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.
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.
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.
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
Your healthcare brand is only as strong as the customers you create. The customers who you advance through your marketing beyond what they can do on their own, and beyond the reach of competitors.
One important key to unlocking this value is the power of a BETTER QUESTION. Obvious questions yield answers that are more affirming and validating. Better questions lead to new perspectives, new insights, new ideas. They provide answers that lead you to “wow, I never thought about that in this way before”, ”never imagined they felt this way before”, “never imagined they looked at their world this way before”, “never imagined we could provide value along these lines before.”
Better questions help you to see, think, believe and then give you the power to act in new ways. They’re questions that peel away at the outer layers of an issue to reveal new things about category, company, customer, connections and communication – to yield inspirational new insights and ideas.
Here are three tips to get to more provocative questions, and more inspiring answers:
1. Force new connections. It gets people out of the category and their comfort zone, but provides a frame of reference for them to relate back to.
2. Think short story. Ask a question that must be answered in the form of an elevator-like “short story”.
3. Personal instead of place. People have visions, values and feelings, places (organization’s) don’t. Make your questions personal.
Better questions lead to better brands, better marketing, better customers. Who then create better brands. And so it goes.
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?
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.
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?
The 2011 ANA Masters of Marketing conference brought together more than 1,700 marketers and marketing service firms to share in the year’s official theme — growth. Forrester Blogs has provided a good “cliff notes” version of the conference, which you can find here.
Despite the somewhat cautious tone of many speakers, the CMOs delivering growth are doing so by demonstrating enterprisewide leadership. Three strong examples, very relevant for healthcare marketers, were from:
• Stephen Quinn, VP and CMO at Walmart, who talked about leading like your customer is your boss.
• Esther Lee, senior VP of brand marketing and advertising at AT&T who talked about leadership beyond the marketing department.
• And Jon Iwata, senior VP of marketing and communications at IBM who talked about leading by building corporate character.
Easy to relate these three examples back to the need for an expanded enterprisewide leadership role for the healthcare CMO…
• Customer as boss. Disruptive technologies (access to information, influencers, communities, grades, reviews, wait times…), new business models, alternative care options, etc, translate to an empowered customer, not a captive patient.
• Leadership beyond marketing. Consider how much brand value is enhanced or destroyed based on the customer experience, pre-during-post care, across the organization’s many access points. This evolves the role of marketing to impact brand-led culture, experience design and operationalization.
• Leading by building corporate character. What’s your bigger envisioned place in the world, beyond that of (obvious) community health provider. The “core energizing idea” that resonates with, inspires and aligns employees and customers. As CMO, help to create the platform that continuously works to move both customer and organization forward in more meaningful ways.
The more energy people sense from a brand, the greater its attraction and opportunity to create future value.
In this case, the brand is Reading Hospital and Medical Center’s Women’s Health Services. And it’s one of those rare times I’m writing about Trajectory client work.
Because Reading’s changing the game and creating new value for women. Who in turn, are carrying this healthcare brand forward and creating more value for the organization.
Reading’s created a comprehensive suite of Women’s Health Services for women at every stage of their lives. And combined with their highly personalized (uniquely branded) method of care – has created excitement inside and outside, changed attitudes and moved the needle on patient referrals and volume.
Marketing has played an important supporting role. It’s voice is personal, sophisticated, respectful and reassuring. Borne out of a lot of rich conversation with care givers and target prospects. It also creates value in and of itself, by being collaborative, enabling and unifying through its multi-channel delivery.
Congrats to Reading Women’s Health Services. They’ve really taken the lead in changing the game, and everyone’s winning.
Healthcare marketer insight: inspiration from Hermes CEO