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What does it mean to build a brand-led business? At Trajectory, we see it as aligning and energizing the whole organization to deliver against a relevant and differentiated brand promise. Harnessing the full power of your branding as a catalyst to boost brand and business performance. Beyond marketing, it includes the complete package of actions taken by everyone across the organization. Regardless of healthcare or wellness segment – whether health system, hospital, or specialty provider, physician and medical practice, health and wellness product and service, or skin care and beauty – these same principles apply.

Branding isn’t a line item on a to-do list that ends with a new positioning, logo, brand launch event or the launch of a new brand advertising campaign. Instead, it’s your entire to-do list – encompassing every interaction, every touchpoint, both internal and external delivering on your brand promise.  Ensuring that all of your actions work to unlock your organization’s full potential.

How consumers see your brands

Consumers don’t see brands through the same lens as marketers. They don’t see brands as your marketing plans, media flowcharts, messaging platforms or brand books. They see brands as the sum of every experience they’ve had with a brand across their customer journey. They see what they believe from your words and actions as your complete brand package.

Astute leaders understand that every action they take, inside and out, is their brand. This kind of brand thinking, a la a complete package, leads to organizations, teams and people understanding that they are all responsible for assembling and coordinating the parts, not just the marketing department. Ensuring that together, they are creating something much greater than the sum of their individual efforts. A complete brand package. Using the analogy of a car engine, it’s like a good mechanic making sure the work on your car is complete, and he or she hasn’t left out a few important steps (or parts) to make your engine purr.

The complete brand package

Assembling a complete brand package requires the following four elements:

1. Foundation: a core idea (what we refer to as Big Energizing Idea) that guides, inspires and connects every action the brand takes
2. Strategy: an organization that treats everything it does as the brand
3. Actions: aligning what it says and does internally with what it says and more importantly does externally (because it’s not what brands say, it’s what they do that matters)
4. Connection: Beyond functional meaning to emotional connection, appealing to both head and heart

Brand and deliver

Winning teams use their brand as an organizational blueprint for growth that is lead from the very top of the organization. This approach, what we refer to as brand-led business, is about the entire organization consistently delivering against the promise of a motivating and differentiated customer experience. In contrast, lesser performing teams see branding in a much more limited role. They mistakenly believe that advertising and design alone can create an “image wrapper” to sustain a product or service. But this can lead to a disconnect between brand image and brand reality that results in customer disappointment and eventual business decline. This thinking also cuts short the power of the brand to inform the “complete brand package” experience and results in lessening the potential to boost return on brand investment.

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Since 1999, New Jersey marketing agency Trajectory has partnered with clients across the healthcare and wellness continuum to harness the full power of their brands to rise above the noise and boost business performance. Reach out for a complimentary consultation.