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This blog series features brands across the health and wellness continuum, and what each of them are doing to leave their mark on the world. It’s a natural fit with our brand and marketing agency purpose – to help unlock the potential for health and wellness brands to leave their mark on the world. This post features New Jersey infectious disease specialists ID Care.

How Brands Leave Their Mark

When considering a purchase or a transaction, people don’t choose brands for what they make. They choose them for what they can make happen.

This calls for developing a brand value proposition that extends beyond the functional (table stakes category benefits) of a product or service – to one that helps people achieve something more and taps into what really matters to them.  Which means developing branding strategy and brand marketing that provides…

• Higher-order emotional and life-changing value
• Value that not only benefits consumers, but increasingly communities and the planet
• And delivers multi-dimensional wellness benefits: physical, mental, social and purposeful

The more a product or service delivers on these elements of value, the more likely it is to leave its mark – and to create an emotional connection that drives customer loyalty and higher and sustained revenue growth.

Shifting Customer Expectations

Accelerated by COVID-19, brands are being judged on their actions. Customers want to understand their priorities, how their resources are being allocated and on the decisions they’re making – beyond the experiences they deliver.  People are asking why you do something and what was the good that came from it. These are the kinds of questions that matter more than ever.

ID Care

Founded in 1996, New Jersey-based ID Care is now the largest network of infectious disease specialists on the East Coast. The medical practice’s board-certified infectious disease specialists see over 200,000 patients a year – across multiple medical practice locations and over 130 care facilities throughout the state (including hospitals, rehab facilities and sub-acute facilities).

As clinical leaders, innovators, and researchers, ID Care provides patients with personalized solutions for a comprehensive range of illnesses and infections. Specializing in every aspect of infectious diseases — including HIV, hepatitis, pneumonia, tick-borne diseases, wound infections, travel-related illnesses, and others — ID Care physicians offer the most effective prevention methods, accurate diagnoses, and state-of-the-art treatments available today.

A Relentless Twelve Month Battle

It’s been just about a year since COVID-19 changed the trajectory of people’s lives in New Jersey, throughout the country and across the globe.  But in New Jersey – alongside patients, families and hospital physicians and staff, was the presence of ID Care.

Working alongside area hospital physicians, ID Care infectious disease specialists were seeing upwards of 1400 patients a day. And this pace continued for months. In fact, ID Care has been responsible for treating over 20% of the hospitalized COVID-19 patients in the state.

Hope And Excitement

With the advent of COVID-19 vaccines, beginning with the rollout of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, Dr. Ronald Nahass, President and Co-Founder of ID Care, is optimistic. “The data is convincing, the immediate safety data is clear. The new technology and the method of development have really provided a lot of comfort for me, and it should do the same for patients.”

Spreading The Word

ID Care continues to be on the front lines of the COVID-19 effort and encourages communicating the value of immunizations to patients. “In the United States, over 400,000 people have died,” said Dr. Nahass. “In order to stop the spread of COVID-19, we need to reach about 70-80% immunity as a population.”

At the moment, it’s estimated about 10% to 15% of the population has been infected, and in order to reach the herd immunity threshold of 70-80%, that means the infection rate would need to be five times as high. So, if you do the math, in order to get to that 75% immunity naturally, we would see about 1.2 million deaths. So that’s the power of a vaccine. It will help get us to that 80% number without incurring all the deaths.”

The Real Power of Social Media In Healthcare

Since late Spring, ID Care pivoted its medical practice marketing to educate consumers, their communities and other allied professionals about the pandemic. It’s a strong example of the real power of social media in healthcare to help improve lives. In this case, engaging with patients by providing support and reassurance at a time when there were no answers and people were struggling to cope at multiple levels with the unknowns of the virus.

ID Care consistently posted on social media channels Facebook and Twitter – playing a valuable role as educator, thought leader and influencer. And it used LinkedIn to reach, educate and be a resource for fellow healthcare professionals and other industry professionals who were struggling with the many questions surrounding the virus.

In speaking with Dr. Nahass, he’s proud that ID Care’s healthcare social media efforts have been working as intended. Throughout this time, beyond being on the frontlines as caregiver, ID Care’s social media efforts helped to provide access to critical information and services, connect people to each other when we were otherwise isolated, help ease anxiety and worry and provide hope when we all needed something to be optimistic about.

Proof that social media was working can be seen in the dramatic growth of ID Care website traffic and the level of engagement over the last twelve months, among both consumer and professional audiences. But according to Dr. Nahass. “these benefits are secondary to being a trusted resource for consumers and the professional healthcare community.”

Building A Brand That Matters

ID Care operates every day knowing that New Jersey is counting on it to deliver trusted care – both to patients and to the physicians and hospitals with whom its partnering in the battle against COVID-19. But the infectious disease medical practice is also doing what it can to evolve and innovate and become true partners to New Jersey residents on their multi-dimensional path to wellness: physical, mental, social and purposeful.

Right now, this means continuing the good fight against the pandemic – on the front lines and as a source of trusted and timely medical information. In the medium term and in years ahead, it means helping people live healthier and better lives – through its own evolution, its medical practice marketing efforts and its partnerships.

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Since 1999, our New Jersey marketing agency has worked across the health and wellness continuum — helping clients across the United States to unlock the potential of their brands to leave their mark on the world. Reach out for a no-obligation consultation.