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.

Eric Brody is President of Trajectory, a New Jersey-based branding + marketing company creating new brand energy by uniting organizations, creating new value and igniting new growth.

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

Eric Brody is President of Trajectory, a New Jersey-based branding + marketing company creating new brand energy by uniting organizations, creating new value and igniting new growth.

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?

Eric Brody is President of Trajectory, a New Jersey-based branding + marketing company creating new brand energy by uniting organizations, creating new value and igniting new growth.

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.

Eric Brody is President of Trajectory, a New Jersey-based branding + marketing company creating new brand energy by uniting organizations, creating new value and igniting new growth.

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?

Eric Brody is President of Trajectory, a branding + marketing company creating new brand energy by uniting organizations, creating new value and igniting new growth.

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.

Eric Brody is President of Trajectory, a branding + marketing company creating new brand energy by uniting organizations, creating new value and igniting new growth.

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.

Eric Brody is President of Trajectory, a branding + marketing company creating new brand energy by uniting organizations, creating new value and igniting new growth.

Great information for healthcare marketers from outside category business leaders about what works and what’s next in social media.

Each year, thought leaders from major brands with expertise in social gather at the Social Commerce Summit, hosted by Bazaarvoice, to present the trends that shape best practices in social media. The 2011 Summit included speakers from Best Buy, Xerox, Newell Rubbermaid, L.L. Bean, Johnson & Johnson, Bazzavoice, Nationwide Insurance, Facebook, Dell, Estee Lauder, P&G and Adobe.

The four guiding themes that shaped the brand leader and social expert discussions, representing the key drivers of successful social strategies, include:

1. The immediacy of social gives brands consumer insights that drive business impact.
2. It’s a conversation, not a campaign.
3. Social media must scale across the organization.
4. Social gives consumers direct input to brands, creating wins for brands and consumers alike.

You can download the paper here.

Eric Brody is President of Trajectory, a branding + marketing company creating new brand energy by uniting organizations, creating new value and igniting new growth.

So here’s a great read. A compact, 32 page e-book, Twitter Business Guide: Communication and Marketing, written by Jean-Christophe Barre’ and Dr. Andreas Schroeter.

It covers everything from what and why and starting out, to understanding the nomenclature, the difference between using Twitter as a communications and marketing tool, to linking Twitter to your business and a conclusion of Twitter in 10 points.

In the spirit of this post, please re-tweet and help spread the wealth to others.

Eric Brody is President of Trajectory, a branding + marketing company creating new brand energy by uniting organizations, creating new value and igniting new growth.

So begins a good article in Bloomberg Businessweek called Shift Happens from G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Viton of Maddock Douglas innovation consultancy.

Their premise is that at critical times in history, business sectors go through radical shifts driven by economic, political, and consumer forces. And these shifts create opportunities for new entrants into markets. Entrants who often bring with them revolutionary ideas that change things for the better. And for many in health care, shift is about to hit the fan.

This shift relates to skepticism about the health-care-reform proposal to create Accountable Care Organizations (ACO’s) – a network of doctors and hospitals that share responsibility for providing care to patients. The potential savings come from keeping people healthy, and ACOs will receive bonuses if they keep costs below a specific number while still maintaining quality.

While the authors love the idea of health-care reform, they think we’re looking in the wrong place for solutions. It should come from entrepreneurs, not the government. Because entrepreneurs are good at listening to their customers – and then reinventing the experience.

If you’re building an ACO, they ask leaders to consider the consumer-based questions mentioned in the article, which you can find here.

Eric Brody is President of Trajectory, a branding + marketing company creating new brand energy by uniting organizations, creating new value and igniting new growth.