To say that a hospital is made up of doctors is obvious. What is less obvious is the idea that a hospital’s brand is made up of hundreds of sub-brands over which it has absolutely no control. For each doctor is, whether they know it or not (whether they will admit it or not), creating their own brand with every interaction they have with every patient, co-worker, member of the medical community and partner.
I say, “whether they know it or not” because while they would bristle at the suggestion that they would ever stoop to anything as crass as marketing, they will nonetheless make it extremely clear to you what their relationship with their patients is and is not, what they are and are not willing to say or do (because it’s “unprofessional”), who they admire and who they despise – in short, all of the things that those of us in marketing basically use to define a brand.
So, does that mean each hospital functions like a traditional “house of brands”? Nope. And that’s the problem.
See, in traditional “house of brands” marketing there is a synergy between then overarching brand and the sub-brands beneath it. The “overarching” brand provides unity and stability, and usually embodies a promise that the sub-brands can exemplify or prove to their different consumers. The overarching brand – because it’s not tied to any one product – can be more aspirational and abstract than the sub-brands under it, which are by definition very specifically product- or service-based.
“But” you complain, “that’s exactly what hospitals are doing.” No, not really. Sure, they often aim at something aspirational, but it’s usually so ridiculously broad (in the hopes that it will sort of apply to every aspect of the hospital) that it ends up meaning nothing and offering doctors no real path to fulfill. Which, by the way, their patients don’t want them to fulfill. “We’re leading edge! We have top technology! We went to Ivy League schools!” Most doctor-patient interactions have nothing to do with that – which is just how patients want to keep it. “Hello Mr. Jones, your tests came back normal. See you next year.”
So not only do the sub-brands not support the overarching brand, they don’t even know they’re supposed to (not that they would if they did, probably).
And while there are many marketing reasons why this is important, two of the most important business reasons (yes, you read that right; a creative is using brands to talk about “business issues”) is how the synergy of these sub-brands help those running the whole company figure out how to run the company better.
For one of the ways an ABInbev or Unilever or General Motors decides which brands they needed to acquire and which they needed to jettison in order to be more successful is by identifying 1) what gaps they need to fill to provide legitimacy for the over-arching brand’s message as consumers evolve and change and 2) what sub brands were contributing a message that had become at odds with or irrelevant to the overarching brand’s message.
But none of that really happens in hospital marketing. Which is exactly why it’s important to hospital marketing.
Look, people don’t “buy” a hospital any more than they “buy” ABInbev. They buy a beer. They “buy” a doctor. Because the beer – and the doctor – are the interaction they have. In many ways, that beer is the brand of ABInbev and that doctor is the brand of the hospital for that customer. And they will carry that perception of the hospital – driven by their experience with that doctor – with them long after the brand campaign you launched today has been replaced.
So what do you do? Put the doctors on the billboards since they’re the product/brand? No, because it’s not only not cost-effective, it’s not any kind of effective. Do you craft some broad platitude about “care” or “health” that is so bland that its meaninglessness is equally meaningless to every specialty in the hospital? No.
You start by going exactly where most hospital C-suites don’t want you to go. You go to the culture.
Look every hospital – like every organization in every industry (even advertising agencies for god’s sake) – has a culture. It could be competitive, it could be innovative, it could be cheap, it could be anything. But that culture is made up of – defined by - the people within the organization. And in a hospital those people are the doctors. And while each one of them has their own brand (see above) what should happen, what likely happens, is that the Venn diagram for the doctors all overlap somewhere and that somewhere is culture of the hospital. (And yeah, sure, as with every organization, there are some outliers, there are some groups that have unique cultures or cultures that are at odds with the rest of the organization. Whatever. Nothing is perfect.)
But that’s where you start. By understanding the culture, by sifting past the platitudes and the superficialities that most hospitals settle for (because frankly they can do nothing else) to find out what this hospital really is like from the people who work there. The good and the bad. The crunchy and the smooth. Only then can you find something that is not only true but that the doctors and the staff and administrators can believe in. Because they’re already living it. And if they believe it, they can prove it to the public. Because they already are.
It's hard, but don’t worry. It’s not brain surgery.