It's getting increasingly difficult to achieve what most hospital branding campaigns must - break through the clutter. Often it takes a strategic call to action that emotionally resonates with your target. That's exactly what the Children's Hospital at Mission (CHM) in Mission Viejo, Calif., achieved with its integrated marketing campaign that used a "consent to treat" form to prompt parents to pre-qualify their children for pediatric services at the hospital.
The campaign, launched last fall, generated 2,500 completed forms - a far cry from its goal of 500, says Claudia Ponder, a principal with Lawrence, Mayo & Ponder, the hospital's advertising agency.
The consent forms were the cornerstone of the campaign's strategy because they captured targeted information for follow-up marketing efforts, including the children's age, insurance, pediatrician information and medical background.
Two direct mail pieces were sent to 200,000 families in the South Orange County market to coincide with the back-to-school timeframe when parents are making important decisions about childcare.
These forms helped to build awareness among parents that CHM should be a top-of-mind choice for competent pediatric care, from preventive to emergency services, says Ponder.
This was a critical impression for CHM to make. During the campaign, a local competitor was in the process of building a pediatric unit with services similar to CHM. And CHM had long been perceived as simply a service line of Children's Hospital of Orange County, instead of a fully-operational, independent facility with a Level III neonatal intensive care unit.
CHM emerged as an aggressive marketer, advertising for the first time as a separate facility spending slightly less than $2 per household. The integrated campaign included ads in community newspapers, regional magazines like Bon Appetit, Colonial Homes and Country Living, transit shelters, an area mall and a movie theater.
The campaign generated approximately 8 million media impressions and in addition to the 2,500 completed consent forms, teachers, PTA members and principals continue to request consent forms to distribute throughout the school system.
(Lawrence Mayo & Ponder, Claudia Ponder, 949/955-9200; CHM, Jan Lansing, 714/516-4293)