Healthcare marketers: does your brand portfolio deliver ROI?
Delivering ROI from your healthcare brand portfolio
Given the squeeze on hospital finances, healthcare systems and hospitals need to find efficiencies wherever they can. Certainly, this includes scrutiny of what are too often deemed discretionary marketing budgets.
One area of review that might yield big savings (at the same time building CFO affection) is for healthcare marketers to evaluate the health and wellbeing of their brand portfolios. Commonly referred to as brand architecture.
What is brand architecture?
Brand architecture is the way an organization publicly expresses the relationship between the parent or corporate brand and its divisions, lines of business, products, services, and subsidiaries. It is one of the primary means of bringing a brand strategy to life.
Basically, there are three types of Brand Architecture models, and then a wide variety of hybrids that can be tailored to the unique circumstances of any company.
Brand architecture decision-making
How do you determine if you’re spending efficiently and strategically behind your portfolio of hospital, facility, center of excellence and service line brands? And how do your know if your brand portfolio has the right mix of offerings to support your business strategy?
The 7 Portfolio “P”s
Trajectory is often involved in evaluating our client’s brand architecture models as part of our brand strategy and rebranding engagements. So we created a tool that we call “The 7 Portfolio P’s.” Presented in summary fashion here, this brand architecture template provides a good starting point for evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of your health system or hospital brand portfolio.
1. Purpose
Successful brand architectures have a strong business rationale behind them. So begin by evaluating weather each of your brands reflect your organization’s vision and long-term business goals. Then evaluate the equity in your existing corporate, facility and product/service brands.
2. Perspective
What story is the brand portfolio telling from an audience perspective? Beyond prospective patients who need to understand the depth and breadth of your offerings, also consider employees, business partners and other stakeholder audiences.
3. Place
Do each of the brands in the portfolio have a clearly defined role? Are relationships clear among all the brands so that they’re easy to shop? Also consider whether there is sufficient separation and synergy between them.
4. Potential
How do your different brands contribute to building strategic advantage, and current/future growth and profitability? Do you sufficiently cover the market given the needs of your priority services and key audiences? And does the brand portfolio allow for expansion to new geography and service lines?
5. Performance
Do you sufficiently cover the market given the needs of your priority services and key audiences?
6. Potency
Does market attractiveness (size and potential growth) merit investment in new brands?
7. Problems
For those brands that don’t meet these criteria, what is your plan for phasing them out? You also might be experiencing situations that merit revisiting your brand architecture, e.g.
- a merger or acquisition
- too many brands and offerings competing for attention and marketing investment dollars
- corporate brand and product/service brands having the same name and being hard to distinguish
- brands that are losing relevance with consumers
- brand meaning being diluted or stretched beyond credibility and effectiveness
- new programs, elements or features asking to be treated as brands
Brand architecture summary
Your reality as a healthcare marketer is that you’re likely having to do more with less. Which means that you can’t afford to waste your precious marketing resources against a brand portfolio that’s not yielding a fair return. Similar to periodically evaluating your financial portfolio to ensure that you’re protecting your wealth now and into the future, you need to do the same with your brand portfolio.