Five things your healthcare branding must do
We often place too much value in the power of sound bites, images and marketing activities, but rarely enough on brand strategy. Yet brand is arguably your organization’s most important asset. One that should be the catalyst for generating growth and creating economic value. Which means you need to get your healthcare branding right. All of the words, images, ideas, associations and experiences that come together to build perception, reputation, trust and loyalty.
As patients are now responsible for an increasing portion of their finances related to healthcare, and as they actively shop their healthcare in a market that continues to include new players – physician groups, hospitals and health systems must work even harder to attract and retain today’s discerning patient. This is where smart, distinguishing and sustainable healthcare branding comes into play.
Every organization has a brand whether it is intentionally created or not. So, best to drive the bus rather than go along for the drive. Here are five healthcare branding tips to help healthcare marketers create the strong brands their organizations need and deserve.
1. Align With Business Strategy
As the face of your business, your healthcare branding needs to align with current and going-forward business strategy. Which means that your brand is shaped starting with your strategic plan, and then engineered through daily brand management across corporate, hospitals, service lines, outpatient, etc. If you consider the demand side of your organization’s business model (i.e. the outputs of its activities) – from value proposition, to target customers, channels, customer relationships and revenue streams – your healthcare branding should reflect how your organization uniquely creates, delivers and captures value.
2. Create Emotional Bonds Through Every Interaction
Branding is a verb. Which means your healthcare branding is a continuous and additive process. Every interaction is an opportunity to add value and strengthen your emotional connections with communities and patients. Here’s a really simple way to say it – bake your brand into every bit of your business. You can use the business model example above as a starting point. With this as a guide, you can then map every single touchpoint of the patient journey. Goal is to put your unique and genuine fingerprint on every interaction.
3. Create Connections From The Inside Out
A strong brand brings employees together to improve efficiencies, work towards common goals and align around larger purpose. Specific to healthcare, employee engagement is also crucial to being able to build a culture of service excellence – where brand experience is largely shaped by staff, nurses and professionals on the front lines who interact daily with customers and must meet their rising expectations. Together, these internal audiences should create a potent team of brand ambassadors who “live” the organization’s brands and build momentum from the inside out.
4. Keep It Authentic
Consumers today, led by digitally native Millennials, expect more from brands. They increasingly require an authentic experience across all the online and offline ways they interact with an organization. Across numerous surveys, Millennials report that the number one way that brands can engage them is to have an “authentic purpose.” Brands from the likes of MasterCard to Amazon to Red Bull are pioneers for authenticity in branding and marketing, and healthcare must follow suit as expectations know no category boundaries. Today, no brand becomes great unless it is totally clear about who it is, why it is and how it approaches the market.
5. Simplicity Is Key
This trend is all-encompassing. From positioning to portfolio to messaging, to logo design and graphics, to website and overall customer experience, smart brands are looking towards subtraction rather than addition to add value. Today’s noisy, technologically-driven lifestyle calls for helping consumers cope by delivering simplicity across the experiences they deliver.
At the end of the day, successful healthcare branding answers three questions – Who, What and How. On the one hand, seems rather simple. But what’s hard is the focus, discipline and unwavering belief necessary to pull it off across the range of elements that comprise your healthcare branding and shape the consumer experience.
Trajectory has specialized in driving brand and business for hospitals and health systems since 1999. If you want to talk about how to improve your healthcare branding, reach out.