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All marketers and branding strategists should want to change their customers’ world for the better. How fortunate are we, then, as health care brand builders and marketers! Our sole purpose is to better customers’ lives. And if we execute a hospital branding strategy right, we also create customers who add value back to our healthcare brand, which in turn adds value back to our hospitals.

Creating Healthcare Brand Affinity

How can hospital marketers create more meaningful and relevant engagement with customers who are now at the center of the healthcare ecosystem—proactively taking ownership for their health, taking control of the buyer journey, and taking control of the media they want to see? AND, how do you do this when the size of your hospital marketing budget might not be as big as the ever-expanding health system the next county over?
Experience and analysis has taught us that a specific set of brand characteristics and behaviors can create successful hospital brands that outpace competitors and create the customers who will take your healthcare brand and organization to another level.

7 Tips For Hospital Branding Success

The following branding principles can help hospital marketing teams reach their goals (and help customers achieve theirs):
Lead with Guiding Principle. A guiding principle behind your brand is the starting point for creating consumer connections and rising above the competition. Call it purpose, promise, north star – it doesn’t matter the nomenclature your hospital adapts. As long as you lead with it. Because it needs to lead your people and the people you serve. Unearth it, declare it, make it easy to articulate and then drive everything from that idea. Every piece of evidence shows that this central tenet drives organization performance. It attracts employees, inspires and connects customers, fuels growth and drives business.
Maintain Authenticity. We talk about this a lot. Because brand authenticity is a critical ingredient for your customers (particularly your millennial customers) who are searching for greater meaning and sincerity from your brand. No brand today becomes great unless it is totally clear about who it is, why it is, and how it approaches the market. Here’s an interesting factoid about the history of this characteristic. It dates back to June 1921 from the Ohio Newspaper “The Mansfield News,”: “Although he has no gilded medals upon his bosom, Howard Herring of the North American Watch company, walks the walk, and talks the talk, of a hero today.”
Keep Moving. Incessantly relevant brands anticipate and lead change. Of course these actions are directly linked to their values and objectives. They are committed to wowing customers and keeping them engaged, not once or occasionally, but constantly. Given the quickly evolving health care market, hospital marketers must adapt a bias to action, which means seeing and thinking beyond the boundaries of health care to tap into what really matters to customers.
Leverage Your Distinctiveness. According to How Brands Grow author Byron Sharp, director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia…rather than aiming for meaningful differentiation, seek instead for distinctiveness. We need to quickly establish a brand within consumers mind – and being distinctive helps make a brand salient. Global market research and  consulting firm Ipsos states…Brands exist in people’s minds as an associate network acting as a mental shortcut. Distinctiveness is the shortest route to your brand. Differentiation (which may be temporary) is good. Distinctiveness (which is ownable forever) is great.
Pull with Emotion. Emotion creates unique meaning and an instinctive attraction that preempts rational reasons for making a purchase. Neurological research supports the premise that people buy on emotion and justify with facts. But it’s not an either or situation. Some categories and brands naturally lean to one approach over the other and each has its place in your marketing toolbox. The challenge is to know which is right for your hospital. Ultimately, your brand itself should guide the decision based on evaluating several dimensions, e.g. uniqueness, price, category perception, importance to prospect, and innovative or intangible services.
Brand Alignment Across Touchpoints. Brand consistency is a growing challenge today. Not only given the number of “media” touchpoints, but given your likely expanding pre-acute and post-acute continuum of care (e.g. urgent care, infusion centers, ambulatory surgery centers, behavioral, rehab) and your growing number of hospital partners. However, achieving and maintaining alignment—presenting a consistent look, message, emotion, and experience across all consumer touchpoints and across all your facilities and service lines—not only creates attraction and belief, but maximizes the value of your marketing budget.
Create and Grow Your Tribe. Any relevant brand today feeds the conversation that is 24/7, always on. It creates, fosters, and facilitates communities of like-minded individuals. This is not only important across clinical service lines like diabetes, cancer, bariatrics, and pediatrics, where patients and families want (and need) to share with one another. It’s also important to your evolving wellness business, given that the “we” factor influences so much behavior. Create opportunities to let your hospital brand be the platform through which communities share, learn, and grow together.
As a hospital marketer today, it’s important to know that there’s no one recipe for being fresh and relevant that will work for every organization, since the needs and circumstances keep changing. However, these seven tips for a hospital branding strategy, when applied as a complete framework within the context of how to make your customers’ lives better, can aid your efforts to shift attitudes and beliefs, attract new customers, and grow the value of existing ones.
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Since 1999, Trajectory has focused on shaping and guiding the trajectory of healthcare and wellness brand growth — with a particular focus on health systems, hospitals, physician and medical practices. Reach out to have a conversation.