Jan

Healthcare marketer tip: better questions for better branding and marketing

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.

Jan

Healthcare marketing: it’s time to evolve

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?

Dec

Healthcare marketing without borders

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.

Dec

From accountable care to accountable healthcare marketing?

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?

Dec

Fresh views for healthcare marketers: Masters of Marketing conference

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.

Nov

New healthcare brand energy: Reading Women’s Health Services

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.

Nov

Good news for healthcare marketers about making life better

How to make a brand stand out from the crowd? Make people’s lives better and more meaningful.

This is the global demand from consumers, in fact, 50,000 of them across 14 countries. Their views were measured by media consultancy Havas Media in their Meaningful Brands survey.

Quite surprisingly (at least for me), the study found that 70% of brands could disappear entirely without consumers noticing and that only 20% of the brands they interact with have a positive impact on their lives.

What’s the trick to making a brand meaningful and playing a larger role in our lives? Focus on outcomes, not outputs. The criteria, according to Havas Media Labs director, are simple: “Did this brand actually impact your life in a tangible, lasting, and positive way? Did it improve your personal outcomes? Did it improve your community outcomes? Did it pollute the environment?

Nike+ is a good example. “Instead of putting up another campaign of billboards with celebrities saying ‘Buy our shoes, they’ll turn you into a master runner,’ Nike+ actually helps makes you a better runner. That’s a constructive way to build a meaningful brand.”

Healthcare and well-being brands are perfectly suited to deliver on this expectation. The ability to help people become fitter, wiser, smarter, achieve what they can’t on their own is right up your alley.

Anything less is really inexcusable.

Nov

New insights for healthcare marketers: IBM Global CMO Study

Big insights and ideas tend to come from outside our own categories. To this point, here are some important ideas from more than 1,700 CMO’s across 19 industries and 64 countries. They were the participants in IBM’s Global CMO Study, focused on the forces changing business and markets today.

Summary of findings include:

• Four biggest challenges/game-changers were: the data explosion, social media, proliferation of channels and devices, and shifting consumer demographics. The most proactive CMOs are trying to understand individuals as well as markets. Customer intimacy is crucial. In fact, in IBM’s last CEO study, getting closer to customers was one of three prerequisites for success in the twenty-first century.

• Advent of social media is challenging older, mass-marketing assumptions, skill sets and approaches. CMOs everywhere are aware of the distance they have to cover. The most proactive CMOs are mining new digital data sources to discover what individual customers and citizens want.

• CMOs in the most successful enterprises are focusing on relationships, not just transactions. They’re using data to stimulate interest in their organizations’ offerings and form bonds with customers to a much greater extent than their peers in less successful enterprises.

• CMO outperformers are committed to developing a clear “corporate character.” They recognize that what a business believes and how it subsequently behaves are as important as what it sells. And they make it their job to help management and employees exemplify the company’s values and purpose.

• Most CMOs are struggling in one vital aspect — return on investment (ROI). Nearly two-thirds of them think return on marketing investment will be the primary measure of their effectiveness by 2015. But proving that value is difficult. Even among the most successful enterprises, half of all CMOs feel insufficiently prepared to provide hard numbers.

Where next?

In the course of CMO conversations, an overwhelming consensus emerged. The vast majority believe there are three key areas for improvement:

Deliver value to empowered customers
The digital revolution has forever changed the balance of power between customer and organization. If CMOs are to understand and provide value to empowered customers and citizens, they will have to concentrate on getting to know individuals as well as markets and better grasp how individual customers behave.

Foster lasting connections
To effectively cultivate meaningful customer relationships, CMOs will have to connect with them in ways their customers perceive as valuable. This entails engaging them throughout the entire customer lifecycle, building online and offline communities of interest and collaborating with the rest of the C-suite to fuse the internal and external faces of the enterprise.

Capture value, measure results
Lastly, CMOs will have to quantify and analyze the financial results of their initiatives and communicate them to the entire organization to enhance their function’s credibility and effectiveness. They’ll also have to inject new skills into the marketing function by expanding the digital, analytical and financial capabilities of existing employees and by hiring staff or by partnering with specialists to fill the gaps.

Here’s the link to study.