Junto ("june-toe") is sponsored by Franklin Street, a branding and full service advertising agency specializing in health and wellness. We call the blog Junto in homage to Benjamin Franklin, who created the first "Junto" brainstorming group, which established the first American public hospital.
As a guy writing this blog, I realize the headline above could be considered piggish.
But it’s not.
If you haven’t heard of Hot Mama, it’s a chain of clothing stores that has Disney-like brand loyalty.
Their secret? A highly focused customer experience tailored to moms who want to feel sexy and beautiful.
Hot Mama stores are designed so that kids playing with the in-store video games are always in view, no matter where mom is in the store. Their retail consultants are trained in matching customers’ body types with denim and other clothing for fit and feel and embrace what women are feeling at different stages of momhood.
Even their Facebook presence is stylish, fun and a great example of customer engagement.
What can we bring into healthcare marketing from Hot Mama?
1. Story building. Traditionally, branding was the art of story telling. With the rise of social media, our audiences want to participate. In turn, they build the stories with the brand. Story building is the new art of customer engagement, a chance for healthcare brands to enhance their brands by inviting participation. Check out how Hot Mama makes store openings and sales exciting on Facebook and consider how to bring more zest to your health system’s status updates.
2. Design an experience. True, many hospitals were designed around the doctor and not the patient, and you may not have the pull to invest millions in environmental design. But if you’re in marketing communications, you probably have the wherewithal to shape a great experience with your website, social media channels and other digital campaigns. On the web, you’re often limited only by your imagination. What can you do to design a great experience for your healthcare audiences?
3. Thin slice your audience. The death of a great campaign is trying to appeal to a wide audience. Be narrow with your focus, or “thin slice” your audience and micro target them with messages and promotions. Hot Mama chose not to sell to a lot of women in order to give full focus to a certain type of woman at a certain time in her life. The more you can focus your messages and campaigns, the more likely you are to say something that is “sticky” with your audience.
What other ways can we parlay Hot Mama’s success into healthcare? What other brands outside of healthcare should we be students of and learn from?
Earlier this year, BridgeHealth, partnered with Franklin Street to develop a campaign for their unique role: “the premier provider of access to Centers of Excellence in the US and beyond for planned major surgeries.”
From direct mail to brochures to email campaigns, Franklin Street developed a complete advertising campaign.
Earlier this year, Good Samaritan Health System in Lebanon, Pa., partnered with Franklin Street to develop a brand campaign for the hospital, emphasizing its mission of “Powerful Medicine. Comforting Care.”
Patient stories across several service lines showcased Good Samaritan’s technology and top-notch care.
Check out the campaign below. How did it work for Good Samaritan? See our blog post about the campaign. For additional info, give Melissa Speir a shout.
Today’s guest blog post is written by Steve Atkinson is the former HR Director at a Fortune 500 company and current part-time professor at VCU’s Business School.
We all get the importance of having strong brands and we even acknowledge that our employees play a pivotal role in a brand’s success.
But recent changes in healthcare necessitate a closer look at our internal culture because it’s going to impact our health system’s reimbursements.
The Affordable Care Act has established incentives for hospitals that focus on both quality of care and maintenance of high levels of patient satisfaction. Medicare reimbursements will partly depend on patient satisfaction.
As a consumer of healthcare and former Director of Human Resources for a Fortune 50 company, I’m thinking there is some work to be done to get health systems congruent with highly positive patient experiences.
Ask yourself this question: Can patient satisfaction be consistently high without satisfied and productive employees?
Personally, I don’t think so. Healthcare workers have a direct line of sight to the patient that can make or break patient satisfaction, and workers can be a gold mine of information that can improve patient care and, ultimately, satisfaction. Further, leadership can do a number of things to set the tone for high patient satisfaction, most notably working to build a culture where the inside behavior is consistent with the external brand message. Branding plays a special role in service organizations because strong brands increase a patient’s trust in service delivery. Jeff Bezos of Amazon said it well: ”Your brand is what they say about you when you’ve left the room.”
It’s time to think about your internal brand and whether your employees are indeed modeling what you stand for in the marketplace. Where might you start? A first step is a brutally honest look at current reality:
What is the current organization like?
What key behaviors do we display or not display to each other and to the patient?
Do we live the stated values of the organization?
Do Operations, HR, and Marketing talk honestly to one another about getting the internal behavior aligned with the external brand messages?
Is everyone on the same page?
How do our employees feel about their work and the organization?
How does this impact patient satisfaction?
Developing an accurate assessment of today requires committed leadership. Change starts at the top.
Does leadership have a clear picture of the future and do they communicate it in a compelling way?
Do employees understand what your brand represents and what the competition is doing?
Do they care?
Does the organization structure operate effectively?
Does everyone understand their role in making it work?
Do you have the right employees with both the talent and passion for their work?
What is your approach to recruiting, on-boarding, and retention?
Are there clear behavioral expectations/values, consistent with your brand that guide employee behavior? Are employees ambassadors for your brand? Does leadership consistently model these behaviors? (The Mayo Clinic, for example, has an extensive, multi-year enculturation process designed to instill the organization’s values into every associate.)
Do work processes and systems help or hinder the delivery of high quality service and employee satisfaction? (Ask your employees – they will tell you.)
Do employees have the needed resources and authority to serve the customer? Do they feel valued? Are they satisfied with their jobs and supervision?
Is this a true service culture with disciplined execution and performance accountability? Does your compensation system reward the right behaviors?
How well are the key elements of the organization (strategy, structure, culture, staff, and systems) aligned to support one another?
Customer experiences create the brand, and building the brand from the inside out requires an honest look at the whole organizational system. It’s hard work, but I am sure you agree it’s worth it.
Steve Atkinson is a Senior Consultant with Pure Culture Consulting in Richmond where he works with clients to align and develop their organizations to best support their business strategies.
Articulating a brand platform and positioning can be challenging work, but the benefits to a well-defined brand outweigh any short-term pain and suffering. After all, brands like Apple, Ford and Target succeed by knowing who they are as brands and replicate that brand through product, price, service and design experience.
There are many paths in discovering your health system’s brand essence, but one of the tools we find very helpful (and fun, too), is the This or That? exercise.
For example: Is your hospital a Walmart or Target brand?
There’s no right answer, of course, but the feedback you get from internal stakeholders will be enlightening and encourage debate.
Other examples:
Thought-starters:
Are you cosmopolitan or tried and true?
Do you focus more on packaging than the product?
Thought-starters:
Is your organization conservative, moderate or liberal-minded?
Are you recognized for technology or spokespeople (like physicians)?
Thought-starters:
Are you known for heritage or reliability (or both)?
Do you appeal to the “everyman?”
In healthcare marketing, it’s easy for us to get caught up in the high tech/high touch debate. The fact is, men and women want both from their healthcare providers.
As you hone in on your brand’s position, investigate the emotional and intangible qualities of your organization. It’s in the emotional landscape that we make connections with our audiences. Great brands know and harness this truth. Good luck discovering yours!
Recently, I was at Memorial Health Care System in Chattanooga to meet with our client. We sat in the hospital’s main lobby and I used the system’s guest wireless service to go online.
The first thing I realized is that the wireless signal strength was better than any hotel’s that I’ve stayed at in the last two years.
Second, the hospital had branded the Acceptance screen forguest access.
The look and feel complemented the hospital’s main website, the type was large enough for senior eyes, and the hospital didn’t expect visitors to hunt and peck to accept the conditions for using the wireless access.
Such a simple thing: wireless Internet access. But for a family member waiting hours for a surgery diagnosis, it’s a godsend. And, Memorial’s effective branding gives its visitors a consistent, good impression.
Sometimes we get overwhelmed by all the things we want to change in healthcare branding. Sometimes, though, doing small, simple things make all the difference.
Recently we developed a physician recruitment campaign for Floyd Medical Center in Rome, Georgia. As with any campaign, we begin with the brand: what is the essential and timeless promise we can share with our audience? Brands are born from the inside out and are reinforced by the actions of people, which is especially true for service organizations like hospitals.
Our approach included a direct mail piece using a size/shape guaranteed to stand out and engage our prospective physician audience, along with a custom website to drive interested prospects.
Response has been tremendous. Now Floyd is carrying out the campaign for other positions, including nursing and tech staff.
But slick direct mail and websites aren’t guarantees to achieving success, especially in recruitment, when organizations don’t define success by getting “warm bodies” in the door — but rather, employees who are engaged, exemplify the organization’s core values and will be around for the long haul.
Making those connections with the right kind of prospect comes down to knowing the brand essence and communicating it effectively.
Sample images from the direct mail piece are below, along with the home page of the custom website, which you can visit by clicking here.
I was asked recently to speak about the challenge of brand positioning in a business like healthcare where consumer decisions are complex and emotions run high. In a world of mass-marketed prescription drugs, rankings, word-of-mouth, and regular scientific advances, the average consumer is overwhelmed with both myth and fact. So, how do you cut through the clutter of information to become a preferred healthcare provider?
I’d recommend the first step is engaging what I call the E-volution Cycle of Stories. A process which will allow you to understand and build a better brand story that tightly aligns (and evolves) with what your consumers need and desire. I’ll focus here on understanding your current consumers, but this cycle is just as effective at gaining potential/prospective consumer insights.
Engage the Consumer
C= Capture, Connect, and Crystalize
Stage one begins with a focus on the consumer perspective and happens mostly through existing touch-points you have with your consumers. In this stage, you capture stories as they are shared. I’m not talking about privacy protected information, but instead about the emotions and challenges folks have engaging with your hospital or health system. Capturing the stream of communication that flows through customer service lines, visitor help desks, waiting rooms, and patient feedback pathways allows you to see your facilities through the eyes of the public. Provide personnel with log books or notebooks where they can jot down notes on questions they are asked and comments that are shared (either with or without demographic identifying information). These kinds of collections are a goldmine of insights for system administrators and marketing departments. Oh, and you can get a jumpstart on this process by asking staff to brainstorm a quick list of the top 5-7 questions they are asked weekly and how they respond. Once you’ve started to capture, connect those insights to tangible processes and elements of your system and crystallize their meaning by putting the knowledge in the hands of departments and divisions which can best address changes or celebrations in consumer engagement.
Most people love to talk about themselves and the events in their lives, and they are waiting for the invitation and opportunity to share. Listening to what consumers are already sharing is one thing, getting them to share in more strategic areas is even better. Once you get a peek at what consumers are talking about in stage one, and perhaps figure out a few areas you’d like to understand better from an administrative standpoint, use the power of other-focused open-ended questions asked at key points of opportunity to get those deeper stories you crave. Let’s say you have a regular need to send patients between departments and want to understand how consumers view the ease of navigation between, say, the main lobby and the oncology center. Simply have the first point of contact at the end of the trip ask a simple open-ended question such as, “Did you have any trouble finding our department today?” Then give the consumer ample time to answer and share their experience.
Emulate the Consumer Perspective
R=Reflect and Repeat
People want to feel they have been heard. Acknowledgement lies at the core of what drives many human behaviors. And in most situations, acknowledgement is best achieved through clear and effective communication that reflects and repeats messages back to us. In this stage, you’ll focus on taking the knowledge you gained in the first two stages and shifting how you communicate (as an office, individual, and system) back to consumers. Acknowledge their concerns, use their phrasing and labels, let them know their voice matters and you are working to improve areas they have mentioned.
Enhance Your Brand Story
E=Edit and Exemplify
Beyond mirroring back language choices and concerns to consumers, adjusting your brand story to incorporate the consumer perspective you’ve learned so much about should be an ongoing process. Consumers drive your systems and offices. Allow their voices and opinions/thoughts to seep into the very fabric of your branding.
Ideally, engaging the E-volution Cycle will be an ongoing part of your brand development and alignment with consumer desires and needs. The steps are simple to implement and an ongoing collection of stories allows for the opportunity to peek into the perspective of consumers at any time and take action to make their experiences within your system extraordinary. Taking those same insights and folding them into your marketing materials and brand speak completes the first cycle and allows you to evolve your brand strategically into stronger alignment with consumer perspectives.
For more information on how the E-volution Cycle works and other strategies to get to the psychology of your consumers, contact Connie Chesner at Right Brain Discovery.
We’re often called in to restore a failing brand. After years of no marketing, consumers lose faith in our hospital client because the only thing they remember about the hospital is a less than perfect experience a friend, family member or neighbor had – often years ago.
Market research is important in developing a brand strategy. We need to know what the marketplace thinks and feels about our clients before we identify the strategy. (What’s the old saying? Prescription without diagnosis is malpractice.)
We also need to get the temperature of the hospital staff and physicians. Do they believe in the hospital leadership? Do they feel they are on a “winning” team? Do they still remember why they got into healthcare in the first place?
It’s that last question that often makes or breaks a hospital brand. People who work in hospitals are passionate. To work with and care for those who are ill, in pain or dying takes a big heart. Healthcare is tough work. The rules and requirements for providing care, shrinking budgets and lower staff to patient ratios can break even the toughest hearts.
The result is an employee base that feels overwhelmed, jaded and burned out.
That’s not good for restoring a hospital’s brand image in the community.
We’re marketing experts, not magicians. We can’t wave magic wands and make the challenging work environment go away for our clients’ staff.
But we always pledge to do our best to create branding campaigns that remind and reinforce staff and physicians why they got into healthcare, and why they chose to work at our clients’ hospitals.
When we get that right, the campaigns also resonate with consumers.
It’s not sleight of hand or doling out false promises. Branding works when it is authentic and strikes an emotional cord.
The iPhone is so wildly popular because Apple “gets” its customers. Apple knows its customers love beautiful design and bells and whistles that make you say “wow,” and thrive on multi-tasking. Dawn dishwashing detergent “gets” that its customers don’t want to spend a long time at the sink scrubbing greasy pots and pans.
But do hospitals, by and large, “get” that their customers don’t want to use their services?
In this business, we’re often too busy boasting about our newest technology, expert physicians and caring staff to remember that our clientele, by and large, never wants to have heart surgery, undergo chemotherapy or have bands surgically placed in their stomachs.
We’re better off to build our hospital brands around the life our patients will have after using our services: busy, active, and feeling well.
Pardee Hospital in Hendersonville, NC gets its audience: active people who love being well. That’s Pardee’s brand promise: Keeping you well. Below are several ads in their brand campaign. Working with Pardee’s marketing team, we photographed physicians in popular hiking and fishing areas in the Hendersonville area.
Update on Thursday, January 14, 2010
Another healthcare brand that “gets” its users is Centra, a 3-hospital system headquartered in Lynchburg, VA. Centra realized its brand was the people: the people who dedicate their expertise and care to patients. Centra, like so many hospital brands, is a reflection of the region. This television spot communicating Centra’s brand by celebrating the people.
