tag archives / eric brody

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
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
18

Health brands’ “ideal-driven” opportunity

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Improving lives = customer and brand energy = brand success.

Great article on mediapost.com – Fastest-Growing Brands Are Ideal-Driven. It recaps the research conducted by Millward Brown and Jim Stengel, former global marketing officer of P&G.

It seems that the common denominator across the 50 brands showing the fastest growth both in depth of customer relationships and financial value between 2000 and 2010 is that they’ve been built on an ideal of improving lives in some way.

By “ideal, they’re referring to a “higher-order” purpose or benefit that the company/brand seeks to contribute to the world, with this purpose being the central driver and determinant of all of its strategies, decisions and actions.

Health and well-being brands that made the top 50 list include:
• Dove (personal care)
• Innocent (food and beverages)
• L’Occitane (personal care)
• Method (household cleaners and personal care)
• Natura (personal care)
• Pampers (baby care)
• Sensodyne (oral care)
• Seventh Generation (household cleaners and personal care)
• Stonyfield Farm (organic dairy products)

Health brands – which at their core exist to make lives better – should own more places on this Top 50 list. It starts with finding your energy. Stepping back and reconsidering your story and the big idea that defines you. Your more heroic purpose. And then letting your actions follow from these beliefs. Which ultimately become a platform for customers (and your brand’s) continuous growth.

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Jan
13

Blast from the past: 10 brands to watch in 2001

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I was going through some old files and found the January 2001 issue of (now defunct) Brand Marketing. This is actually pretty surprising, as I’ve rightfully earned the nickname of “the great purger” of old files at Trajectory.

The cover article is ten brands to watch in 2001. And the sub-head reads Brand Marketing picks the consumer products and services most likely to make an impact this year. It’s their top picks for the biggest potential newsmakers. Not necessarily the most successful, but those judged to make the biggest impact.

Here they are. Hot off the presses (so to speak), with summary rationale for their inclusion on this list:

1. amazon.com – given its diversity beyond books, personalizing the on-line experience and strong bent on customer service. Truth be told, I’m a big fan.

2. america online – having just acquired Time Warner, the 23 million subscriber company was trying to vault ahead in the multimedia world. FYI, it’s subscriber base (as of 6/10), was 4.4 million.

3. AT&T – which was just breaking up (again) in 2001, splitting into four companies (business long-distance, consumer long-distance, wireless and broadband) and introducing it’s new Boundless ad campaign. Is it’s equity any clearer today?

4. hillary clinton – just having inked an $8 million deal to write her White House memoir, her new appointment as U.S. senator from New York and being hailed as one of the political brands with the greatest potential to impact the country.

5. firestone – once one of the most venerable brands in the tire business, was actually fighting for survival given the deaths that were linked to alleged failures of its tires. Some speculated that it wouldn’t survive the year. It did.

6. napster – was responsible (operative word being “was”), for 150 million downloads a month.

7. nokia – was the world’s largest maker of wireless handsets, and for several years “has been focusing on how consumers actually use the devices after realizing that they were moving from pure functionality into design and fashion.” Funny reading this now.

8. onstar – the 600k drivers of GM vehicles who were already subscribers has new increased tenfold to six million.

9. revlon – things were looking bleak in 2001, following a decade-long decline that witnessed some fuzzy and dated imagery around the brand.

10. xfl – remember this upstart league brand (backed by WWF Entertainment) that was going to challenge the dominance of the NFL? probably not, as they played one season on 2001.

To paraphrase Walter Cronkite, “and that’s the way it was” back in 2001.

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Jan
10

Healthcare marketer tip: better questions for better branding and marketing

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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.

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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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