category / healthcare

Feb
22

Healthcare re-branding: think more broadly about communication

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Consider every single way your healthcare organization communicates its ideas.

We’re in the midst of rebranding a healthcare system. Fundamental to the success of this effort are a few ideas that first must be conveyed and demonstrated to internal audiences. While many months away from launch, we’re already starting to capture all of the different ways the organization communicates its ideas – both top down and across all departments, e.g. medical, finance, nursing, operations, human resources, quality, IT, marketing, service lines, strategic planning, etc.

We’re way out in front with our launch planning because we have so many more communications avenues available beyond what many organizations typically consider. Of course, there are the usual tried and true mass channels. And the ones we pay for. But think more broadly.

Consider each of your departments within the organization and how they get your story, and theirs, out to the world. Begin by highjacking a room. And then start covering the walls. Capture on stickies all of the different ways you communicate, both formal and informal – in meetings, speeches, committees, task forces, retreats, phone calls, texts, reception areas, break rooms, etc. Invite people across every single department to participate.

Branding is ultimately about delivering on the promise of your vision in everything you do. This organization-wide exercise is a valuable means to creating the alignment you need to get there.

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Feb
16

Healthcare re-branding: 5 internal energizing must-do’s

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When it comes to your healthcare re-branding, it’s important that leadership exhibit the same behaviors that your communities and patients now expect from your brands: actions speak louder than words.

For any re-brand to be truly successful (measured in both relationship and financial terms), your internal audience needs to buy in to the story of your brand. Too often, brand vision, values and promises are rooted among senior managers, but don’t permeate the rest of the organization. What’s required is more articulation, more communications and more demonstration of your branding to your entire internal audience.

Here are five important requisites for success:

1. Paint a compelling, inspiring and tangible picture for the future that will energize the organization and inspire high levels of optimism, commitment, engagement and performance.

2. Introduce a branding strategy that will bind the organization together, while supporting individual hospital and service line identities and answering the question, “What do we (all of us and each of us) stand for?”

3. Prepare the Senior Team, Directors, Managers and Physician Leaders to enthusiastically and effectively champion to all employees your vision for the future, your strategy and your brand positioning.

4. Establish an on-going, two-way communication process to check progress, communicate successes, solve implementation problems and sustain enthusiasm.

5. Utilize all available formal communication vehicles to inform, inspire and engage internal audiences.

At the end of the day, your most effective brand guidelines – for building brand value – are people. They, not manuals, are the only way to truly maximize your healthcare organization’s brand energy.

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Feb
13

Healthcare marketer insight: inspiration from Hermes CEO

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Hermes is seemingly, worlds away from healthcare.

But here’s a great interview with Robert Chavez, CEO of Hermes US, talking about why culture and employee engagement, a very personal customer experience and an online/digital presence are key to driving his business and brand objectives.

Could easily be an interview with a healthcare senior leader given the issues their organizations are facing today.

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Feb
08

Healthcare marketing: getting outside your box

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Inspiration should come from many different places. Case in point being: Nestle’s New Weight Loss Program Pairs Pets With Their Owners.

Nestle’ launched this unique initiative in the US to help pet owners and their furry friends shed excess pounds together. The company’s pet and people weight management experts have teamed up to give owners of overweight pets an online program to help both them and their animals lose weight.

Is this initiative relevant to your healthcare marketing efforts? Absolutely. You just need to be open to looking at everything fresh.

Consider the power of friends (though not the furry kind) to…

– motivate each other and pursue progress together, which might lead to a “2 together” program
– influence each other, which could lead to a “BFF assist network”
– impact each other’s health and well-being, which could lead to a “power of two” program

Inspired by Nestle’s new program, we’re reminded of the powerful link between friendship and health, and therefore, a powerful marketing opportunity to be leveraged.

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Feb
03

The true power of your healthcare brand

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Healthcare Brands

Everything starts with the desire to be more than you are today. Holds true for your healthcare organization. And your customer’s.

– You want to be a stronger brand. They want to be stronger individuals.

– You want to be more skilled in what you deliver. They want to be able to achieve more than they can on their own.

– You want to deliver a better experience. They want to feel like they’re really cared for.

– You want to be a better employer. They want to be a better parent, sister, brother, individual.

– You want your voice to be heard beyond others. So do they.

Think more deeply about your opportunity. And theirs. The intersection is where magic can happen.

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Jan
29

Maximizing your healthcare system or hospital brand

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Your brand is the platform through which your communities and patients, and in turn, your healthcare system or hospital brand, grow stronger. 

We presented to the Board of a healthcare system client last week. We’re rebranding the organization and were reporting on our Discovery and initial Strategy direction.

To provide context for our presentation we opened with a few slides titled “Great Brands.” This cross-functional senior team, comprised of employees and community members, don’t spend much time thinking about the “b” word, so we wanted to make sure we were all on the same page from the outset of our session.

They found the slides extremely revealing as they challenged their beliefs about brands. As a result, it widened their lens and provided a much richer (and rewarding) picture of their opportunity. Expanding on the few opening slides…

Great Brands bridge brand strategy and business strategy. Using brand to differentiate organizations, products and services to maximize their value and potential – by managing all of the tangibles and intangibles that surround these offerings – successfully achieved when championed by the CEO, embraced by leadership and lived by every stakeholder.

Great Brands create relationship and financial value inside and outside the organization. They create relationship value internally by impacting recruitment and retention, staff connection and commitment, pride in the organization and confidence in the future. Externally, they enhance community health status, influence consumer choice and build loyalty, create leverage by attracting partners, enhancing relationships and allowing the organization to seize new opportunities.

They create financial value internally by optimizing marketing/spend resources, enhancing future cash flows and bond rating and promoting coherent and efficient brand management. Externally, brands influence service volumes, donor attraction and contribution, capital fundraising and higher revenue procedures.

Great Brands are built on a foundation wider and deeper than brand positioning. They are nurtured with connecting Stories, shaped by shared Values, guided by Promises, expressed by way of their Positioning and Personality, and succintly captured through their Tagline.

Great Brands know that actions speak louder than words.  To talk only of their “campaigns” diminishes their opportunity to help communities, patients and ultimately the organization itself grow stronger.  An easy example is Nike + iPod which gives you feedback while you record your run or workout and then lets you track your progress.

In short, great brands provide the energy that drive your communities, patients and organizations forward.

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Jan
25

Healthcare marketer insight: rise of the e-patient

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Good presentation for healthcare marketers from Pew Internet Project Director Lee Rainie on understanding social networking and online health information seeking. You can view the presentation here.

Key takeaways:

• new social operating system: networked individualism

• impacts include: “second opinions, allies and complements for care delivery, providers assessed and judged in public ways”

• empowered and engaged: 61% getting health info on line, 29% contributing, 19% consult rankings/reviews of providers and hospitals

• relevancy of mobile: 63% of adults, 50% have apps on phone, 29% have mobile health apps

• searching for health: 48% for others, 36% for self

• affecting decisions: 60% say information found online affected decision about how to treat, 56% say it changed overall approach to maintaining their health, 53% say it lead to ask doctor new questions, 49% say it changed the way they think about diet, exercise, stress management, 38% say it affected decision to see a doctor

• three levels of physicians as “nodes” in e-patient communities: act as sentries, act as trusted/wise companion, act as helpful producers/enablers

• at the end of the day: 41% say they’ve been helped via online medical advice or information, 3% say they’ve been harmed

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Jan
05

Healthcare marketing: it’s time to evolve

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Can we evolve healthcare marketing? Yes we can.

This was the topic of a recent talk of mine, which included five reinforcing themes.  As a foundation for these themes, it was agreed that whatever form of marketing you undertake, it needs to be:

• Grounded in truth: genuine to an organization’s story, values and ambition
• Relevant to audiences: in ways that are real and genuine
• Deliverable based on promises: able to be reinforced through the patient experience (which means deliverable across the organization)

The five themes included:

1. Wider Angle Lens: seeking out new inspiration and insight by looking in new places and making new connections. Understanding what truly drives and moves your audiences, and those who influence them. Identifying the customer strengths you enable, customer weaknesses you lessen, customer opportunities you can create and customer threats you can remove (yes…this is a SWOT analysis, but from your customer’s pov).

2. Creating New Brand Energy: thinking more holistically about how your brand can serve as the platform to move customers, and therefore your brand, forward. Thinking beyond transactions to creating relationships. Creating win-wins such that your organization and customers both grow stronger.

3. New Marketing Energy: creating marketing that has utility. Beyond communications to marketing that enables, involves and unifies. Consider the metaphor of a gear, where your organization’s teeth engage those of the customer and move them to a better place. Helping them do what they can’t on their own, beyond the reach of your competitors.

4.  Mass Customization: Leverage the unique strengths of some channels and mitigate the weaknesses of others. Use traditional to reach the masses (though can also target to discrete target segments), and digital/social to heighten relevance and utility to specific target populations. If Burger King let’s you have it your way, shouldn’t healthcare?

5. Synchronous Actions: Can the brand promises you make truly be delivered across the organization? Are all internal audiences (docs, nurses, staff, volunteers) aligned around a brand-led culture and able to deliver your uniquely branded experience? Be aware that every action sparks an equal reaction which either enhances or detracts from your desired perception. There’s a great native American saying – “it takes a thousand voices to tell a single story.”

Thoughts about this list? Others you’d add?

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Dec
18

Healthcare marketing without borders

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Are brand and marketing at the center of your healthcare organization’s attention? In this extraordinarily competitive and challenging healthcare environment, I’d suggest they should be.

This really came to light for me while meeting with a prospective client. Regardless of which way you looked out from the tenth floor of their offices, you’re in view of a competing healthcare provider. But beyond competition, there are a few other forces at play that lead to re-thinking the traditional siloed approach to marketing:

• Unlike other industries and organizations where employees are tightly aligned around their corporate brands, e.g. Whole Foods, Google, Zappos, to name just a few, healthcare brand and marketing delivery are often subject to the performance of dispersed, individual (often unemployed) care providers.

• Patient service revenues continue on the path of being generated outside the inpatient side of the business, calling for stronger operational integration and communication.

• The customer experience, so important to fostering longer-term relationships and enhancing overall brand value, is rarely informed and shaped by “marketing.”

• Customers are now co-steering your fate. They’ve evolved from passive receiver to active investigator and empowered influencer. They can access and interface with the organization through numerous channels. And they have new alternatives to traditional providers in terms of new upstarts, intermediaries, resources – changing the rules and redefining consumer value.

Given these forces, I’d suggest that brand and marketing management need to become a team sport. An organization-wide effort where brand and consumer are at the heart of business strategy. Where all are enabled and compelled to foster relationships (internally and between organization and community) and grow total enterprise value. And the marketing department just happens to be the hub of this collective effort. So…

• Tear down the walls (to paraphrase one of our President’s) to move brand and marketing to the center of the organization, and the CMO to the proverbial “table” alongside the other “O”s (Chief Operating, Financial, Nursing, Medical, HR, Quality…).

• Lead with brand as an organizing principle for the organization and as a basis for guiding business forward, beyond simply a brand-building communications function detached from strategy.

• Consider a broader definition of marketing to include the relationship-making or breaking patient experience. So regardless of what door someone enters your healthcare system, there are points of consistency in brand delivery.

• Work as a cross-functional team, with marketing as the linchpin, to create continuous value for the consumer. Value that is beyond marketing communication to marketing that involves, enables, and unifies.

• Align internal audiences around a common purpose (through the lens of your brand), so they make your mission their own.

Just some ideas to think about as you peer out your own “tenth floor” window. Wherever that might be.

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Dec
05

From accountable care to accountable healthcare marketing?

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How would your efforts measure up to accountable healthcare marketing.

It would be similar to that of accountable care organizations (ACO’s). Ensuring that all of the parts work well together, and that better-organized is better for the patient, along with financial penalties or rewards that accrue to those organizations producing better outcomes.

In the case of accountable healthcare marketing, however, we’d be “accountable” to patients for the value of our marketing. Accountable for delivering “marketing that matters.”

Marketing that understands and responds to what your patients are really hungry for. That moves them forward by creating more (and distinctive) value and playing a more meaningful role in their lives – delivering personal growth, solutions to current problems and hope and optimism about the future. Marketing that is beyond exposure and attention, to delighting, inspiring, empowering and fulfilling.

Similar to ACO’s, accountable healthcare marketing would also be a two-way street. As you move communities and patients forward via your brand as a platform for their growth, they carry your brand forward and take your business to the next level. Today and into the future. This is your financial reward for producing better outcomes.

Here are three principles to start you on your way:

1) create marketing that in and of itself, through deeds rather than words, adds value to the lives of your communities and patients;

2) enables them, through you, to say something about themselves by reflecting their lifestyle or an attribute they want to express; and

3) unifies them, by giving them a way to act together and achieve something bigger than themselves.

Any thoughts you’d like to share?

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