Your Brand's Value is Influenced by the Company it Keeps

Many years ago, an older and wiser colleague gave me this advice: be careful where you put your logo. A point made all too well, when at one of our port city’s many waterfront festivals, I ran smack dab into a biker (the Hell’s Angels, not Lance Armstrong, type) wearing our health system’s 100th anniversary t-shirt. There was our carefully-crafted and beautifully-designed ‘future of medicine’ message and logo stretched across the beer belly of a large, bearded and seemingly-intoxicated man complete with ‘die young’ tattoos, leather studded neck collar, and dangling cigarette. The dichotomy of the message and the media underscored the importance of context for brand building communications.

Professors Brian Sternthal (Kellogg School of Management) and Myungwoo Nam (INSEAD) conducted a series of experiments (Kellogg Insight) to determine how the environment in which a brand appears influences brand perception, and concluded that managing the brand’s environment is just as important as managing the brand. A more favorable context produces a more favorable perception, and a negative context, a less favorable one.

Most marketers know this and work hard at selecting and controlling media that enhance and complement the brand – but the advent of the Internet and increasing popularity of social media sites have made this a more challenging aspect of brand management. Organizations fear and avoid social media channels, citing the need to maintain control. As if by not showing up, they have somehow done so. But they’re really in denial that a cyber-biker might just be sporting their brand in a compromised context around the web.

So the question for chief marketing officers is how do we help health systems replace old concepts of control with those of engagement, conversation, relationship, community, partnership, insights and influence?

Time-starved Consumers Seek ‘Brand Butlers’

The convergence of consumers with limited time and the ease of providing mobile online services is creating a new class of service-oriented “brand butlers,” according to consumer insights firm trendwatching.com. Trendwatching.com defines brand butlers as brands that focus on assisting consumers to make the most of their lives, as opposed to the traditional branding model of selling consumers a lifestyle or identity.

Although trendwatching.com identifies the growing sophistication of mobile online services as crucial to the development of brand butlers, the company advises that offline services such as permanent or pop-up branded spaces and lounges tied to a specific event (music festival) or location (airport) can qualify as brand butlers. Trendwatching.com also advises that brand butlers go above and beyond top-quality products and services, so providing excellent customer service is not enough on its own to become a brand butler.

Learn more about their 8 key brand butler categories at Time-starved Consumers Seek ‘Brand Butlers’

Moving It for Heart Health

In this YouTube find, Orlando Health's Heart Man rounds up the hospital staff to Move It for Heart Health.

Brand Management Requires a Comprehensive, Robust Framework

Brand management is an essential core competency for healthcare organizations seeking growth, market differentiation and competitive sustainability. And the creation, building and management of brands requires a comprehensive, robust framework to guide brand strategy, brand alignment and brand performance.

At this past week’s Chief Marketing Officers’ Innovator’s Studio work session, Mike Eaton, vice president for Navvis & Company, and Rob Klein, President of Klein & Partners, presented a 6-stage structure for brand management, and led the group on a discussion regarding the complexities and opportunities for building a powerful brand portfolio. Here’s a glimpse into their workshop session.

CMO Innovator's Studio Brand Mastery Framework

View more presentations from Karen Corrigan.

Guest Blogger: Chris Bonney

When decisions regarding facility design, patient flow, registration systems and other design, process or policy issues are made, who is sitting at the table as the voice of the customer? Who evaluates the impact of those decisions on the customer experience? Once again, I am pleased to offer the insights and perspectives of long-time colleague Chris Bonney on this topic.

Tracking the Eyes That Count

I was at a meeting of some architects recently. In demonstrating their capabilities, they showed how they'd solved a tough design problem on a hospital expansion project by clustering treatment rooms in a way that increased operational efficiency and reduced construction cost. Sounds like a win-win proposition, doesn't it?

Only nowhere in the process was there input from the patients who'll be using the facility. And therein was laid the foundation for what is likely to be a history of low patient satisfaction with this facility.

No one checked to see if patients would object to all those treatment room with their curtain doors facing the same public area. No one checked to see if patients would understand the confusing and blandly colored wayfinding signage necessary to navigate the facility's labyrinth of interior corridors, none of which have visual cues to set them apart from each other. They didn’t consider that older patients might need covered places to sit down every fifty yards or so as they walk in from the parking lot in the rain, or whether they’ll even find their way through the three poorly marked left turns necessary to get into the facility’s parking lot.

Navigating the health system is challenging enough for most people even when they have all their faculties. But add advancing age, declining eyesight and hearing and the stress of whatever condition brings them into your healthcare facility and you multiply the opportunities for confusion, anxiety, anger and failure.

Remember “Brubaker,” the movie where Robert Redford arrived undercover as a new prisoner to get a glimpse of life in the penitentiary he’d been hired to clean up? Put yourself in the patient’s shoes. Take a walk around your facility wearing a blindfold, wearing someone else’s eyeglasses, wearing earplugs or with a cast on your leg. Start out on the street where the bus lets people off, or at the farthest point in the parking lot. Do it in the daytime and at night. Do it in a wheelchair. Spend some time in each of your waiting rooms just listening. Pick a random ER patient and observe that patient through his or her entire stay at the hospital. Sit in a patient room and listen to the staff conversations outside.

After you’ve done all this, you might be surprised how different your impressions are from what they are now, and how many new ideas you’ll pick up. You could learn a lot from your customers.

Chris Bonney is president of Bonney & Company, a Virginia-based marketing research firm. He can be reached at 757-481-7030 or by e-mail at: chris@bonneyresearch.com

Regaining Trust is Prime Objective for Big Brands

“In the world of branding, trust is the most perishable of assets.” So begins the lead article in Business Week’s September 28, 2009 special report on 100 Best Global Brands. The story here is that consumers have lost considerable trust in brands – and in business overall – in the economic tailspin of corporate greed, recession, job losses and tanking home values.

Not surprisingly, financial services and automobile brands tanked. And other long-respected brands – Starbucks, Sony, Harley-Davidson and Dell dropped in the rankings. Google and Amazon were the big winners, having gained 25% and 22% respectively in brand value since 2008. Other winners included Zara, Nestle, Apple, H&M and Ikea. Coca-Cola still holds the #1 post, followed by IBM (#2) and Microsoft (#3).

Smart CMOs are going on the offensive to restore reputations – and brand value. “Trust and transparency” are key areas of focus according to McDonald’s global chief marketing officer Mary Dillon (McDonald’s rose from #8 to #6 in the rankings). Companies like Ford, American Express, and others are re-engineering their marketing departments to embrace new media and leverage digital tools to listen, reach and engage consumers in new and open forums. They are rediscovering the strategic value of public relations and pumping up PR budgets. Investments in social media are eclipsing other marketing initiatives.

So what can healthcare CMOs take away from this news?

• Brand is a critical lever for growth, profitability and competitive performance
• Consumer values and behaviors toward brands are changing
• Trust in the brand – in the company – is paramount to success
• Reach and frequency may not be as effective as listening and engaging
• Marketing resources are shifting from production and placement to people and places

It’s a great time to watch CMOs that are stepping up as ‘chief brand stewards’ and accepting the charge to lead companies into a new consumer world, restore trust and turn the tide on economic performance. Lots to learn.

'Energized Differentiation' Separates Great Brands from the Pack

A recent article published in Strategy + Business (The Trouble with Brands) summarizes findings from a massive study of consumer brand perceptions and the impact on corporate performance. The comprehensive examination revealed that consumers are increasingly focusing their loyalties and purchasing power on an ever-narrowing set of brands that are connecting to the public in more exciting and dynamic ways.

This brand phenomenon – coined ‘energized differentiation’ – is personified in high energy brands such as iPhone, Nike, Walmart, Whole Foods, Zappos and Axe, among others.

According to the authors, three primary factors separate high energy brands from the so-so lot:

• Vision – how the company’s aspirations, reputation and values are presented to consumers
• Innovation – how consumers perceive innovative design or function or content
• Dynamism – how the brand persona evokes emotion and engagement

A critical finding of the study was the link between energized differentiation and financial earnings and stock performance. “The more energy they have, the greater consideration, loyalty, pricing power, and brand value (as a percentage of firm value) they command.” (Gerzema, Lebar)

In other words, the more energized the brand, the greater the preference and usage – and the more predictive of brand-driven growth.

The article is worth the read (click here), and will make a good journal topic for your next marketing team meeting.

Karen

CMOs to Explore New Brand Mastery at Fall Innovators' Studio

The Chief Marketing Officers’ Innovators’ Studio will hold its next working session on November 9 and 10, 2009 at the Catalyst Ranch in Chicago, Illinois. The focus of the gathering is The New Brand Mastery, which will address head-on how operational, clinical, business development and marketing alignment can create a powerful, relevant and differentiated brand-driven culture –transforming an organization from one that simply ‘promotes a brand’ to one that ‘delivers the brand.’

Whole Foods marketing executive Maggie Bahler will be a guest catalyst for the Chief Marketing Officers’ Innovators’ Studio brand mastery work session scheduled November 2009. Maggie will engage the group in a discussion about brand as a driver for growth, and share how Whole Foods works to create company-wide alignment to the brand strategy while emphasizing local community connections. She’ll also lead us on a brand excursion to their newest Chicago store where we will experience the brand in action.

Additional catalysts and brand explorations will be announced soon.

Karen

Develop Competencies for Brand Leadership

For far too long, health systems have been trying to build brands almost exclusively through communications processes, which waste marketing dollars and undermine competitive performance when the image portrayed is not the experience delivered.

Powerful brands do not happen by accident. They are carefully discerned, purposefully positioned and aggressively managed to create connections that stimulate demand, build customer loyalty, drive growth and improve profitability.

The well-developed competencies underlying great brands include:

• Brand Intelligence – brand leaders employ advanced research and analytic techniques to inform positioning, segmentation, targeting, product design, channel, pricing and promotions decision-making. Real brand intelligence takes more than awareness and preference research.
• Brand Positioning – strategic processes are in place to create a core positioning strategy, articulate the brand value proposition, and formulate integrated operational, clinical, business development and marketing strategies to achieve meaningful competitive differentiation.
• Brand Alignment – strategic processes are in place to unify brand building across the value chain in order to focus design; align operations and organizational policies; build and support effective channels; drive service delivery innovations; create advertising that works; and build staff commitment to ‘live the brand.’
• Brand Portfolio Management – large, diversified, complex health systems are evolving methods for determining, managing, and building brand portfolios, addressing multiple facilities, strategic business units, markets, physician integration, and partnering ventures.
• Brand Evolution – brand leaders measure and track brand performance, and consistently evolve and renew brands to address new opportunities and changing competitive dynamics.

If you want to put rocket-boosters behind your brand, then focus investments to build brand leadership competencies. The payoff is better business performance.

Karen Corrigan

Rapidly Restructuring Healthcare Markets Require New Approaches to Brand Management

Ever more complex health system structures, physician relationships, expanding clinical portfolios, new business ventures and expansion into new markets require a proactive, focused and purposeful plan to build and leverage brand equity across the enterprise – across geography – across constituencies.

Today, health systems’ approaches to branding must evolve to address and manage the complexities of:

• Hospital and health system mergers & acquisitions
• Physician integration, joint ventures and owned medical practices
• Ambulatory, post acute and retail diversification
• Academic, technology and business partnerships
• Multi-market, multi-state expansion initiatives
• Enterprise IT/EHR/Website strategies
• Co-branding/co-marketing relationships

This requires more sophisticated methods for determining, managing, and building brand portfolios in diversified health systems, addressing multiple facilities, strategic business units, markets, physician integration, and partnering ventures. Because at the end of the day, the objective isn’t what to call something, it’s market leverage.

Karen Corrigan

Keeping Your Brand Healthy After Physician Integration: Part II

Health systems that ignore the implications of physician integration to the organization’s brand do so at their own peril. Hundreds of doctors in an employed physician structure can produce hundreds of thousands of patient visits in a year – each visit shaping and reinforcing the organization’s brand reputation.

Without an explicit strategy for creating and delivering a brand-defined experience in physician practices, health systems run the risk of developing a brand reputation they don’t want – formed from inconsistency of service, customer indifference, fragmented care, complex processes, poor medical care.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The key question for health care executives is how to leverage investments in physician integration to increase total brand equity – to build a powerful, differentiated brand presence and to drive growth from a core positioning platform.

To do so, we must first understand brand as a central and foundational underpinning of competitive strategy. Brands are potent business-building assets for driving growth, engaging customers, building profitability. As you develop and evolve the integrated physician structure, key issues regarding brand and business building strategies should be addressed from the beginning.

So how can a health system turn a potential brand liability into an advantage?

• Determine your unique brand value proposition. How you plan to create and deliver value to current and prospective customers through the fully integrated physician practice is fundamental to long term success. What significant customer-centered benefits (more timely appointments, better coordinated care, personalized service, best in class physician talent, etc.) will your patients gain as a result of the integration strategy?
• Agree on brand identity. Names may be about egos, but brands are about business. The right brand identity should, first and foremost, ease the selection process for your customers. Brand identity for the physician group should be chosen in the context of the health system’s strategic positioning and growth goals, as well as its overall brand building strategy.
• Create brand alignment across operating, clinical and marketing systems, and build a discipline to channel investments into those things that matter most.
• Hardwire customer service, operating and patient care processes to ‘deliver’ on the brand. Patient experience is born through brand activation, a process whereby the brand value proposition is translated and transformed into actionable principles, features, service standards and behaviors. Remember that brand reputation is built primarily through customer experience.
• Enhance brand performance. Establish and monitor key metrics regarding growth, revenue, profitability, brand awareness, brand preference, customer advocacy and staff engagement. Identify growth opportunities in key segments, markets, channels. Address barriers that may limit the power of your brand to move market share.

The mantra for health systems seeking leverage from their physician integration investments is simple. Build the brand. Build the business.

Is Service Line Success Embedded in Design or Execution: Part 3

This is the third installment of four posts on healthcare service line strategy and structure. Watch for the 4th post in coming days.

Brand vs. Service Line Management

In comparing and contrasting healthcare’s service line model with industry’s product or brand management model, fundamental differences are realized across key factors:

Market orientation -- A key difference between service line and brand managers (and among better performers and poorer performers of service line management) is the vantage point from which decisions are made – poorer performers operate from the inside out (“here’s my program – let’s see if we can find some customers”) versus outside in (we’ve identified segments offering significant opportunity for growth – let’s build a product to attract them.”). In competitive consumer markets, maintaining an external focus while keeping a direct line into the operations team to deliver against changing consumer requirements is paramount to success.

Strategic focus – Historically, the strategic focus for hospital service lines has been development of profitable clinical services to compete with other health institutions; improving quality, lowering costs, aligning physicians, and adding services all are aimed at creating a better offering. Competitive advantage, however, isn’t sustained by being “better” than the competition but from being “different.” Brand managers seek to create markets and new sources of revenue by finding new and different ways to meet customer needs, extending the life cycle of the brand and representative products, forging strategic partnerships to enhance product offerings, and developing proprietary approaches for channel leadership.

Competitive posture – The health industry’s supply-side orientation to strategy tends to favor defensive posturing. Service line initiatives are over-invested in similar activities amongst providers in a market to protect position and share, as opposed to proactive strategies to leverage strengths against emerging market conditions that offer opportunity for substantial growth. A demand-side perspective acknowledges that consumers have shifting needs that can be met in a myriad of ways. It opens up our thinking as to not only “who” but “what” we compete against.

Value innovation – Organizations that consistently perform above industry norms are those that better anticipate changes in competitive dynamics and continually innovate to create greater value for customers and the market. However, the health industry’s penchant for benchmarking and low tolerance for risk-taking sentences service lines to numbing sameness and marginal improvements. Value innovation does more than raise the bar – it resets the rules of competition by de-commoditizing health care services. The ultimate pay-off is substantial gain in growth.

Marketing – The traditional service line marketing toolbox has offered up a limited set of tactical activities to promote service line offerings and cultivate referral relationships. In consumer markets, marketing is a strategy-critical core business competency to create profitable exchange relationships between an organization and its publics. It is the principal process for creating and linking customers to the organization’s products and services. In comparison, the traditional industrial marketing model includes major functions of producing, packaging, pricing and promoting individual products.

Scope of responsibility and authority – One of the fundamental issues with the service line management model is lack of agreement as to whether service line leaders are operations managers, clinical leaders, business developers, marketing managers or some combination of the mix. A matrix reporting structure, which is often poorly defined, limits the manager’s ability and authority to achieve service line objectives. If we contrast this model to that where cross-organizational teams work for a brand manager who reports to senior executives, there are lessons to learn about lines of authority and accountability for performance

Performance metrics – In poorer performing service line organizations, performance objectives and measures of success are unclear and reward systems are not linked to achievement of specific goals. Even worse are those where authority and accountability are so misaligned that turf wars break out inside the very service line structure intended to “break down silos.” Consider the service line leader who is held accountable for volume growth and profitability, but has no authority to impact capacity, through-put or supply costs. In competitive consumer markets, metrics such as preference share, conversions to trial, percentage of revenue growth from introduction of new products, and repurchasing rates, among others, are leading success indicators.

Coming next: Imitation is Not the Answer

Karen Corrigan

Is Service Line Success Embedded in Design or Execution: Part 2

The following is a continuation of an earlier posting.

The Disconnect Between Strategy and Service Line Structure

At the risk of boring repetition, structure should follow strategy. There is no universal ‘right’ way -- or ‘wrong’ way, except perhaps blind restructuring of clinical services into service lines without a defined strategy as to how value will be created and what capabilities and resources must be brought to bear effective execution.

Strategy then is not just an aggregation of tactics, but a leadership-driven approach to articulating a futuristic vision for how a service line intends to compete. To get to this point, health systems must develop a point of view as to how the market is likely to unfold, identify specific strategies to create a distinct and compelling market position and then create a business model and structure to effect achievement of its goals.

In its generic form, the product line and brand management models developed by industry leaders such as Proctor and Gamble and GE, are useful frameworks for designing an approach to service line leadership with the fundamental intent of optimizing the organization’s market position for a defined service line.

There may be more to learn today from the product or brand management models that evolved in the consumer goods and services industries as we address increasing consumer influence in the selection, purchase and use of health services and products. However, to be receptive to the advantages offered by brand management models, we must suspend the predominant notion about brands as communication devices and adopt an understanding of brand as the totality of customer experience resulting from organizational decisions regarding positioning, design, development and delivery of products and services.

Fundamental differences are realized across key factors. Part III will compare and contrast healthcare’s service line model with industry’s product or brand management model.

Join the discussion. What do you believe to be the key strengths and pitfalls of service line management models?

Karen Corrigan