Healthcare Branding Series: How to Make the Most of your Healthcare Brand
It’s a new year! If your goal is to improve your hospital or healthcare practice brand this year, we have several tips to get you started on a path to success. This week’s topic is what it means to live your brand.
When you communicate a brand promise, you create expectations – meaning, your brand is much more than the advertising messages you convey. For your healthcare brand to be authentic, your patients and visitors must have experiences and interactions that align with your message. For example, if you say you excel at patient satisfaction but your front-line staff sometimes delivers less-than-stellar service, your organization is not living its brand. Pay attention to how well the real patient experience aligns with your brand promise. If you find anything lacking, make the changes necessary to improve and follow through. And remember, outcomes aren’t everything, so focus on patient needs beyond clinical care as well…
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Last week, one of our clients unveiled their new brand to employees. It was an amazing day for the associates who joined the company meeting to hear the long-awaited announcement. The CEO and partners presented our branding approach and explained the work we undertook to arrive at the new 
Recently, while attending a grand opening for a healthcare organization, I found myself blissfully lost in the chief operating officer’s storytelling about the power of the organization. He and I were deeply engaged in conversation, and I listened intently as he told one compelling anecdote after another, each chock-full of relevant and useful patient experiences. My first thought was, Wow! How can the marketing team replicate the COO’s patient-centered chronicles in mass media to tell the real story of the company? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized, storytelling alone wouldn’t differentiate the organization.
Over lunch today, we discussed how to play dominoes. Apparently, there are new games that are quite complex, but one thing hasn’t changed at all: after the leader sets the game in motion, the inevitable chain reaction follows. It struck us that – in dominoes and in organizations – every “move” by every “player” affects the final outcome and ultimately connects back to that first play of the game.
Recently, we heard some compelling stories about a client’s brand. We were conducting consumer in-depth interviews (IDIs) to better understand how people make personal healthcare decisions, as well as their perceptions of our client’s brand.
Healthcare consumers are more empowered than ever to choose according to their perceptions, and they know it. As health plans get more flexible in letting people pick providers – and online platforms enable word-of-mouth to cover more ground at faster speeds – the competition to be anyone’s provider of choice is fierce.
