Not Just for Soft Drinks: Branding and Health Care
Written January 16th, 2008 by Dan HaleyI’m as skeptical of concepts like branding as you are. If not implemented properly, branding becomes a blithe marketing strategy more closely aimed at consumer perception than experience. But when I sat down last month to sketch out my 2008 content goals, clarifying our branding elements and better integrating them into our web site’s content was high on the list.
When done properly—with sincerity, clarity, and comprehensiveness—branding can help coalesce what’s unique about your organization, and articulate a new or reinvigorated sense of purpose. This is good for the organization, and it’s good for patients. This post poses the questions: What is your experience with branding? How do you implement branding components on your web site?
Brand was an imperative at this year’s Health Internet Conference: the ubiquity of social media strategies, which is branding, after all; and the lesson often repeated that if you don’t manage your brand, there is a chorus of online voices that will. Or just one viral voice. But to manage your brand, you have to know what it is. This takes a clear, concise vision, and honest accounting of your organization’s strengths and weaknesses. For health care providers, this may involve a key value, central to your culture and identity, or a pledge to prospective patients regarding the care they will receive in your facility.
For a brand to succeed, though, it must be consistent with how the public actually experiences the service or product. As such, health care messaging can capitalize on and reinforce patient care measures, strengthening quality of care and experience initiatives that your organization has in place. And everyone these days is ostensibly concerned with quality. A good brand campaign yields internal as well as external results, refocusing staff attention on core values: What are we here to do? What role do we play in our community? Are we taking something for granted? Health care providers are not endeared to the public at present; we need to counter by emphasizing what we do well.
What role can health care web sites play? We should be expert in clear, concise communication that’s true to our organizations’ distinct identities, so branding offers us the chance to shine. In addition to consistent graphics, messaging components should be integrated elegantly throughout our sites. From the About Us page to more granular services pages, users should feel your core values throughout the site’s content and images. What sets your organization apart?
Your site is search engine optimized, but is it branding component optimized? Successful branding is in the details; at its best, your brand—or distinct health care mission, if you prefer—comes across in each video, content piece, podcast, and news item.
How is your site communicating brand?
January 23rd, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Great post, Dan. And timely in my case as we just had our major ‘kick off’ for re-designing our public site.
We’ve always had a very strongly worded mission/vision/values statement – and the firm we selected to help with the redesign cottoned right onto those terms, and is vehemently using them as the guideline in what we build, and how. Basically, our ‘values statements’ are the metric against which all development is being weighed. It’s nice to see those statements strike a chord with a partner, and now to see them ‘come to life’ and used as a measuring stick. Hopefully our end result is commensurate with our ideals.
January 23rd, 2008 at 4:26 pm
We, too, are starting up a redesign effort aimed at doing a better job of conveying our brand online. But our brand has been very clearly definied as innovation (constantly finding better ways). I’d like to think our site has exemplified that by offering the kinds of tools and transactions that we have had on the site for years now. Because we try to actually embody our brand, we are encouraged to try and experiment. I think it’s one reason we’ve done as well as we have on the Web site.
But I agree 100% that branding that isn’t supported by actual patient or customer experience is worthless!
September 8th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
I stumbled upon this post today and hope you don’t mind me resurrecting the discussion. While the original post is none-too-recent, the subject is incredibly topical and could even be considered apropos if you consider that 2009 is right around the corner, planning-wise.
I have mixed reactions – feelings, if you will – to some of Mr. Hayley’s comments and assertions. As a marketer and long-time brand steward and a professional in the healthcare vertical, I wholeheartedly support the trueism that healthcare – as with any consumer brand – requires strong branding to form the skeleton of communications strategies.
Consumer values – control, self-expression, technology, and many others – serve as filters for how people evaluate and prioritize the information and stimuli surrounding them. These values manifest themselves into products and services, many of which set the standard of experience people carry with them into other environs. Consider wifi accessibility, availability of quality coffee, choice of service hours. Consumers experience these (and many other) attributes in other sectors and permeate their “lenses” for viewing healthcare and physicians. Can I make an online appointment? Will the doctor or his nurse email me? Is telemed an option?
Meanwhile, as the value filters evolve, so do the products and services that germinate from them. It’s entirely accurate that credibility and authenticity are critical components of marketing, one of the reasons that so much consideration must go into the development (and maintenance) of the “voice and tone” aspects of a brand identity bible.
Which in my opinion is one of the areas the Web becomes so powerful as a brand-building channel. The question shouldn’t be “how you implement branding components on your website,” as originally mentioned above. It’s about your brand’s Web presence. A brand is a living, growing, evolving entity (and as suggested above, if not nurtured, could stagnate, fail, or turn at an undesirable corner) that holds consumer value through needs assessment and relevence – presenting opportunities for emotional connections. Those are the ties that will bind.
September 8th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Thanks for the thoughtful comments, Heather.
I agree with your main point: that your organization’s web presence is just as important as your web site. Since I wrote this blog post, our team has implemented a social media campaign: Scripps Health now has a presence on Wikipedia, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. We’re very cognizant of the many social utilities out there, and how we need to participate as a health care org—our patients, prospective patients, employees and future recruits are already there in full force. We’ve got a long way to go, but we’re jumping in.
We’re also looking into monitoring tools to track the online chatter regarding our brand, across many channels. We hope to use this information from a marketing standpoint, but also to improve our clinical care quality: our facilities have dedicated quality teams that we’ll be sending online feedback to.
However, our nascent efforts to cultivate an effective web presence have further underscored the fact that we still need a strong web site. After all, the purpose of many social utilities is to drive visitors to your site, to further familiarize them with your org and its medical services, work in the community, events, etc.
Every time we build landing pages for AdWords campaigns, refine our SEO or post a link somewhere, I’m reminded that we need robust content for those users to come to. And since web users are now coming more to specific pages (via search or your web presence), rather than just through your home page, each page in that long tail needs to work harder to communicate your distinct identity and strengths.
You’re absolutely right, though: authentic, lucid health care brands must be well-traveled online.