Effective branding in healthcare is a highly desired goal, but achieving it is tough. Should you use an "umbrella" approach that promotes all hospitals and facilities in a system under one major brand or allow individual facilities to maintain their own identities? These questions and other pressing marketing issues are addressed in The New Rules of Healthcare Marketing: 23 Strategies for Success by Arthur C. Sturm. The book is a resource for navigating the complex maze of healthcare marketing - from open enrollment strategies and managed care contracting to market segmentation and organizational restructuring.
In this excerpt, Sturm provides a branding analogy that highlights how Procter & Gamble's branding approach can be applied to a hospital system.
Rule 3: Your Brand Is a Valuable Asset: Nurture and Develop It
One of a provider's greatest assets never appears on its balance sheet. It's called "brand equity." Put simply, this phrase means that the reputation an organization enjoys in the market is a true asset it can leverage to your advantage to increase membership, redirect market share and pave the way for other opportunities.
But having and nurturing a brand are different from simply promoting one.
A brand is the sum of the experiences the consumer has with the product. The price, the performance, the satisfaction of the product are what make it unique and appealing.
Too often healthcare providers equate image with brand, but a single ingredient such as that has never built or sustained a lasting brand.
If image were all there is to branding, marketing would be a relatively simple task. Marketers could whip up some advertising, make some outrageous claims, and voila, it's a brand. Of course it doesn't work that way. Branding is a conscious and ongoing effort. You have to decide what you want your brand to be and then deliver on that promise to your customers.
The challenge today, particularly for emerging integrated systems, is to make a true brand out of their collection of acquired facilities, physicians and employees. And at the core of that challenge is the need for consistency.
It's that day-in, day-out performance that creates the brand. A brand delivers on a promise it makes to the consumer day after day. It sounds pretty dull, but managing the performance of a brand to meet customer expectations over and over again is no small task. And in a highly diversified environment such as healthcare networks, the challenge is exponentially greater.
Choosing a Brand Model
Many CEOs of IDNs (integrated delivery networks) have told me of the difficulty they're having in applying the notion of a brand to their organization. As an aid, my partners and I developed an exercise that uses several major international companies as brand models.
The goal is to see if any of these existing brand models can be applied to a specific IDN. There is no right or wrong answer: it is an exercise in creativity and strategy.
The companies we chose were General Electric (GE), BASF, Procter & Gamble (P&G) and Nabisco. Each represents a different approach to branding that may or may not be translatable to healthcare.
To populate the example here, we'll use a fictitious "ABC Health System" as an example.
Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble of Cincinnati, is a world leader in the manufacturing and marketing of consumer products. A major part of its strategy is to own a category rather than just a share of it.
For example, P&G markets several brands of coffee that clearly compete against each other. P&G encourages that competition to build both the brands and the category resulting in a larger category share for P&G.
The strategy:
- Brand strategy is developed at the product level with little or no corporate visibility (Folgers Coffee versus Hills Brothers).
- Products each have a unique position and brand personality with different target audiences.
- Corporate leverage occurs at the wholesale level (distribution, advertising).
- Brand managers fight for corporate resources but share philosophies and goals.
ABC the P&G way:
- Brand strategy centers on each ABC unit: Children's Hospital, North Community Hospital, and so on.
- ABC is seen as a "good citizen" - not as the brand.
- ABC negotiates at the wholesale level (managed care contracts) while its brands operate at the retail level (physician practices, hospitals, etc.).
Why use this strategy?
Originally, this strategy was not favored much in the healthcare market. But the more I think about it, the more applicable it is to many markets. As consolidation continues, large, well-preferred brands will face the possibility of being consumed by other large, well-preferred brands.
Should all of that brand equity be abandoned under a consolidated name? Maybe that's not such a good idea. Maybe those individual brands should survive - and in fact compete against each other - on the retail level, while broader strategies are created at the wholesale level.