When marketing healthcare brands, achieving top-of-mind awareness is good. Most preferred healthcare brand is even better. Most likely to return and to refer to others -- fantastic. But how about love for your healthcare brand? Read more »

Most hospital branding campaigns involve associates in the research or execution phase: interviewing or featuring the individuals who represent the hospital's brand. But hospital branding efforts rarely deliver those brand messages back to the associates, and we think that is a mistake. Read more »

For many hospitals, branding has lost its top spot on the priority list. For some, it’s the lack of long term funding. For others, it’s internal pressure to promote only service lines. Still others lack the marketing culture required to really implement such large-scale change. Regardless of the reason, it has resulted in many great hospitals not being known as great hospitals. Read more »

Cardiac services is one of the most popular services for hospitals and health systems to market to consumer audiences. For good reason. Cardiac services is often one of the hospital's most profitable service lines. (Even if you're a non-profit, remember the maxim, No margin, no mission.) Consumers "get" the need for advanced heart care. There's no need to "sell" the average person on why expertise is important. Read more »

Adapted from Franklin Street's Healthcare Marketing Trends Report Where's your smart phone right now? Chances are good that it's within arm's reach. According to a Morgan Stanley study, 91% of smartphone owners keep their phones beside them 24 hours a day. (An interesting office poll: ask your colleagues how many sleep with their phones. The number who do will surprise you.) Read more »

Adapted from Franklin Street's Healthcare Marketing Trends Report. A new form of self-help in healthcare and health and wellness is emerging. Brands like Nike are embedding "feedback loops" into their products, allowing people to get real-time reactions on their activities – while reaping brand loyalty and profits in the process. Call it Do It Yourself (DIY) Healthcare or "Help Me Help Myself." Read more »

One of our clients reminded us recently that healthcare is a two-sided coin of Life and Death. Unlike any other business category, healthcare marketing and branding requires engaging prospective patients who would rather avoid the conversation altogether. We are starting to see the trend of audiences becoming increasingly engaged in proactive healthcare lifestyles. Read more »

The New Year means the chance to embrace change, and to grow. Here are our resolutions for the healthcare marketing community, which we are grateful to be part of. We wish you a bright and prosperous New Year.Resolution No. 1: We will do less and accomplish more.We will say no to those activities that do not solve our organization's business challenges. As Lisa McCluskey, VP of Marketing Communications at Memorial Health Care System says, Read more »

All marketers (healthcare and non-healthcare) say they measure their campaigns, and almost all feel they lack the  tools to connect the ROI dots.Information, we've got. We're drowning in data. Google Analytics can tell us everything about our web traffic, except how much revenue we're delivering our health systems with each new visitor.Klout scores (does anyone follow these anymore?) can tell us how cool our social online presence is, except Read more »

In every brief and campaign strategy document we write, there's one implied goal that's never written down, but always top-of-mind: will this campaign make the physicians happy?Happiness is relative, of course.Maybe the campaign can just pacify the doctors, for the short-term. (And hopefully, long-term, leading to market share growth.)But the short-term goal – making the physician happy – is almost always something our clients are Read more »