because brand is a byproduct of culture. To promote and encourage internal brand adoption:

Maintain cultural and strategic alignment. Understanding and embracing the link between strategy, culture and brand is key. Your organization’s culture is inspired through leaders and demonstrated through core values. It is a powerful strategic asset and a sustainable differentiator that requires ongoing focus and commitment.
Enlist internal brand advocates. Branding extends far beyond the marketing department – brand advocates can and should span all levels and departments within your organization. These individuals can encourage a shared sense of purpose, keep others focused on the brand strategy and help implement tactical components to fulfill the brand promise.
Audit internal brand adoption. Ask your brand advocates to track key desired behaviors. Provide clear guidelines on the activities and cultural attributes you want employees to demonstrate. Empower employees to innovate to deliver products, services and experiences that align with your brand promise.
Adhere to your visual brand guidelines. Although you likely inventoried your corporate identity assets and brand presence as part of your rebranding effort, there are ample opportunities for branding oversights or mishaps. Create and distribute a simple brand identity checklist for everyone to follow. Be sure your new logo, tagline, tone, color palette and other visual elements are followed consistently. Be diligent about it, and engage your brand advocates and other passionate team members to assist in this effort.

5. Continue to tell your brand’s story.

Preserving brand health involves telling the brand story at every meaningful opportunity. Encourage employees at all levels of your organization to refer to your brand talking points as they communicate in person, online, over the phone and every other touch point for connecting with consumers. Lead by example.

Take talking points a step further by developing a compelling story about your brand. According to Harvard Business Review, stories are essential in today’s information-rich (and often data-overloaded) environment. Telling stories creates “sticky” memories when emotion is embedded in the story. Take time to develop a narrative around your brand that creates memorable and positive associations. What is the inspiration behind your brand? What specific challenge(s) have you overcome that made your brand what it is today? What role do your employees play in that brand story? What role do your customers play?

Your brand is one of your most valuable business assets. Invest time and energy to maintain and evolve what you have created. Keep your brand healthy through strong leadership and close attention to consumer and competitive activity as your healthcare business grows and transforms. Look for opportunities to strengthen your brand internally, and continue to share the meaning and purpose of your brand to enhance connections with your customers. Your efforts will be rewarded with loyalty and preference, both internally and externally.

As a side note for healthcare organizations that wish to embark on a rebranding journey but seek expert guidance through the process, brand scout+ is an excellent resource for leaders to consider. Learn more in this blog post on revitalizing your brand.

About the Author

Carol Dobies is the CEO and Founder of Dobies Health Marketing, where she has been bringing healthcare brands to life for 35 years. Share your thoughts with her by tweeting @DobiesGroup or commenting on our Facebook page.

Strategy, Culture and Brand: The Unbreakable Link for Success in Healthcare Marketing

May 22, 2017/in Healthcare Branding, Healthcare Marketing Strategy/by Carol Dobies, MBA

Consolidation and Integration Require New Brand Strategies for Healthcare Companies

April 25, 2017/in Healthcare Branding, Healthcare Marketing Strategy/by Carol Dobies, MBA

As healthcare industry leaders look to increase efficiency, grow market share, improve outcomes, and meet consumer expectations for health and life services, many are finding solutions through consolidation and integration.

Predictably, when organizations join forces, they experience a cultural transformation that affects all aspects of the company, including its brand. At a pivotal time like this, it is essential that leaders skillfully align company culture with the business strategy and brand strategy. Of the three, the latter is the most often undervalued or overlooked by companies that fall short of their full potential post-merger. Those who address all three with equal importance are the ones who succeed…the ones who lead.

Case in point: CVS Health. Once a traditional pharmaceutical retail chain, the company now owns 50 percent of market share in the retail clinic space. Cited as “arguably the country’s biggest health care company” by The New York Times, CVS Health’s business model has positioned the company to deliver on its publicized promise of “helping people on their path to better health.” A series of consolidation moves over the last decade set the stage for the organization’s transformation, including the 2006 acquisition of MinuteClinic, the 2007 merger with pharmacy benefits provider Caremark, and the 2013 purchase of Coram, a home infusion services company.

Incidentally, CVS Health further bolstered its brand promise in 2014 when it announced the discontinuation of tobacco sales. In doing so, the company forfeited $2 billion in annual revenue but moved the dial on something priceless: brand authenticity.

And that’s where the rubber meets the road, so to speak—brand authenticity is the much-coveted marriage between what you say you do (e.g., helping people on their path to better health) and what you actually do (e.g., providing highly convenient access to healthy products and services). Aligning words with actions across an entire enterprise is no small feat, especially post-merger, but it is as possible as it is imperative. The most important ingredients are skills, experience and a unified commitment to the new brand promise.

Increasing Capabilities through Consolidation

According to a report from the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, healthcare is currently the third most active industry in mergers and acquisitions (behind only computers/electronics and professional services). The healthcare industry announced more than 1,000 deals valued at $176 billion in 2016, and more than 1,200 deals valued at $417 billion in 2015. This trend is expected to continue. According to Kaufman, Hall & Associates, 63 percent of hospital and health system leaders surveyed for Futurescan 2017-2022 predicted their organizations will consolidate with another hospital or system within the next five years.

It’s not just health systems. Companies all across the healthcare industry are consolidating, often bringing together unexpected partners to create a platform of products and services that engage consumers in innovative ways. As healthcare organizations expand their footprints, diversify into new business segments, and bring innovative products and solutions to market through consolidation, they will likely find it challenging to integrate cultures from two companies into one. Is it a big undertaking? Yes. Does that mean it should be bypassed for efficiency sake? Definitely not. While difficult, transforming the culture to align with the new promise is essential for delivering an authentic brand experience, which is, in its own right, essential for customer satisfaction, loyalty and trust.

Just look at how others are broadening their capabilities through consolidation:

Nonprofit entities Dignity Health and Catholic Health Initiatives announced last year they were exploring a merger that could be one of the most sizeable deals of 2017, creating the largest not-for-profit hospital system with revenues of $27.6 billion.
Roche, the world’s largest biotech company, made six acquisitions and investments in genomics companies in just over a year to boost its standing in the drug discovery arena. By acquiring organizations with operations that complement its own, Roche is positioned to accelerate its understanding of genetic causes of disease and further establish itself as a leader in the field.
UnitedHealth Group, a leading managed care company, announced in 2015 it was combining OptumRx, its freestanding pharmacy care services business, with Catamaran Corporation, a provider of pharmacy benefit management and technology solutions. The combined company links data typically found in disparate systems—including demographic, lab, pharmaceutical, behavioral and medical treatment data—enabling clients and consumers to make better decisions regarding care effectiveness and pharmaceutical compliance.
In January 2017, Optum and Surgical Care Affiliates (SCA) announced a merger to create a comprehensive ambulatory care platform that will operate in 75 markets, representing about two-thirds of the U.S. population. Together, Optum and SCA will serve millions of consumers each year through 20,000 affiliated physicians and hundreds of care facilities.

The Power of Brand

What do all these examples have in common? Through mergers and acquisitions, they are creating new opportunities to broaden their scope of capabilities, and as a result, extend their promise. They are thinking outside their own enterprises and finding innovative ways to make a deeper impact on health and healthcare. However, even the most experienced leaders and smartest strategies can only take the promise so far. In the end, the authenticity of the actual experience becomes the most critical success factor.

Creating a brand strategy—in preparation for consolidation or anytime—involves defining how the brand resonates both internally and beyond: what should the customer experience look like post-consolidation, and how will the new brand promise be communicated—and kept—for customers? Finding the right answers takes a significant investment in time and resources, but it is well worth it. A newly consolidated company has much to communicate and even more to do, and success depends on doing everything well.

For expert guidance navigating your own organization’s brand strategy, discover brand scout+.

For insights to drive a new marketing and positioning strategy, discover maps+.

About the Authors

Carol Dobies, CEO and Founder of Dobies Health Marketing, has been bringing healthcare brands to life for 25 years. Carol co-authored this blog with Julie Amor, Chief Strategy Officer for Dobies Health Marketing, who brings more than 20 years of experience elevating healthcare brands to our firm and our clients.

Share your thoughts about this article by tweeting @DobiesGroup or commenting on our Facebook page.

From Brand Challenger to Brand Leader

December 20, 2016/in Creative Advertising, Healthcare Branding/by Thom Ludke

Three Strategies for Hospitals to Take the Lead

Like any competitive environment, hospital markets include two key types of players:

Brand Leaders – The most dominant or recognizable brand in the market typically enjoys the greatest market share. Also known as a market leader, a brand leader usually drives the largest profit margins, making this spot highly coveted by competitors.
Brand Challengers – Challenger brands are not the category leaders in the market. Rather than simply competing in an existing product or service line category, a brand challenger aims to change mindshare by finding new ways to differentiate or segment its brand from the market leader.

With the right strategies and tools in place, challenger brands have an opportunity to rival long-established leaders by creating and executing effective, data-driven marketing and advertising strategies that help them effectively compete.

According to The Nielsen Company, “Challenger brands have to take a different approach.” In terms of advertising and market messages, Nielsen’s research suggests that for every 10% excess share of voice achieved (which is calculated by subtracting market share from share of voice), challengers only see 0.4% market share growth, compared to 1.4% market share growth for leading brands. As a result, a brand challenger needs an advertising strategy that is at least 3.5 times more effective than the market leader’s strategy to truly move the dial and capture greater market share.

[View our infographic to learn more about the dynamic between share of voice and market share.]

The key to creating and executing effective market strategies is data. When you use data to drive marketing, branding and advertising plans, your hospital will significantly improve its ability to compete in market. These three approaches combine strategy with data to deliver a competitive advantage:

1. Evaluate your current brand position to reveal new opportunities

What you convey about your brand – and how you hope others perceive your brand – must always align with the experience you actually provide. To continuously build volume, preference and market share, it is important to give your brand a thorough, objective evaluation.

Exploring consumer and employee perceptions of your brand will inform your brand strategy, which should outline your differentiators and brand promise (as well as how to keep that promise), serving as a filter for future business, marketing and creative decisions. In addition, assessing your competitors’ communication brings insight to create a sustainable value proposition for your brand. This ongoing process requires continual maintenance and dedication over time.

[To determine your brand’s health, view our step-by-step brand assessment and strategy checklist.]

Brand building is a complex, interconnected process that requires authentic insight, objective decision-making and careful, sometimes even calculated effort. Insights from brand scout+ empower you to identify differentiators, design key messages and rally your team around a brand promise that will ultimately create a more authentic experience for your customers.

2. Use data-driven insights to guide marketing and positioning strategies

A marketing and positioning strategy is the compass that allows companies to successfully navigate the nuances of an ever-changing healthcare market. A smart and sustainable strategy should always precede marketing tactics. When you formulate a strategy before moving to creative tactics, you enhance your organization’s ability to elevate your market position relative to your competitors. Leveraging the power of information through market research, competitive studies and consumer insights will allow you to make more informed decisions to drive greater market share and brand equity.

Effective marketing and positioning strategies – also known as maps+ – provide key insight into your organization’s market position (including where you are now and where you can be in the future), as well as your competencies and capacity, viable differentiators, opportunities and challenges, and more. From there, you can develop on-point marketing imperatives and tactical plans to improve your market positioning, and grow market share.

3. Analyze competing campaign messages and performance to fine-tune advertising strategies

Understanding your competitors’ market position, share of voice and advertising spend are critical knowledge points to making informed advertising decisions. According to Nielsen, a brand is more likely to gain market share if its share of voice is greater than its share of market. Simply put, increasing share of voice is essential to market share growth – but how do you increase share of voice?

A comprehensive competitive market profile leads to better, more proactive recommendations for your organization’s local advertising strategies. Timely, reliable data and creative samples from competing campaigns and market presence—including core marketing messages, share of voice, media mix, advertising investment analyses and creative samples—are key to gaining traction in your local market through advertising.

A competitive market profile from soviews+ evaluates each of your top five competitor’s messaging strategies, matching them against the industry’s top consumer drivers to identify the space they claim in your market. These insights inform and assist your efforts to be more competitive and targeted with your media dollars.

Empower your organization by creating a healthier brand, formulating a smarter marketing and positioning strategy, and challenging the competition. Keep an eye on your competitors and identify new opportunities for differentiation or segmentation in your market. Through the use of data-driven insight, objective decision-making and highly strategic planning, you will be better equipped to reach your targets with pinpoint precision and ultimately drive market share, top of mind awareness and consumer preference.

Marketing Is Not a Department

April 19, 2016/in Healthcare Branding, Healthcare Marketing Strategy/by Carol Dobies, MBA

Why Healthcare Marketing Leaders Need to Inspire Others in the Organization to Deliver on the Brand Promise

When we present a strategic marketing plan to a hospital, for example, we start with a simple statement that has enormous value. It sets the tone for the entire data-driven document:

“The strategic marketing plan is a blueprint to support organization-wide growth. It is used by hospital and physician leadership, practice managers and the marketing department to guide the execution of organizational and marketing initiatives that will contribute to market share growth.”

In other words, marketing is not a department. While the quote above is specific to hospital marketing, the overarching concept is true for any healthcare organization. And our brand plans carry a similar message: brand is all about what an organization does. Everyone in the organization has a role in delivering brand authenticity – the behaviors and actions of everyone in the company come together to form the brand. When we emphasize this to clients, we see heads nodding, but few really understand what it means. Our job as healthcare marketing and branding experts is to make certain that leaders at our client organizations understand that brands are symbiotic with culture. Or, stated another way, brand building is not an initiative that belongs solely to the marketing team.

Today’s competitive healthcare market requires engagement throughout the organization to deliver on the brand promise. While the marketing department can strategically share the right message with the right audience using the right method, it is the experience each customer has with the organization that creates the brand. That’s because purchasing healthcare isn’t like purchasing your everyday product – it is far more complicated, involving far more moving parts. Before selecting a doctor or a hospital, consumers have to piece a lot of information together. They look at online ratings and reviews, social media posts from friends and neighbors, and content on health-related websites. They also have conversations with multiple people at the various hospitals and practices they are considering. Some of the information they obtain comes from communication created by a marketing department, but the vast majority is organically assembled by the experiences consumers have with the brand.

So, isn’t it logical for each person in your health organization to have a role in ensuring the right purchasing decisions are made? Logical, yes…but few outside the marketing team will claim responsibility for customer engagement, much less marketing.

A 2011 McKinsey Quarterly report summed it up nicely: “At the end the day, customers no longer separate marketing from the product—it is the product. They don’t separate marketing from their in-store or online experience—it is the experience. In the era of engagement, marketing is the company.”

As such, everyone in a given organization needs to be accountable and universally accept that marketing is the organization. This is a notion that continues to challenge many in the healthcare space. For example, recently we were exploring how one of our healthcare clients might better engage his organization to deliver on the brand promise. While the employees were conceptually on board with the notion that everyone in the organization is accountable for delivering on the promise that is communicated by marketing, they expressed concern about who would ultimately be charged with driving market share growth. We explained the marketing leader is the catalyst – the individual responsible for fueling the company’s customer engagement engine, while the marketing team is responsible for designing, building and deploying new customer engagement approaches and brand-building strategies across the organization’s departments. The marketing leader must influence everyone at the organization – not just the marketing team – to row together, getting the organization further, faster. In doing so, the marketing leader creates brand ambassadors who exponentially increase the reach of the marketing team and engage employees in new ways that make them more vested in the organization’s performance.

According to the 2016 Edelman Trust Barometer, there is a clear and compelling business case for connecting with employees as brand advocates. Data show people want to hear from employees more than any other spokesperson on issues like organizational performance and business practices. Plus, an engaged workforce is typically happy to be part of the organization and willing to go the extra distance to help enhance the organization’s overall performance (especially when the company is engaged in societal issues, as our Chief Strategy Officer, Julie Amor, discussed recently in Corporate Social Engagement: What it Means for Healthcare Brands).

In today’s era of consumer engagement, marketing and branding are no longer the purview of a single department. As mentioned, your customers no longer separate marketing from the healthcare service – it is the service. After 24 years of helping healthcare clients deploy strategic marketing and brand plans, I encourage you to build a culture of brand authenticity and engage your entire organization in the role of delivering on your brand promise. It’s time to influence others in the organization—to coach them on effective customer engagement tactics and reward them for building tighter relationships with customers. Your customers will appreciate hearing directly from your employees and your leadership will appreciate the accountability to organizational performance.

Corporate Social Engagement: What It Means for Healthcare Brands

March 21, 2016/in Corporate Social Responsibility, Healthcare Branding/by Julie Amor, MHA

What do toothpaste, beer, shoes and hospitals have in common? A mission to do good. If you have been watching television or online ads lately, you may have noticed an upward trend of companies infusing corporate social responsibility into their brands. Corporate social responsibility refers to a business practice that involves participating in initiatives that benefit society. However, it is often viewed as a corporate-driven, top-down, obligatory duty that does not connect employees with the mission of the company.

Thanks in large part to the influence of Millennials (those born between 1980 and the early 2000s) in the workforce, corporate social responsibility is transitioning to a more palatable approach called corporate social engagement—a thoughtful, mission-driven approach that brings companies and employees together to make a greater social impact.

While corporations have a long history of writing checks to support charitable organizations, efforts to truly engage and inspire employees to be part of the cause have historically been lackluster. Only recently has engagement become an expectation for companies seeking to build their brands, improve customer loyalty, and attract and retain talent.

In fact, Unilever—a marketing firm representing some of the world’s most recognized brands—has added social purpose to its own brand positioning, even making it their primary brand platform.

This shift in advertising has been quite apparent, with companies promoting their causes rather than their products. For example:

You may have seen Colgate® toothpaste recently use Super Bowl 50 to shine a spotlight on the need and value of water conservation. In its 30-second television spot, the company encourages people to turn off the tap while brushing their teeth to “make every drop count.”
Stella Artois, a Belgian beer company, launched their “Buy a Lady a Drink” campaign, a new initiative aimed at ending women’s journeys to fetch water.
TOMS® has long promoted itself as a “One for One” company. As explained on the company’s website, every time a TOMS product is purchased, TOMS helps provide shoes, sight, water, safe birth and/or bullying prevention services to people in need around the world.

It is not hard to see the trend. Millennials are driving a consumer economy focused on sustaining the world—and their influence has grown. The Millennial population as a whole has surpassed Baby Boomers as the nation’s largest living generation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And in 2015, with 53.5 million strong, Millennials became the largest share of the American workforce, according to Pew Research Center.

So how does all this fit in with healthcare? Hospitals and healthcare companies by nature have a mission to do good. Using social responsibility as a brand platform is an opportunity ripe for the taking. Like the companies featured above, healthcare organizations can embrace corporate social engagement as a strategy for building brands, fostering loyalty, and enhancing recruitment.

Corporate social engagement as a brand and loyalty strategy

Millennials choose products and services provided by companies that are committed to making a difference in the world.

In fact, a recent Nielsen survey found 55 percent of global online consumers across 60 countries are willing to pay more for products and services provided by companies that are committed to positive social and environmental impact. Consumers around the world are saying loud and clear that a brand’s social purpose is among the factors that influence purchase decisions.

Consumer attributes common among Millennials include:

Active and highly participatory
Value corporate affiliation with a social cause
Seek brands with benefits beyond the bottom line
Believe companies and individuals should work together for greater social impact
Want to be actively engaged to do good in the world

Healthcare is about engaging consumers and gaining lifetime loyalty, in part, by sharing the story of how your health organization is making the world a better, healthier place. Healthcare organizations can expand their brand platforms by using cause-marketing to drive brand affinity.

Corporate social engagement as a recruitment strategy

A 2014 Bentley University study of more than 3,100 people found that Millennials are not as enthusiastic about entering the business world as they should be, considering the demand for them in the workforce. This could be in part because Millennials have a negative perception of traditional businesses. As a result, Millennials say they seek out employers who are committed to social responsibility:

85% prefer to work for a socially responsible or ethical company
95% prefer to work for a company with a positive corporate reputation
91% prefer to work for an employer based on social impact efforts

We are just beginning to see the Millennial influence in our workforce. What is taking root now is likely to grow and spread and flourish—it’s not just a passing trend. After all, the oldest Millennials are still in the early stages of their careers. It would be surprising if they didn’t bring major changes as they continue to join the workforce and advance into positions of influence. With the healthcare industry facing an impending workforce shortage, healthcare organizations can attract and retain a talented workforce by inspiring employees to become loyal employees, brand ambassadors and engaged consumers simply by doing what they want to do: change the world.

Infusing corporate social engagement into your brand

Corporate social engagement is not simply about making monetary donations. It has to be meaningful to employees and the cause must relate to the mission of the organization. Without a strategy for corporate social engagement, employees can become disconnected from the cause and lose interest in the mission. Based on my experience, the most successful corporate social engagement strategies include a three-way approach, offering employees options: giving money to a corporate-sponsored cause, joining a corporate-sponsored community initiative, and/or extending care into the community through corporate-sponsored community service.

Using this strategic approach in a purposeful, mission-driven manner will position your health organization to do more than provide care, services or products – it will engage employees in becoming brand ambassadors who are happy to be part of the organization and build a brand that extends beyond its core services. As a healthcare marketing strategist, I see infinite possibilities for the healthcare industry to build a brand platform on corporate social engagement. Enlist your employees to expand your corporate footprint by giving, joining and serving in order to make an honest impact in your communities.

Ready to Revitalize Your Healthcare Brand? You’ll love this Step-by-Step Checklist

February 8, 2016/in Healthcare Branding/by Carol Dobies, MBA

Uniquely designed for healthcare marketers by healthcare marketers, brand scout+ is your source for essential information to guide your brand strategy. (Click to learn more.)

As healthcare leaders and marketers, we all know the importance of a healthy brand – and a healthy brand, like a healthy body, requires maintenance and dedication over time. What you convey about your brand – and what you hope others will embrace about your brand – must always align with the brand experience you actually deliver. To continuously build volume, preference and market share, sometimes you need to give your brand a thorough, objective evaluation.

When that time comes, you have two options: you can find a partner who specializes in healthcare branding, or manage and complete the work internally. There is no one-size-fits-all answer – it depends on an array of factors including your in-house capabilities and capacity. Make an informed decision about whether to DIY or outsource using the following checklist and questions to govern the brand assessment and strategy process:

1. Brand Audit: Measure current perception of your brand and your competition

Use surveys, in-depth interviews and local market studies to systematically assess your healthcare brand from these varying perspectives:

Your customers/patients
Your community stakeholders
Your healthcare leaders (executive team and board of directors)
Your employees (physicians, nurses, etc.)

Next, audit your communications. Ask yourself how authentically your healthcare organization appears in:

Advertising campaigns
Promotional materials and sales collateral
Web content and social media
Proposals and estimates
Customer communications
Internal communications

Then go one step further by assessing your competitions’ communications, which will provide insight to guide your decisions in step two.

2. Brand Differentiation: Create a sustainable value proposition

Based on current perceptions revealed in the brand audit, identify three key attributes that describe how you differ from your healthcare competitors. Ask yourself:

Do you have a proven process to accurately identify what makes you stand out from the competition?
Can you objectively determine if the differentiators you identify are realistic and authentically different from the competition?
Can you readily determine actions your organization currently does that align with the brand differentiators you’ve identified?
Are you diving deep enough to uncover new opportunities for differentiation based on current gaps among consumer brands in your local marketplace?

3. Brand Strategy: Develop a one-page synthesis of your brand position

This internal use document should clearly and succinctly convey the following:

Your brand differentiators
Your brand promise
How you will keep that brand promise through actions and interactions?

As you create your brand strategy document, ask yourself if it meets these important objectives:

Can the brand strategy be deployed as the filter for future business decisions?
Will your executive team use the brand filter when making key organizational/business decisions (e.g. capital purchases, new business development)?
How can your board of directors use the brand filter?
Is the document designed for organization-wide understanding and use? No jargon, no rambling – just the brand strategy in simplified terms to engage everyone.

4. Leadership Adoption: Roll out a process for ensuring what you actually do aligns with your brand differentiators

This is a critical step where your leaders outwardly refresh how they live the brand, and where they inspire others to follow suit:

Give your executive team key talking points and a 30-second elevator speech that stays on point with the brand strategy from start to finish.
Seize all opportunities to integrate that message into weekly employee communication.
Embed the differentiators in materials your executive team routinely uses.
Include your board of directors in this same process.

5. Touch Point Mapping: Devise a plan to ensure your employees live the brand

Create a matrix of current and planned behaviors for each department. Internal brand adoption takes time – and adequate guidance is essential. As you build the matrix, ask yourself:

How can you guide each department to live the brand throughout relevant daily activities? What your employees DO every single day, and what they say in every single customer conversation, needs to align with your brand promise and differentiators.
Are there significant changes that need to be made to ensure alignment?
Do you have a measurement system and/or incentives in place to ensure departments keep their commitments to living the brand?
Do you have visual aids throughout your departments as reminders of the brand promise?

6. Brand Champions: Identify brand-passionate employees to gain organization-wide support

Brand building extends far beyond your marketing department. Designate a group of employees to serve as brand champions who inspire others to live the brand. Ask yourself:

How do you want to appoint the brand champions – ask for volunteers or delegate?
Which employees are your best exemplars of the new brand?
How can you represent all departments?
How will the brand champions work together, and who will facilitate their work?
How will you empower the brand champions to take action and sustain their influence?
Should you set up a private Facebook group to facilitate virtual engagement with your brand champions?
What kick-off activities/events can you implement for the brand champions?

7. Internal Communication Strategy: Make a plan for internal roll-out

Establish a strategic and tactical plan for unveiling your new brand to key stakeholders, leadership and employees, and continuously reinforcing the brand across your healthcare organization. Questions to ask:

Does your plan include a top-down communication component?
How long will it take to gain internal adoption before you can take the new brand to market?
What tools can you develop to support the brand, and how can you integrate the new brand into existing employee materials?
Can you return to your communication audit to adapt internal versus external communication aids with ease?
How will you engage your brand champions in the internal communication strategy?
How frequently will executive leaders communicate about brand progress, and what mode of communication will they use?

8. Marketing Strategy: Develop strategies and tactics for external communication

When you are ready to launch the new brand externally, create a one- to three-year strategy and tactical calendar. Once you have collected data-driven insights for market share, market forces and growth potential for the organization and each of its key products or service lines:

Stratify your key brand messages by audience.
Align your in-market tactics and media plan with your external communication strategies.
Integrate across all communication channels.
Ensure consistency throughout, from external to internal brand elements.
Remember to use the brand strategy as a filter for your tactical decisions.

9. Creative Strategy and Execution: Bring your new brand to life with integrated creative materials

Create new content, complete with new design elements and visuals that align with the core purpose of your healthcare brand.

Translate the new brand in ways that communicate effectively with various demographic groups.
Give your color palette, fonts and images a brand boost.
Consider a common element or thread necessary to connect your old brand to your new one, ensuring your consumers understand your brand evolution.

10. Market Studies: Continuously measure your efforts and document competitive gains

To maintain a healthy brand, you must monitor:

Internal brand adoption
Improvements in external awareness and perception of your brand
Progress achieved in improving your brand’s competitive positioning

Brand building is a complex, interconnected process that requires authentic insight, objective decision-making and careful, sometimes even calculated effort. Whether embarking on a self-assessment or soliciting professional healthcare branding expertise, it is well worth the extra effort – bringing your brand back to life in the hearts and minds of your customers always is.

The process outlined above is recommended when revitalizing your brand image. For a 10-step process to redefining and communicating your brand identity, see Creating Healthier Brands: What is the Difference Between Brand Identity and Brand Image?

For healthcare companies seeking professional branding expertise, we encourage you to learn more about brand scout+, an innovative product that delivers healthier brands.

What is Your Superpower?

December 29, 2015/in Healthcare Branding/by Julie Amor, MHA

Identify Your Competitive Advantage

Believe it or not, you do have a superpower. Do you know what it is? That may seem like a silly question, but looking within yourself to identify your core strength is actually very empowering. Most people can put their fingers on their superpowers fairly quickly, with just a little introspection and perhaps a touch of feedback from their peers.

However, while the same is true for companies – that each organization has a core strength or purpose that sets it apart – many company leaders struggle to identify their organizations’ unique competitive advantages (a.k.a. superpowers). Those who can articulate their company’s superpower often do so in overly simple or extremely complex ways. If you think your superpower is nothing more than your company’s product or service, you’re oversimplifying. On the other hand, if you need several sentences to describe your superpower, you’re making it too complicated. The key is distilling your superpower down to ONE THING your company does differently from and/or better than anyone else in the industry.

In his book, The One Thing, author Gary Keller explains how there is “one thing” behind every successful person that helps him or her reach set objectives. “No matter how success is measured, personal or professional, only the ability to dismiss distractions and concentrate on your ‘one thing’ stands between you and your goals,” Keller writes. This statement can easily apply to the corporate environment in terms of focusing on an organization’s core business strength and purpose in the world.

For example, what do you think the “superpower” is behind brands like Coca-Cola, Nike and Dove? Here are my speculations:

Coke: We make people smile.
Nike: We inspire people.
Dove: We empower beauty.

With those examples in mind, what would you say is your company’s superpower? Do you save lives? Do you expand knowledge? Do you improve health? Do you empower people to make better decisions? A word of advice: Avoid the temptation to say “all of the above” – you can’t be better than the rest at everything you do. In other words, before you can do everything well, you have to do someTHING exceptionally well – what’s that one thing?

In our work with companies across the healthcare industry, we have found one of the biggest barriers to identifying an organization’s superpower is a lack of a data-driven processes. Data often reveal the true story, offering factual, unbiased insights that help define the unique point of competitive differentiation. When companies know and understand their unique competitive advantages, it gives focus and meaning to how they move forward, ensuring their actions support their core missions and live up to the full potential of their superpowers.

As healthcare branding experts, we cannot overemphasize that brand differentiation and market positioning require a firm grasp on your competitive advantages and customer expectations. Conduct research and look closely at your health organization’s data to discover exactly who and where your customers are, what they want, and how to reach them in meaningful ways. To do that, you must think beyond what your product or service IS, and focus instead on what it DOES for your customers.

What is the Difference Between a Brand Promise and Mission Statement?

November 16, 2015/in Healthcare Branding/by Carol Dobies, MBA

For some, distinguishing a company’s brand from its mission statement can be confusing. During brand sessions with clients, someone in the C-suite will usually ask, “Why do we need a brand promise when we have a vision and mission statement?” Given the way we define brand, I can understand the confusion. Both are all about what you do, but their foundations and purposes are not the same.

You create a mission statement to describe what your company does from an internal perspective, often to inspire and motivate your employees.

A brand promise, on the other hand, is externally focused. It is crafted to hold your company accountable for delivering a consistent customer experience.

At Dobies Health Marketing, we tend to be rather zealous about our definition of brand. To emphasize that brand is not encapsulated in a logo, tagline, slogan or campaign, we repeatedly say, “Brand is what you do – it’s how you present yourself every day and how your customers experience your company.” It starts with the promise you make to your customers – but your ability to keep your promise ultimately determines the health of your brand. In other words, your brand is the culmination of expectations your customers form over time based on your actions. It is an intangible asset that lives in the hearts and minds of your customers. Your customers are emotionally connected to your brand.

Your mission statement should emotionally connect your employees to your company. Your mission statement describes what the company does, and, hopefully, gives your employees a very good reason to wake up and come to work every day. A good mission statement distills what your company does into a couple of sentences and underscores your organization’s purpose.

For example, our mission statement at Dobies Health Marketing underscores two things. First of all, we come to work every day because we fundamentally believe our work makes a difference in how people think about health. The creative messages we send into the airwaves for a community hospital, for instance, inspire consumers to take their health more seriously. Sometimes we compel consumers to choose a primary care physician or schedule their heart risk assessments; other times, we educate consumers about how to find, use and understand hospital quality data. We help them think differently about their health.

Secondly, we succeed when our strategy, words and designs inspire people to make better, more informed decisions about health and contribute to improved care and quality of life for patients. For one of our medical device manufacturer clients, we showcase how automation in anatomic pathology reduces errors, streamlines workflow and ultimately gets patients an accurate cancer diagnosis quicker than ever before. Simply put, our work illuminates the better decision.

What about our brand promise? We promise to always engage strategy first. No matter how big or how small the assignment may be, “strategy first” is what we do every day. Our clients expect it. They know they can count on us to uphold our brand promise by infusing strategy into everything we do. And we know that consistently delivering on those client expectations is an essential aspect of our brand health.

What about your healthcare company? What is the expectation you want your customers to form about your organization, and how do you intend to equip and inspire your employees to make that happen? Your mission statement and brand promise, when crafted carefully and strategically, are the firsts of many essential steps, touch points, actions and communications that together comprise your brand.