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BRAND=EXPERIENCE…WHAT’S YOUR BRAND?

Written by: Candace Quinn

Article Overview: How do you defind your brand? This artilce first appeared in Healthcare Marekting report in 2007.

BRAND=EXPERIENCE…WHAT’S YOUR BRAND?

It take’s an entire organization to define and deliver any brand. Many companies forget this important concept. It’s not just the advertising, the packaging, or the hype. It’s the performance of the product or service. For healthcare organizations, your brand is only as real as the experience of the last patient who entered your emergency room, who registered in radiology this morning, who tried to park in your visitor’s lot, who phoned your billing office ten minutes ago…your brand is the patient’s experience. When it comes to delivering a brand in a service industry, the brand’s integrity lies in the hands of your employees. It lies in the hands of your managers. And in healthcare, it is only as good as support your physicians give it.

When we think about brands, we tend to think about segment defining brands, like Xerox which is synonymous with document duplication, or Kleenex which has almost eliminated the word “tissue” from our vocabulary. So, what is your brand? Unless you’re The Mayo Clinic, The Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, or one of about a dozen household names in healthcare, chances are good your executive team has asked you this very question. Other questions include: Does it distinguish you from your competitor? Really? Do your patients, physicians, employees, managers all agree that this is your brand? Does it add value in the market equation? How do you know?

In the following paragraphs, I’ll lay out a foundation for determining just what your brand is, how you can go about nailing it on the first try, and how you manage to supporting the integrity of the brand.

It all begins with information. Contrary to some opinions, you don’t necessarily start with a naming strategy. A naming strategy may be one in a series of tactics that you employ once you’ve agreed to do a brand launch, but it is rarely where you start. You need information. You need to spend the time and resources to ask some very fundamental questions about what key audiences perceive about your brand. Does your current name stand for anything, good or bad? What, specifically? If you are a stand alone hospital, what does your employee base think your unique factors are? Can they name them? More importantly, can they agree on a theme that seems to repeat itself? Do your physicians agree with that assessment? And your community, what do they look to you for? Is there a consistency in what they describe as your key attributes? If you are a health system, does your system identity add value? Is the name distinctly known? Has your past naming architecture established a base upon which to build? Does it currently represent any type of promise or expectation that unite your facilities and services?

A good research firm can help you formulate these questions into survey questions for these audiences. Many of you conduct ongoing consumer surveys….these questions can be added to that survey to give you some immediate input. Similarly, most of you regularly survey your medical staff and employees. If you have the luxury of time, add these brand related questions to that process. For those of you who only survey physicians and employees once every few years, consider some key focus groups facilitated by a trained third party to get to the meat of these questions. And, if your mandate is this is the year we must do branding….then I suggest you push forward with this information gathering as rapidly as practical, using a combination of survey and focus group tools.

While this step can take 6-8 months, depending upon how much original research you need to conduct, it is worth the investment. During this time, you can also be putting together your RFP to go out to ad agencies who will be very helpful to you in putting the information into messages and creative that you can test with these same audiences prior to launching any type of brand campaign. Once the information starts coming in, you want to use your leadership team to review the findings for themes that ring true to your mission and vision. Typically, most healthcare organizations have the essence of their brand already embodied within these important statements of belief. Perhaps an example would be helpful here.

Health system ABC states in their mission statement “to deliver the highest quality healthcare with compassion and competence”. In a series of focus groups, nurses shared that they chose health care to make a difference; that fundamentally they care about other humans and want to be able to not only nurse but nurture. They think this passion for nurturing is what makes their hospitals different from hospitals in the area not in the health system. Physicians surveyed shared that they sense the dedication of the nursing staff, and that as a system, the organization clearly is in pursuit of quality, but has some work yet to do in this regard. The community stated that they really only relate to their neighborhood hospital member of system ABC, and that ABC by itself didn’t mean anything to them, good or bad. In fact, they weren’t sure they knew what a health system was, and that is seemed big, and they weren’t sure that was good. When asked what they’d want from a health system, they said they’d like seamlessness around information sharing, and a sense that if they made an ABC choice, any ABC choice would be the right one.

Can you see a theme developing? The theme that the information above reveals is that the mission statement contains the common thread that those closest to the brand experience are observing. If the ABC brand is going to be about high quality healthcare, with compassion and competence, the evidence that this aspiration is within reach is clear. However, does it differentiate from the competition? Will it add value in the market equation? Perhaps. One needs to know more about the competition to answer that question.

In using this type of validating information, your ad agency in partnership with your leadership team should be able to pull together competitive information, compare it to this internal assessment, and finally juxtapose this to other knowable information, like current patient, physician and employee satisfiers, dissatisfiers, and other market opportunities. From this point, a simple expression of the brand/experience promise might be developed. It will be from this statement that the creative will eventually evolve.

Once you and your agency agree on this promise and message, and frequently even before creative is attempted, although this can vary by whether or not the message is obvious (in which case, developing creative to test is frequently a good accompaniment to the message…many people are more visual than literal) your brand themes and messages need to be taken back to those that will make the experience match the brand promise. Using focus groups of employees, physicians, patients and consumers will net you invaluable information as to the credibility, believability, and potential value of the brand as you hope it to be.

So now that you have this information, and your agency is busy perfecting the messaging and advertising support to help set the brand promise out there, how do you make the experience match up?

Successful brand launches are preceded by energizing your employees and physicians around the brand promise, and understanding how much of the promise is aspiration and how much is already in place. You will need to assemble teams of staff, physicians and past patients to determine where the experience is right on message, and where experience improvement will need to occur. Whether you need to address patient satisfaction across the board, or tweak a few problem spots, understanding any potential for a disconnect to the messaging is crucial.

Remembering that the Brand will equal the Experience that your customers have, and that the experience needs to be deliberate and consistent, your organization should be able to take its unique market position and create real value in the market equation with a successful branding strategy. As for adding value in the market equation, think about the halo effect of great brands in this industry….a great brand will cause consumers to identify your brand as “best for” services you don’t even offer….

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Article Tags: branding, experience design, healthcare experiences, healthcare marketing, marketing



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