It’s a new year! If your goal is to improve your hospital or healthcare practice brand this year, we have several tips to get you started on a path to success. This week’s topic is what it means to live your brand.
Living your Brand: Why, How, What and Who
When you communicate a brand promise, you create expectations – meaning, your brand is much more than the advertising messages you convey. For your healthcare brand to be authentic, your patients and visitors must have experiences and interactions that align with your message. For example, if you say you excel at patient satisfaction but your front-line staff sometimes delivers less-than-stellar service, your organization is not living its brand. Pay attention to how well the real patient experience aligns with your brand promise. If you find anything lacking, make the changes necessary to improve and follow through. And remember, outcomes aren’t everything, so focus on patient needs beyond clinical care as well.
Start by educating employees on what your brand stands for and how they contribute to its authenticity (or lack thereof). Use touch point mapping to guide this process, which means plotting consumer interactions or experiences with your organization to more conclusively capture and understand every opportunity for improvement. You can use this approach to identify employees who already do a good job of putting your core values on display, and designate them as brand ambassadors. They can act as role models for co-workers on how to live the brand. Ideally, when done correctly, every employee will become a brand champion in time.
Improving your hospital or practice brand is a complex undertaking, so you won’t see changes over night. These tips can get you started, but it takes some time to enhance consumer perception of your organization. We encourage you to check out our next topics in this series:
- Optimizing online content
- Listening and engaging through social media
- Aligning your marketing budget with strategic initiatives
- Stepping outside your comfort zone