Healthcare Branding Series: How to Make the Most of your Healthcare Brand

It’s a new year! If your goal is to improve your hospital or healthcare practice brand this year, we have several tips to get you started on a path to success. This week’s topic is what it means to live your brand.

Living your Brand: Why, How, What and Who

Live your brandWhen you communicate a brand promise, you create expectations – meaning, your brand is much more than the advertising messages you convey. For your healthcare brand to be authentic, your patients and visitors must have experiences and interactions that align with your message. For example, if you say you excel at patient satisfaction but your front-line staff sometimes delivers less-than-stellar service, your organization is not living its brand. Pay attention to how well the real patient experience aligns with your brand promise. If you find anything lacking, make the changes necessary to improve and follow through. And remember, outcomes aren’t everything, so focus on patient needs beyond clinical care as well.

Start by educating employees on what your brand stands for and how they contribute to its authenticity (or lack thereof). Use touch point mapping to guide this process, which means plotting consumer interactions or experiences with your organization to more conclusively capture and understand every opportunity for improvement. You can use this approach to identify employees who already do a good job of putting your core values on display, and designate them as brand ambassadors. They can act as role models for co-workers on how to live the brand. Ideally, when done correctly, every employee will become a brand champion in time.

Improving your hospital or practice brand is a complex undertaking, so you won’t see changes over night. These tips can get you started, but it takes some time to enhance consumer perception of your organization. We encourage you to check out our next topics in this series:

 


DesignRush.com

Rolling Out Our Brand New Logo

The story behind our new look & what it means for healthcare marketers

Can you spot what’s different about us? Hint: look in the upper left corner of your screen.

We have a new logo!

We are VERY excited because our new logo illustrates something unique about us: our three-part process for making companies healthier. Known as Discover-Connect-Promote, this process is an integral part of what we do and how we make healthcare brands come to life.

For years, Discover-Connect-Promote has played a big role in how we present ourselves in the market. We talk about it on our website, we explain it in our proposals, and we feature it in our company brochure. Having proved itself successful time and time again over the last two decades, it seemed natural for us to build this process into our signature look. With its graphical element that combines what we do with who we are, our new logo is smart, contemporary and fun…just like us!

So, what do we mean by Discover-Connect-Promote exactly? When we apply this three-part approach, we make everything come together seamlessly for healthy returns on our clients’ marketing investments:
Discover-Connect-Promote process image

First, we discover the difference. We dig deep to uncover what makes each client unique. We look closely at all the right data to explore where the target customers are, what they want, and how to reach them in meaningful ways. Brand differentiation requires a firm grasp on current positioning and customer expectations, so we listen, we probe, and when necessary, we challenge. We engage at a deeper level than most because we want our clients to succeed.

Next, we connect the dots. Most clients select us for this very reason: we think and operate strategically. In addition to market research and trends, our planning considers operational readiness, competitive reactions and more. Because we lead with marketing strategy, we connect everything we do to the client organization’s business plan.

And finally, we promote what works. We make brands come alive by blending strategic thinking with creative campaigns and communications. Clever advertising in and of itself rarely produces long-term results – that’s why our creative campaigns build on the client’s brand promise and align with the organization’s strategic priorities. By taking the time to discover the difference and connect the dots before creating ad campaigns, we ensure we’re promoting what works to captivate customers where they live, work and play…each and every time.

And there you have it! That’s the story behind our new logo and what it means for healthcare marketers who partner with us for marketing, branding and advertising initiatives. What do you think of our new look? Let us know in the comments!

Emotional Branding in Healthcare

Be Authentic. Align Experience with your Brand PromiseAs any successful healthcare marketer can attest, advertising alone does not build emotional connections with healthcare consumers. Patients need to personally experience “compassionate, personalized care” when they interact with your brand, or what you’re promoting simply isn’t true.

To connect emotionally in ways that build affinity and loyalty, make it authentic by carrying that connection through the entire patient experience. Research shows the difference between having ‘emotionally connected’ customers, as opposed to those who are just ‘highly satisfied,’ can be measured in dollars and cents. Through those measurements, we see emotional connections create more valuable customers. For the skeptics out there, consider this:

A recent article, called Making Better Marketing Decisions: A Left-Brain Argument for the Right Brain, examines the potential for emotional drivers to increase profitability in major consumer industries. The author cites an example from the banking sector, in which scientific research and mathematical modeling were used to reach an accurate understanding of the specific attributes that drive purchase and loyalty behaviors. For banks, the data showed that, compared to highly satisfied customers, “emotionally connected customers own more banking products, carry higher credit card balances and advocate for their bank’s brand more often.” As a result, data further suggest an estimated $14.2 million boost in net present value profit is on the table when the number of emotionally connected customers grows from one to five percent.

Granted, banking is different from healthcare, but the overarching lesson is the same: healthcare marketers need to tap into emotions and right-brain functions in their marketing and branding strategies. For an off-the-cuff case study in what emotional branding can look like in healthcare, let’s briefly explore what they’re doing at the Cleveland Clinic health system:

With an executive team that includes a Chief Experience Officer and strategic priorities aimed at improving the patient experience, the Cleveland Clinic has made great strides since 2009 at connecting emotionally with consumers. After taking a deep, data-driven dive into the hearts and minds of their consumers, leadership began making operational changes to enhance the experience they deliver. Non-clinical touch points like patient scheduling, facility aesthetics and an emphasis on addressing patient fears and concerns have all been improved. They also adopted a new clinical model that has multidisciplinary specialists collaborating seamlessly on patient care, which enhances the patient experience on multiple levels from convenience to well-coordinated care.

In other words, the Cleveland Clinic’s patient experience now extends far beyond the medical outcomes it has long been known for, and into other areas where the experience feels less about clinicians treating patients and more about people helping people.

With its reputation for looking after patients’ physical AND emotional well-being, the Cleveland Clinic can now authentically convey its ability to treat patients as individuals with unique concerns, lifestyles and circumstances. If the Clinic distributed this widely viewed “Empathy: The Human Connection to Patient Care” video four years ago, however, the message would’ve fallen flat because the patient experience in 2009 did not reflect the genuine understanding and compassion so eloquently depicted in the video. Now, with an elevated patient experience to back it up, the message is resonating well with people, as evidenced by the video’s nearly 100,000 views on YouTube and countless shares on other social sites.

If you’re not already taking strategic steps to create emotionally connected customers, you can’t afford to wait. The concept is taking hold within the healthcare industry, so build personalized, meaningful bonds with your patients now before your competition beats you to it. Because once an emotional bond is made, it’s hard to persuade that customer to try another brand…and that’s the whole point.

Building a New Brand

Our Clients' Authentic Brand AtrributesLast week, one of our clients unveiled their new brand to employees. It was an amazing day for the associates who joined the company meeting to hear the long-awaited announcement. The CEO and partners presented our branding approach and explained the work we undertook to arrive at the new corporate identity and, more importantly, the new brand.

The process they described wasn’t just about selecting a new name and tagline. It was about emerging in the market under a new brand, with a new brand promise and set of brand attributes that will differentiate the company for years to come. Employees were fascinated by the process, and the message really resonated with them when the CEO described brand as “what you do.”

This excerpt from the CEO’s script shows how she outlined our process:

“When we started, we engaged Dobies Health Marketing to help us with this process. You will recall the survey you all took. Carol asked you about words and phrases. She asked you how decisions were made and what type of environment you worked in. She asked you how we dealt with mistakes and about our organization’s personality.

She also asked us [the leadership team] about what we wanted as leaders, how we made decisions and how we thought about our company.

She walked us through a Branding Framework. We talked about how we wanted our company to run. We looked at organizations that have an Expert Brand, such as BMW, Mayo Clinic and Apple. They stand out as the industry’s preeminent leaders.

We looked at organizations that are customer-centric and customized, such as Lands’ End, Zappos, and Target. They try to make their clients a part of who they are; they include their customers in their brand experience. And we talked about Authentic Brands, such as Whole Foods, Starbucks, and Ben and Jerry’s. Their products make peoples’ lives better; they support growth and help the customer be better.

The idea behind the Branding Framework is that an organization will have trouble delivering on its brand if the styles of leadership aren’t in line with brand attributes…

I am very proud to have led the leadership team through this branding process. I watched them weave very different leadership styles together to arrive at a singular authentic strategic intention (brand platform). Using findings from employee interviews and leadership/culture indexes, they discovered the key behaviors that were keepers and those that needed to be jettisoned with the old name. Although it was a lot of hard work, they had a tremendous amount of fun as they turned “NewCo” into a dynamic new brand.

I can hardly wait to share the new brand with you and reveal more details about the brand promise and corporate identity. But, now is not the time. Over the next six to eight weeks, leadership will lead each department through a series of meetings to discover and adopt touch points aligned with the brand. During this time, work groups will deliver new systems and processes. Staff will get comfortable with new key messages, and hundreds of items will be reprinted with the new company identity.

Healthcare Branding & the Patient Experience

Storytelling patient experiencesRecently, while attending a grand opening for a healthcare organization, I found myself blissfully lost in the chief operating officer’s storytelling about the power of the organization. He and I were deeply engaged in conversation, and I listened intently as he told one compelling anecdote after another, each chock-full of relevant and useful patient experiences. My first thought was, Wow! How can the marketing team replicate the COO’s patient-centered chronicles in mass media to tell the real story of the company?  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized, storytelling alone wouldn’t differentiate the organization.

My point is, to deliver more value, your narrative must be driven by storydoing. When care teams consistently do the stuff that great stories are made of, it trumps storytelling every time. Simply put, patients aren’t satisfied by the experiences you describe, but rather, by the experiences you deliver.

At Dobies Health Marketing, we approach “storydoing” as part of the brand strategy implementation for our clients. We love it when brand ambassadors carry the torch of change and clinical/medical teams rally around new patient touch points because that’s how healthcare organizations create amazingly unique patient experiences and fiercely loyal customers. Those are the stories that will be told and retold throughout the community to friends and family and spread by social media for years to come. From there, using storytelling to unveil the voice of the customer will happen naturally, authentically and effectively.

Corporate Re-Branding: A Company Identity Checklist

Changing Your Company NameIn our previous post, we counted down the 10 essential steps to trade name changes. When the time comes to launch, you may decide to outsource the work or partner with your agency, or you may plan and execute your trade name change entirely in house. Either way, it all starts with an inventory of corporate assets that carry your corporate brand identity. To help, we’ve included a checklist below.

This checklist is not exhaustive, but it’s a great starting point. We recommend meeting with key representatives from each department to customize the plan for your company. From there, you can assign tasks and deadlines for a timely and thorough roll-out.

Update your website and sites that link to you:

  • Get the domain for the new name and, when ready, redirect the old domain to the new site URL.
  • Change the name and logo wherever they appear on your website.
  • Update SEO/keywords if applicable.
  • Revise metadata on web pages as needed, including page titles, page descriptions and image alt-tags. Leave a “trail” in the meta-tag description and keyword of the old name.
  • Update your listings in applicable online directories.
  • Send updated logo and company name/descriptions to any partner or affiliated vendors that mention your company and/or link to your website from their own.
  • Write a press release and post it on your website explaining why your company name has changed.

Update your social media sites, which may require new pages built from scratch:

  • Different rules and procedures apply depending on the social site, so study up on each to get a better understanding of what’s involved. For example, Facebook will only let you change the name of your page if it has fewer than 200 likes – and even then, changing the page name does not change the page URL.
  • In many cases, it will be necessary to start a whole new page and encourage existing fans to “follow” you on your new pages instead.
  • Wherever you are currently linking to social pages that will become outdated once you’ve built new pages, be sure to update your links. These URLs are most commonly embedded in social icons on the company website and/or email templates.

Facilitate the trade name change across your operations:

  • Finance: invoices, statements, checks, credit applications, change of address forms, banking information, contracts, employer identification number and other IRS records.
  • Human Resources: company policy statements, employee handbooks, internal forms, applications, training materials, payroll, etc.
  • IT: company intranet, related web domains, vendor notices.
  • Legal: incorporation articles, business registration and trademarks, board of directors’ materials, memberships.
  • Customer Service: service scripts, forms, contracts, return authorizations.

Update all business systems:

  • Name badges
  • Business cards, email signatures and addresses
  • Letterhead, envelopes, labels, folders, coversheets
  • Telephone greetings and messages, including:
    • Outgoing voicemail greetings
    • Standardized greeting when answering live calls
    • Company “on-hold” messaging
    • Answering service/after-hours call center greeting
    • Outgoing caller ID
  • Signage/way-finding
  • Internal documents (forms, applications, etc.)

Last but certainly not least, update all affected marketing materials:

  • PowerPoint templates and existing presentations that are still in use
  • Word templates
  • Brochures, flyers, patient education materials, other print
  • Trade show booth
  • Poster presentations
  • Case studies, white papers, customer testimonials, etc.
  • TV and radio spots if applicable
  • Digital banner ads if applicable
  • Newsletter/e-newsletter templates
  • Videos and product demos
  • Customer-facing training materials
  • Promotional items (pens, notepads, etc.)
  • Web content
  • Leadership biographies
  • PR boilerplate copy

Have you ever been involved in a corporate name change? If so, what additional insight can you share? We’d love to hear from you!

Healthcare Re-Branding: A Countdown to Launching Your New Company Name

Your new name, logo and tagline are only part of the puzzle.‘Tis the season to be thankful for good fortune, which for us includes many fun projects with a wide range of healthcare clients. With a New Year approaching, it seems fitting that two of these projects involve helping clients unveil new trade names. Two very different companies – one in the health technology space and the other in healthcare supply chain services – both rolling out new trade names and logos that more accurately reflect what their brands are all about.

When they reveal their new corporate identities in January, they’ll do it with all the right messages to every applicable audience across every applicable channel. In doing so, they’ll revitalize their brands in ways that are meaningful for employees, consumers and all other audiences, which will lead a steady pace of new prosperity in the new year.

But, as these clients know, it’s a lot more work than meets the eye. Choosing a new name, logo and tagline is only part of the puzzle. There is much work to be done and many factors to consider when changing a company name. It’s brand-building at its core. So, in the true spirit of a New Year countdown, we present to you…the 10 essential steps to successfully rolling out your new company name.

It’s a countdown, folks, so say it with us…

“Ten!”
Know your audiences…all of them. Who are the various groups you’ll unveil the new name to, and why should they care? The latter depends on the former – different stakeholders have different reasons for taking interest in what you say and do. Using a mix of methodologies, we helped our clients identify all targets and the brand attributes most relevant for each group. For our client in health technology, we mapped key attributes across seven different audience groups; for our client in supply chain solutions, four groups.

“Nine!”
Study your competition to pinpoint how and where you can stand out. Start with the obvious – their websites – then explore anything and everything you can get your hands on, like sales collateral, digital and print ads, social pages, and so on.

“Eight!”
Choose the name. Share what you learned in the previous steps with key representatives from your internal teams, noting their additional perspectives on exactly what the new name should convey. Carefully narrow the focus to the most universally meaningful brand attributes, then find a name that fits just right.

“Seven!”
Write a tagline that clearly and succinctly communicates your value proposition. Capture only the true essence…you will have plenty of opportunities to expound on it in copy. For both clients, we helped craft powerful taglines using only three words each.

“Six!”
Redesign your logo. Bring the new name and tagline to life with a visually appealing, contextually symbolic logo. Whether you outsource or use an in-house designer, choose colors and other visual cues wisely, as they should become the basis for the new brand standards you’re about to develop (later in the countdown, that is).

“Five!”
Refine your key messages. You’ve already identified who your target audiences are and what each one seeks from your company, and now it’s time to further develop and fine-tune your key messages accordingly. Craft reader-ready key messages, tuned to the listening preferences of each audience, for use in copy across an assortment of communications and media.

“Four!”
Develop a brand styleguide. Using the colors of your new logo as your starting point, select a full color palette for your brand and create a manual to govern employee use of colors, logos and even editorial standards if appropriate. In some cases, it’s necessary to create co-branding guidelines as well, for vendor partners to use under co-marketing circumstances.

“Three!”
Reveal the new name, tagline, logo, key messages and brand standards to everyone inside your organization. We suggest a meeting – or even better, a fun event – where you can present the new look and feel in ways that excite and engage the troops. Wherever possible, draw attention to the ways their input contributed to these decisions and developments. Assure them that you are providing all the tools they’ll need to live the brand in their daily work and professional interactions.

“Two!”
Prepare for the external launch, and leave no stone unturned. Like looking under your couch cushion and finding assets (okay, coins and pens) you’d forgotten you had, you might be surprised to discover just how many parts and pieces have your outgoing company name on it. From minutia like mailing labels to the big things like your corporate website – and partner websites that feature and/or link to you – it’s time to get downright tactical, no matter how tedious it may seem at times. We recommend using this handy company identity checklist as your starting point.

“One!”
Happy New Year! Proudly light up and embrace the new you, and make it your resolution to uphold the integrity of your newly revitalized brand all year long.

Best wishes to you and yours throughout the coming year, from all of us at Dobies Health Marketing.

Healthcare Brand Authenticity & the Domino Effect

Brand AuthenticityOver lunch today, we discussed how to play dominoes. Apparently, there are new games that are quite complex, but one thing hasn’t changed at all: after the leader sets the game in motion, the inevitable chain reaction follows. It struck us that – in dominoes and in organizations – every “move” by every “player” affects the final outcome and ultimately connects back to that first play of the game.

For healthcare organizations undergoing a rebranding effort, this “domino effect” is more than an analogy – it’s a certainty that impacts the ability to deliver an authentic brand. We believe most rebranding strategies falter not because they are poor ideas or ill-conceived, but because they fail to consider the characteristics and influence of organizational culture and leadership behavior.

Here’s what we mean:

We all know strong brands create value for healthcare organizations by building emotional bonds with customers. Emotional bonds build preference, which leads to utilization. At Dobies Health Marketing, we help our clients understand that a brand is defined and delivered by the culture of the organization – and the culture is guided by the organization’s strategic intention. Strategic intention is important because it tells everyone within the organization how to realize its brand promise.

An achievable brand platform is built on the foundation of the strategic intention. The brand platform becomes authentic when the organization’s brand promise (what is communicated) aligns with the brand experience (what is actually delivered via daily operations).

Organizations often fall prey to aspirational or unrealistic brand platforms, whereby goals are too far from customers’ current brand perceptions to be believable. This does not mean companies shouldn’t set goals for enhancing the brand over time. However, the entire organization must be mobilized and empowered to deliver emotional and functional customer experiences that together form an authentic brand platform.

For organizations to sustain change, they need leaders that pursue brand platforms and develop cultures in alignment. It is through this alignment that organizations, and their people, create emotional bonds with their customers. And win at dominoes.

In-Depth Interviews (IDIs): Exploring the Hearts and Minds of Healthcare Consumers

Recently, we heard some compelling stories about a client’s brand. We were conducting consumer in-depth interviews (IDIs) to better understand how people make personal healthcare decisions, as well as their perceptions of our client’s brand.

As we listened, we were impressed by the passion and honesty each participant shared—a benefit that’s relatively unique to IDIs. Focus groups, on the other hand, tend to be dominated by a handful of participants, which can skew results. By eliminating the drawbacks of “group think,” IDIs enabled us to garner consumer input that was not affected by the views of other participants.

Other advantages of IDIs include:

  • They allow us to investigate not only perceptions, but also individual thought processes. Because consumer feedback is solicited and given in a one-on-one dialogue, IDIs help shed light on differences that exist within each target segment.
  • By design, IDIs give the interviewee significantly more “floor” time, meaning the consumer will speak for approximately 80 percent of the interview. By contrast, focus groups require more speaking and facilitating by the moderator, which leaves less time overall for consumer responses.
  • IDIs can be adapted to other settings as well, including online and phone interviews.

We value IDIs for all these reasons and more. By taking group bias and external influence out of the equation, we can gather insightful information for our client that may not have surfaced as clearly in a focus group or survey. Probing the hearts and minds of healthcare consumers as individuals enabled us to draw several informed conclusions and build them into our client’s strategic plan. We are confident tomorrow’s consumers will like what they see from this client in the coming years because it will be, by and large, exactly what they said they want and need.

Brand Promises in Healthcare: How to Deliver through Patient Touch Points

Healthcare consumers are more empowered than ever to choose according to their perceptions, and they know it. As health plans get more flexible in letting people pick providers – and online platforms enable word-of-mouth to cover more ground at faster speeds – the competition to be anyone’s provider of choice is fierce.

Which brings me to the importance of patient touch points—those many opportunities for healthcare providers to ‘live their brand’ by enhancing patient experiences. Every interaction counts, whether direct or indirect, clinical or non-clinical.

In a sea of how-to’s and must-do’s surrounding social media and health information technology, it’s important to keep more conventional methods in our strategies as well. With today’s patients empowered to think and act like retail consumers, providers are wise to take pages from consumer-oriented business models to elevate service levels and deliver fully satisfying experiences at the point of care. Think Disney, Zappos and Nordstrom.

Here are three great places to start:

  • Personalize Care. People love it when they feel camaraderie with their care team, and they respond with loyalty when they believe you know them as individuals. Introduce yourself, call patients by name and look them in the eye. Also, be mindful that your presence in the community is making impressions on people even before they become your patients, so find ways to customize every encounter.
  • Be Responsive. It goes without saying that patients are happier when healthcare providers eliminate wait times. Go beyond the obvious. Ask patients about their expectations and respond to their personal needs. Unanticipated opportunities to show extraordinary service go a long way toward improving the patient experience.
  • Keep Patients Informed. Whether it’s about medications or when the doctors are likely to make their rounds, keep patients informed. Explain tests, treatments and procedures; describe the technology you use. Include patients (and if appropriate, their families) in decision-making.

At Dobies Health Marketing, we encourage healthcare marketers to champion the notion that brand is what you do. It is not a logo or tagline—a brand is something that lives in people’s hearts and minds. It’s defined by expectations developed over time through your communications and more importantly, your actions.

In other words, when you make a brand promise related to patient experience, you need to know you can keep it. You also need to continually strengthen the promise by identifying and translating consumer expectations into touch points that matter most to patients.