To create a corporate brand after a merger means forging a perception that leads the customer to believe that the new company and the products and services it offers are worth more than its competitors.
However, selecting a new brand name, successfully launching it in the marketplace, and giving it lasting impact and a distinct identity is no easy task, said Rhoda Weiss, president of the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development.
Such challenges, however, are happening more and more. The healthcare sector accounted for 12 percent - or 139 - of the name changes that occurred in 1996, with mergers and acquisitions the primary reasons for changes.
What's in a name? It depends on who you are. When your organization, whether it be a hospital group or HMO, merges, everything changes - including the name. While mergers are a weekly occurrence, few issues in healthcare or in the business world are more emotional than identity, branding, naming and logos.
To Intermountain Health Care (IHC), an integrated delivery system serving four states, the branding approach places IHC as the dominant identity for all its affiliates, while hospitals retain their own name along with an IHC tag line.
While to Providence Health System, identity means ensuring the name "Providence" is the first word of each of its nearly 40 entities in four Western states.
While many have long carried the name, other institutions that had existed for over a century added it more recently. They were able to retain long-held identities while building a consistent image linking all health system components.
Tom Vitell, director of public relations and advertising for the Salt Lake City, Utah-based Intermountain Health Care, was involved in the front end of the identity debate. When he arrived as part of a new public relations team in 1989, it was pretty apparent that IHC's identity needed an overhaul.
"IHC was the major healthcare organization in the Intermountain region, yet it appeared that we had no physical presence in our communities," he said. "There were inconsistent graphic standards and signage (none emphasizing IHC), more than 200 logos competing with the IHC logo for the public's attention and the lack of a `public presence' for IHC. The results were a confused identity that sent wrong messages."
The Three Steps of Mergers1. Select A New Brand Name The choice of a name is intimately connected with developing a vision and a mission statement for the new company - try to find something that meets your goals and is easy to remember yet different. 2. Launch An Identity Now that you have a name and an idea of how you want to do business, you have to formulate precisely what you want to present to the marketplace. In a crowded, competitive field, how can you demonstrate that your company offers unique benefits to customers? Find unique features of your new company. Taken together, these features would create a strong and unique market presence. 3. Build and Maintain |
In the fall of 1994, IHC rolled out its identity program and is currently completing signage replacement for 23 hospitals, 89 physician clinics, eight urgent-care centers and some 50 other sites.
In devising the program, Vitelli stresses it was not to create new graphic standards. "That's the smallest part of the task," he said. "The hard part is redefining the relationships among the various IHC entities and the organization.
Questions To Ask Yourself During Branding:
- How are you going to market yourself and your individual products and services to the public?
- What are the relationships among the system's entities and the system as a whole?
- What information needs to be presented on stationery, advertising, educational materials and signage?
- How do you handle joint venture situations, where you have one entity in your system working as part of a program with other companies outside your system?
- Who is going to pay for the conversion to the new identity system - especially the expensive signage part?
Once these issues are addressed, the next challenge is to convince people who have invested thousands of dollars in building separate brand identities to abandon them for a system strategy.
Providence Health System in Seattle is one of the nation's oldest systems, more than 100 years old.
While the network's formal name "Sisters of Providence Health System" (representing the Catholic order which owns and operates its entities) is used by system and regional offices, "Providence Health System" and "Providence" before each facility name and a cross logo are used in other cases to create brand awareness and consistency.
While many of its hospitals have names a century old, Providence decided in 1993 that in order to help people gain access to its continuum of services, strengthen system identity, build a consistent image linking all components of the system and create a distinctive position in the marketplace, it needed to embark on an identity program.
"The changes in healthcare are creating a need for organizations to convey a clear, simple image of who they are and how they are affiliated with systems," says Providence Director of PR Cheryl Sjoblom. "We knew that a system identity would enhance our ability to communicate that we are a continuum of care in various regions, help consumer access services and foster an awareness of relationships among system components. "Our identity program provides management controls over visual and verbal visibility of the organization," she said.
Every public exposure expends dollars, whether spent in marketing, communications or time. The fewer names and visual solutions to recurring problems, the greater efficiency in creating presence, reducing costs and eliminating confusion, she said.
(IHC, 801/442-2000, Providence, 206/622-9709, Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development, 1-800/333-5421)