Nov

Eight questions to a stronger healthcare brand portfolio

You can’t excel across all service lines. You certainly can’t support them all. But despite this (forgetting all the politics and compromising), internal teams keep churning out new branded services.

Here are eight questions that will start your organization on its way to building a stronger portfolio that builds maximum relationship value for your audiences and maximum financial value for your organization:

1. Strategic Fit. Does the portfolio help achieve and support your longer-term strategic priorities?
2. Support Priority Businesses. Does it support the businesses that contribute to driving volume and reputation?
3. Brand Value. Does the portfolio reinforce and help build brand equity?
4. Brand Synergy. Is there a clear relationship between the brands?
5. Customer Value. Does the portfolio meet the needs of your customers?
6. Customer Opportunity. Do your brands invite the customer relationships you want?
7. Other Stakeholders. Does the portfolio meet their needs; and not sacrifice business and brand priorities?
8. The Organization. Do the brands work together to build value back to the organization?

Oct

How fit is your healthcare brand?

I just facilitated a brand workshop with different cross-functional teams of a healthcare system. It was a chance to get them excited about, and aligned around, an upcoming organization-wide initiative.

At the end of the session, we circled back to a Top 10 Brand Fitness checklist – which I thought I’d share here. FYI, we handed out this checklist on the back of a “faux” new business card. At the end of each day over the next few weeks, we asked participants to refer back to the checklist – to keep them thinking about brand and actively engaged in their organization’s upcoming initiative. Here’s the list:

1. Driving Ambition. Is your organization clear on what it wants its brand to become; and what it ultimately hopes to accomplish for communities and patients?

2. Strategy & Alignment. Does your brand influence the total operation of your organization to ensure consistent brand behavior in your market and consistent brand experiences for communities and patients? Does the brand align with business strategy, as well as organizational structure, systems and cultural style?

3. Brand Positioning. Does your organization clearly and simply state how it wants to be perceived among communities and patients in a way that stands out from the crowd, that goes beyond healthcare and service lines to what really matters to people?

4. Customer Reflection. Does the brand have personal relevance to your target customers? Does it build an image and reputation, drive preference and behavior. Is anyone in the organization listening/watching for cues to deliver more value for customers as they interact with you?

5. Loyalty Beyond Satisfaction. Many people wrongly assume they’re essentially the same thing. But satisfaction relates to the results of a process, while loyalty is a much longer-term proposition relating to a relationship. In an increasingly competitive marketplace where consumers have more choices, recommendations from family and friends carry a lot of weight and loyalists have a much bigger voice than those who are merely satisfied.

6. Brand Delivery. Is your brand positioning delivered through every action and form of communication that the organization has at its disposal; does every aspect of the corporate or product “experience”deliver the brand in tangible and intangible ways?

7. Cut-Through Noise. Does your healthcare brand cut-through the noise of your market and competitors, to engage and retain your best customers?

8. Co-Creation. Do you open up your healthcare brand to community and patient participation, to allow customers and your organization to continue to thrive?

9. Leadership Commitment. Do senior leadership actions reflect your brand promises and positioning?

10. Internal Commitment & Demonstration. Is internal brand-building on the organization’s agenda; across all facilities and service lines? Are there programs in place to help you actively deliver on your brand, or is brand building reduced to a manual?

Oct

Kimberly Clark: a health brand drastically changing its marketing approach

Placing your customer at the center of everything you do.

Good interview – Kimberly-Clark: Breaking the Marketing Mold – by Brandon Gutman which appeared in Forbes with Andrew Meurer, VP of adult, feminine and senior care for Kimberly-Clark. Andrew talks about the U by Kotex campaign, and that in order to successfully “Break the Cycle” of everything in feminine care, K-C needed to drastically change its entire marketing approach.

But the driver to K-C’s ability to break the marketing mold – “placing the consumer at the center of everything we do to ensure we understand what consumers need and then quickly translate that understanding into meaningful innovations, marketing programs and indispensable brands.”

Pretty simple really. If you’re willing to do the hard work to first understand what your customers are ultimately trying to achieve.

Sep

The real power of social media in healthcare, and beyond

Scott Johnson, author of Scott’s Diabetes Journal and Scott’s Diabetes Blog, recently wrote a blog post titled A Patient’s Perspective On Social Media (see below). I read it on Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media site, and it referenced the importance of Mayo’s Center for Social Media.

It’s a very heartfelt post about the value of social media, in the context of living with type 1 diabetes. But more than that, it speaks to the real power of social media. The power to truly engage and inspire. To bring people together around their passions, concerns and causes. To motivate participation and collaboration. And in this case, the power to help heal.

Regardless of where you compete across the health continuum – whether healthcare, medical devices, life sciences or personal care – you have the ability to enrich the lives of your customers by being the conduit for their conversations. To create marketing platforms that provide value, not noise. That focus on their needs versus your messages. That build relationships where all parties benefit.

Here’s his post. Would appreciate you sharing your thoughts.

Social media gives me access to a world of people living with type 1 diabetes, just like me. Any hour of the day or night I can tune in to discussions on Twitter or Facebook, I can read thousands of blog posts written by people from all walks of life, all living with type 1 diabetes, and I can find YouTube videos that make me laugh and cry. I can find connections. I can find people who understand exactly what I’m going through. These people and their stories become an emotional lifeline. Suddenly I don’t feel so alone or isolated. In fact I often feel inspired and empowered by what I’ve seen.

Social media has helped me be a healthier person by showing me real-life examples of others living with diabetes. Unfiltered and unafraid, these people are sharing their stories. I hear first hand about situations they have experienced, and I can share in their successes and challenges.

…

The Mayo Clinic recently launched a Social Media Center to teach and train other health care organizations on using social media. Beyond just setting an example for organizations to follow, the Mayo Clinic is encouraging and teaching these organizations to jump in with both feet.

Instead of fearing and ignoring the Internet, the Mayo Clinic embraces the communication that social media enables. That is exactly what we want. We want communication, a chance to share our story, and a channel to provide feedback on what works and what doesn’t. We want to get to know the people behind the corporate curtain. We want to learn more about the dedicated people working to help us live better. We want to know that we are not alone out here.

As a patient living with chronic illness, social media has become a part of my health care regime, and something I’ve come to need as part of my survival toolkit.

I am excited to see that The Mayo Clinic has recognized the importance of social media as a means to connect with and provide additional support to patients. I believe the center will be wildly successful, and I hope to see other healthcare organizations make use of this resource to get involved with social media the right way.

Thanks Scott.

Sep

Insights for health brand marketers: IBM’s Global CEO Study

Here are two major findings and associated recommendations that are relevant to health brand marketers – based on 1500 face-to-face conversations with CEO’s, general managers, and senior public sector leaders worldwide – representing different sizes of organizations in 60 countries and 33 industries:

Creativity is the most important leadership quality. Leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, encourage others to drop outdated approaches, invite disruptive innovation, find new ideas, and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.

The most successful organizations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes. Globalization, combined with dramatic increases in the availability of information, has exponentially expanded customers’ options. CEOs said that ongoing engagement and co-creation with customers produce differentiation. They consider the information explosion to be their greatest opportunity in developing deep customer insights, and have made customer intimacy their number-one priority.

Recommendations (partial list from study)

a. Creativity

Reach beyond silos. Pull creative elements of your organization out of compartments and integrate them into the mainstream. Proactively exchange knowledge and cooperate with internal and external stakeholders, eliminating every communication barrier to improve your ability to handle the unknown.

Exemplify breakthrough thinking. Practice and encourage experimentation at all levels of the business. Forge ahead with rule-breaking innovation that sets your organization apart from the crowd. Study and question what others do — scour technology and customer trends. Build scenarios to plan responses to a range of possible futures.

Act despite uncertainty. Fight the natural urge to wait for clarity and stability; taking calculated risks — while others hesitate — can pay off. Find a creative way to turn complexity into an advantage. Rely on deeply felt values and a well-defined vision to provide the confidence and conviction to exploit narrow windows of opportunity.

Borrow from other industries’ successes. Learn from and be inspired by creative achievements from outside your industry. Regularly discuss case examples from other industries in your management team meetings. Stay abreast of customer and technology trends that are transforming other sectors and consider how you could apply them.

Use a wide range of communication approaches. Supplement top-down organizational communication with less formal, more innovative channels. Accept that for customers and employees alike, blogs, Internet presence, instant messaging and social networking are more credible — and often faster — than traditional top-down communication.

b. Customer Value/Co-Creation

Establish an unprecedented level of focus. Starting with the CEO, every employee in the organization must be hyper-focused on customers. Make customer value your number one value. Ensure every employee is responsible for and assessed annually on a customer satisfaction or customer value metric.

Heighten customer exposure. Make it easy for customers to connect with the right person in your organization. Every employee must have the information needed to engage with customers appropriately and effectively. All employees must understand the link between the work they do and the value it brings to customers.

Measure what customers value. Genuinely know what motivates current and potential customers to choose your product or service. Surpass today’s standards to proactively verify that you are providing what customers want and delivering it in ways that matter to them. Understand your customers’ business goals and help them succeed.

Make customers part of your team. Enhance customer relationships by finding new ways to communicate, new roles they can play, new questions to ask them, new ways you can listen, new ways to evaluate their feedback and leverage what you learn. Make — and deliver on — customer commitments.

Solicit customer wants. Engender loyalty by directly involving customers in defining emerging needs. Constantly tune offerings to their rapidly changing preferences. Make sure you are providing what customers want tomorrow, instead of what they wanted yesterday.

Co-innovate and interact with customers in new ways. Collaborate across different channels to create new products and services. Maintain a running dialogue that includes face-to-face and social networking interaction. Involve customers before and beyond the sale, including care and service.

The full study can be found here.

Sep

Huggies: enriching customer health one innovation at a time

Kimberly-Clark is working with their core customer, and the fastest-growing sector of entrepreneurs – women – by investing in their incubating innovation ideas.

Twelve entrepreneurs, chosen from 400 submissions, now make up the first class of Huggies “MomInspired” grant recipients, receiving $15,000 each to fund their “unique baby or childcare product ideas that address unmet parenting needs and make life easier for moms and dads.”

According to Steve Paljieg, Senior Director, Corporate Innovation for KC "our most important consumer is mom, and we felt the launch of Huggies MomInspired delivered on the brand's mission of providing simple solutions to help parents enjoy each and every day (beyond diapers or hygiene) and also encourage the business success of moms by giving them access to educational and financial resources."

Here why this program creates new value for both brand and customer:

– it delivers on the brand mission – helps create a bigger brand idea (and potentially new revenue streams) beyond diapers and hygiene – creates a more meaningful kind of brand-customer relationship beyond Huggies' core business – connects women (and men) together, through Huggies, around their most important agendas – engages and ignites pride on the part of those who work on the Huggies brand – generates great PR and positive word-of-mouth for Huggies and KC; and – ultimately builds loyalty and (presumedly) more Huggies sales

Sep

Adding a little “action” beyond your healthcare messaging

We message about our devices, our hospitals, our doctors, our service lines, our technology and our achievements. Campaigning on our behalf.

But mere selling messages alone no longer cut it for your customers. The information they need and want has changed. The basis for their decision-making has changed. No longer passive followers, they yearn for marketing that matters – to them.

To make your proposal more appealing, consider that your actions speak louder than your words. Focusing less on your brands and more on enriching the lives of your customers.

Help them achieve what they can’t on their own. Help them make better and more informed decisions by providing them with the basket of information and resources – articles, videos, blogs, testimonials, interactions, communities, contributions – they’re actively seeking out as part of their decision-making process.

Help them understand that you’re in business to help them, and not to sell them on your agenda. Here are five examples that I like:

1. Patients Like Me: where patients find others just like them, share their treatment experiences, and learn from others just like them.
2. Being Girl: where young women get all the information, advice and tips they need about being teenage girls.
3. Walgreen’s Take Care Clinics: delivering ease of access and transparent pricing through convenient-care clinics inside drugstores.
4. Huggies MomInspired Grant Program: awarding up to $15000 to women to further the development of innovative products that make life easier for parents so that they can better enjoy everyday moments with their children.
5. Humana’s CrumpleItUp: an innovation effort focused on coming up with creative ways to help people be healthy while having fun.

Sep

When were you last one-on-one with your health brand customer?

Are you outsourcing your marketing eyes?

The only real sustainable goal for your business is to enrich your customers lives, not to sell them more x or y. But if you don’t have any real context for understanding their lives, how can you really do this?

The impetus for this post is a new Trajectory client. The Brand Manager responsible for the portfolio of brands we were just assigned had spent three days in an important market at the local fair. Not just any fair, but a “hugely” important annual event drawing a crowd of thousands.

For three days, ten hours a day, he spoke with (actually mostly listened to) prospective and current customers. The topic of conversation wasn’t so much about his products. Rather, the focus was on these people lives – their challenges and their priorities. He said he heard things he never heard before. Learned how they make their decisions. Learned how these products fit into their lives or better could in the future.

This was a good lesson for why you shouldn’t outsource your eyes. There’s simply no substitute for the clarity that comes from seeing things yourself, and for the insights gained from face-to-face conversation. In the end, it’s the only way you can really create superior value for your health brand customers.

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category / marketing

Eight questions to a stronger healthcare brand portfolio

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How fit is your healthcare brand?

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Kimberly Clark: a health brand drastically changing its marketing approach

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Huggies: enriching customer health one innovation at a time

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Adding a little “action” beyond your healthcare messaging

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When were you last one-on-one with your health brand customer?

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