Fundamentals Of Marketing & Customer Serviceguest082e19
This Presentation helps the beginner, to explore makreting concepts & to build insight to whom ever been intrested in establishing a poisition in Today's competing market.
Scaling up a business is not easy. Many start-ups, family business or professional run firms fail to scale to next level of operations. In this white paper, Browne & Mohan consultants share a framework that is successfully employed by companies to guide their scaling up process.
Common Objectives Performance Management System for Not-for-profit and Public...Browne & Mohan
Designing Performance management system for government, public sector and not-for-profit organization is a daunting task. Many of these organizations pursue long-term programs and projects. Alignment of various groups, departments and individuals within each department is the need of the hour. However, many of these organizations suffer from functional silos and focus on financial measures only. Managing for results by directing right staff behaviour and initiative taking is not facilitated. In this paper Browne & Mohan consultants present a common objective approach that could be used to fix accountability, ownership and outcome based behaviour in public sector and non-profit organizations.
Fundamentals Of Marketing & Customer Serviceguest082e19
This Presentation helps the beginner, to explore makreting concepts & to build insight to whom ever been intrested in establishing a poisition in Today's competing market.
Scaling up a business is not easy. Many start-ups, family business or professional run firms fail to scale to next level of operations. In this white paper, Browne & Mohan consultants share a framework that is successfully employed by companies to guide their scaling up process.
Common Objectives Performance Management System for Not-for-profit and Public...Browne & Mohan
Designing Performance management system for government, public sector and not-for-profit organization is a daunting task. Many of these organizations pursue long-term programs and projects. Alignment of various groups, departments and individuals within each department is the need of the hour. However, many of these organizations suffer from functional silos and focus on financial measures only. Managing for results by directing right staff behaviour and initiative taking is not facilitated. In this paper Browne & Mohan consultants present a common objective approach that could be used to fix accountability, ownership and outcome based behaviour in public sector and non-profit organizations.
Revealing the Leading Practices of High-Performing, Go-to-Market Technology Alliances. Learn from the best. Discover what distinguishes high-performing alliances and they do differently from their peers.
Is your organization aligned to a common direction?
For more white papers and webinars, go to http://www.sldesignlounge.com
Or visit us at http://www.sld.com
Six Steps for a Successful Job Search: Perspectives from an Executive Search ...Spencer Stuart
Tips for how to manage your job search and how to work with an executive search firm. Visit www.spencerstuart.com/research-and-insight for more insights on career development and leadership.
www.ExpandYourImpact.org-- What is Positive Change Marketing? And why should you incorporate it into your nonprofit marketing strategy? Ways to improve current marketing plans using evidence-based marketing analysis. How to truly appeal to your target audience.
Professor Sharyn Rundle-Thiele presented this keynote entitled "Playing to Win" at the 7th National Irish Social Marketing Conference at NUI Galway in December 2015
Rewiring marketing: a practice based approachBrowne & Mohan
Many marketing managers are not aware if they are leveraging marketing efforts correctly or getting the returns that they anticipated. Often people believe transforming marketing is all about creating some digital assets. Marketing transformation is not piece meal improvement. The primary purpose of a marketing transformation is to increase the ROI of marketing your company. In this white paper, Browne & Mohan consultants share a practice based approach to marketing transformation.
Performance Measurement in NGOs is a challenging task as they have both business and social obligations to meet. Traditional accounting measures may not suffice to capture and benchmark growth and other challenges of NGOs. In this paper, we enumerate some key performance measures that could be used by some practitioners.
Revealing the Leading Practices of High-Performing, Go-to-Market Technology Alliances. Learn from the best. Discover what distinguishes high-performing alliances and they do differently from their peers.
Is your organization aligned to a common direction?
For more white papers and webinars, go to http://www.sldesignlounge.com
Or visit us at http://www.sld.com
Six Steps for a Successful Job Search: Perspectives from an Executive Search ...Spencer Stuart
Tips for how to manage your job search and how to work with an executive search firm. Visit www.spencerstuart.com/research-and-insight for more insights on career development and leadership.
www.ExpandYourImpact.org-- What is Positive Change Marketing? And why should you incorporate it into your nonprofit marketing strategy? Ways to improve current marketing plans using evidence-based marketing analysis. How to truly appeal to your target audience.
Professor Sharyn Rundle-Thiele presented this keynote entitled "Playing to Win" at the 7th National Irish Social Marketing Conference at NUI Galway in December 2015
Rewiring marketing: a practice based approachBrowne & Mohan
Many marketing managers are not aware if they are leveraging marketing efforts correctly or getting the returns that they anticipated. Often people believe transforming marketing is all about creating some digital assets. Marketing transformation is not piece meal improvement. The primary purpose of a marketing transformation is to increase the ROI of marketing your company. In this white paper, Browne & Mohan consultants share a practice based approach to marketing transformation.
Performance Measurement in NGOs is a challenging task as they have both business and social obligations to meet. Traditional accounting measures may not suffice to capture and benchmark growth and other challenges of NGOs. In this paper, we enumerate some key performance measures that could be used by some practitioners.
Did you know that most innovators developed their concepts in their 20s? There’s a reason for that. They were able to successfully access their greatest app – a different part of their mind – on demand.
Our colleague, Bill Donius, was recently chosen to highlight a proven facilitation process to break through established habits and routines at a TED Talk.
This approach, based on a Nobel prize winning discovery, has now been applied to business. Using such will ensure you get truly different points of view, even among large groups, through your most powerful app – your mind. This is the essence of “thinking outside the box.”
You can use our techniques, based on 50 years of scientific research, to organize your teams to address key business challenges, including strategic planning, marketing and brand strategy and customer experience management.
Experience Management for Referring Physicians - WHPRMS ConferenceEndeavor Management
A recent presentation at the WHPRMS Conference on how you can step into the physicians shoes and design an engaging experience to increase referrals and grow advocacy.
No matter the size of the organization, effective brand management provides the critical link
between ambitious business goals, employee behaviors, marketing communications and the
ability to deliver exceptional experiences.
W2O Group Function Optimization 2014 reportW2O Group
Over the course of our existence, W2O Group has been working with global organizations, specifically Chief Communications Officers (CCOs), to better organize, structure and fully develop corporate communications as a function, a system, and a set of capabilities to better align with strategic priorities. The report is a compilation of lessons learned, insights gleaned and recommendations for companies of all sizes.
Get a jump on your competition by understanding the strategic marketing framework process and produce a Growth Playbook to keep your marketing effort on track. Download our whitepaper, Growing Strategically for all the details.
Examples of conscious integration of learning organization principles into Marketing are scarce. We’re just starting to acknowledge that we’re behind other organizational functions in our learning process.
An ebook that explains the concept of amplifying messages via social profiles of employees, discusses the pros and cons of the approach, as well as best practices to adopt during implementation.
Unleashing Potential: Talent Management and Career Development Strategies for...Vanessa Theoharis
This presentation was shared by Vanessa Theoharis and Julie Ried at the American Marketing Association Higher Education Symposium in November 2022.
The market has gone through a whirlwind of a year, as individuals contemplate the next stages of their career journeys, whether within the organization or elsewhere. As higher education leaders, you have the opportunity to create a workplace environment that will attract top talent, engage your team and motivate individuals to stay.
Bringing best practices from across the field, this presentation includes strategies around employee recruitment, retention, and engagement, specifically for marketing and communications teams.
Target MarketAs marketing consultants, our firm will work with y.docxmattinsonjanel
Target Market
As marketing consultants, our firm will work with you and your organization and administration group in an expert item dispatch, marking research, or business measuring or focusing on engagement. Since every customer organization or firm is special with its own arrangement of issues and opportunities, we regularly start our association with a choice recognizable proof and illumination engagement what we call Decision Mapping. This distinguishes the most applicable issues, opportunities, and issues most important, and serves to elucidate the choice motivation. We accept this is a critical stride to guarantee as specialists to your organization, that our examination or promoting technique engagement meets your particular administration prerequisites. Further, Decision Mapping spares both time and cash as it hones concentrate as to the accurate work which should be proficient in our staying counseling or statistical surveying work for your organization. (Clarke, & Charmaz, (Eds.). 2014).
To start with, we are not industry pros or specialists. Our theory is that we bring a toolbox of systematic and administration abilities to the table. We bring profound industry learning of your business. The mixing of our useful and administration aptitude, and your insight into your own business and industry, settles on for a beneficial choice centered engagement. (Clarke, & Charmaz, (Eds.). 2014).
Market Needs
Brilliant organizations realize that cunning and viable showcasing is the way to accomplishment amid both great and awful monetary times which we are prepared to give. The issue is that numerous organizations are thinking that it’s difficult to adjust their promoting systems to today's financial atmosphere. This is not astonishing as fruitful business advancement obliges advertising background and information that numerous organizations don't have in-house. Putting resources into an accomplished business advertising expert can give associations the help they have to reconnect with their clients and advance their items and administrations all the more successfully. (Hollensen, 2015).
Proceeded with development in medicinal services consumptions and huge changes in human services scope are making interest for counseling ventures. This incorporates an emphasis on advanced wellbeing records and an emotional requirement for more prominent productivity and expense control. Consultancies that emphasis on activities that plainly decrease business expenses and upgrade working benefits in a sensibly brief time of time will locate a ready corporate business sector, (for example, advisors who concentrate on income improvement, production network productivity and assembling proficiency). (Hollensen, 2015).
Market Trends and Growth
Alliance Marketing Consultants incomes (counting HR, IT, method, operations, administration and business counseling administrations) will speak the truth $1,100,000 in 2002, as indicated by our exploration gauges. This sp ...
As organizations strive to sell more solutions, their reps will increasingly face off against a variety of senior- level buying roles. To improve these interactions, sales leaders should adopt a systematic process to help reps. This brief introduces and examines the components of ONE process for selling to senior executives, and explores the options of segmenting the sales force and/or leveraging subject matter experts (SMEs) when looking to reach these buyers.
MARKETING PLAN
Marketing Plan
Jessica Peterson
Rasmussen College
Author Note
This paper is being submitted on July 26th, 2015 Elisa Frederick’s Advanced Principles of Marketing
Marketing Plan
Positioning Strategy
Alliance Marketing Consultants offers organizations, government foundations, non-government associations (NGO), and people solid, brilliant, and financially savvy counseling administrations for different purposes. This key aspect makes the company unique and separates it from the competitors. It targets the services that plainly decrease business expenses and upgrade working benefits in a sensibly brief time of time will locate a ready corporate business sector. The decision mapping approach is another key aspect which separates the company from the competitors, as it spares both time and cash as it hones concentrate as to the accurate work which should be proficient in our staying counseling or statistical surveying work for your organization.
Product Strategy
Production strategy refers to the pattern of decisions or actions that the organization takes to produce goods or services. Alliance Marketing Consultants always puts in mind the following Production Strategies while developing a new product.
· Investment to made for production
· Technology to be used for production
· Training to be given to the production staff
· Production schedule to be followed
· Goods and services to be produced
· When to introduce the product
With these strategies identified and determined, it then becomes easier to counter the available competition by making the product unique when compared to those offered in the market.
Pricing Strategy
Penetration pricing is the best strategy for Alliance Marketing Consultants. It is not similar to price dealing, which some marketers market temporary low prices to new products when first hitting the market Penetration pricing is a perfect strategy for a new business entering into the new market and looking to build on a moderate market share. The demand for the product is consider to be elastic, i.e. the demanding prices and new consumers will be attracted to Alliance Marketing Consultants, and customers that are willing to buy more for a low price. Alliance Marketing Consultants will be successful if the strategize the penetration strategy correctly to lead to great sale volumes and market shares. It will be marketing their services with affordable pricing will attract more sales, after which the prices will shoot with a small margin
Distribution Strategy
Distribution channels determine how a business will reach the customer. As the products and services move through the distribution channel to the customer, a price mark-up occurs at each stage of the network. Alliance Marketing Consultants distribution strategy is to use a direct distribution channel with an e-commerce component. The target market includes commercial customers with retail, places of worship, health facilities, and restaura ...
May 2015 marked the final offering of Product Manager Imperatives at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Professional and Executive Education. After 40 years of running these open enrollment corporate workshops on product management, UW-CPED has decided to focus exclusively on management and leadership training. This presentation is the condensed version of the final offering of Product Manager Imperatives. For a version of this presentation with links to videos, tutorials and other tidbits to demonstrate key points, look for this presentation at BrainSnacksCafe.
Physician schedule optimization model - Endeavor AnalyticsEndeavor Management
How can you meet organizational revenue needs while addressing physician preferences? In this presentation, we review our approach to creating an physician schedule optimization model that assembles and predicts the impact of schedule changes on patient revenue against a series of constraints and variables.
It's like a dating site to match physicians and consumers.
In this presentation, our approach to patient volume modeling is reviewed. This model is used for marketing and operations strategic decision making.
As hospitals and healthcare systems are trying to increase commercial revenue (non-government funded) to sustainable profitability, many are unable to address this problem strategically due to data dispersion and the analytical model required to establish cause and effect relationships. Endeavor Analytics’ digital tool assembles, models and predicts the impact of market changes, marketing and operational activities on all-payer patient volumes.
In this white paper, we review the critical success factors for maintaining a highly successful contact center, ensuring each interaction enchants callers to schedule appointments, participate in fund raising events and refer patients.
Avoid PRM failures by avoiding ensuring it's not simply a repository for documenting simple tasks. PRM failures occur when the IT solutions only serves to document activities instead of serving to streamline the physician experience.
2017 digital engagement webinar marketing360 - gelb consultingEndeavor Management
This presentation highlights things every healthcare marketer should know about how to measure healthcare marketing ROI, how to design a healthcare marketing dashboard the right way, and what’s possible in today’s digital age.
Managing a trusted brand in the oil & gas industry requires a variety of tools for understanding and successful implementation. This document outlines various Endeavor Management capabilities such as Brand Trust Measurement, Message Mapping, Sales Training and Culture Design.
Client's experiences with behavioral health services are shaped by all of their interactions with us, across the continuum of care. While we can assume what our clients want, need and experience in receiving services from us, it is valuable to use their direct feedback to understand their functional (what we do) and emotional (how we do it) needs throughout their experience. In this webinar conducted with Sovereign Health, we discuss the foundations of customer experience management, provide examples of tools and resources that you can use to understand client's experiences and address opportunities for improvement, and discuss a variety of implications in behavioral health settings.
How do you operationalize a culture and strengthen employee trust? Gelb's experience mapping frameworks can be used to effectively examine the holistic employee experience and create advocates out of your teams!
Ever had this nagging feeling you just weren't sure why a physician referred his or her patients to a competitor over you? You have the advanced technology, latest clinical trials, and maybe even a top-notch team of liaisons. Outside of insurance, there are many other functional and emotional factors affecting physician referral behaviors. Most of these can be indicated by leakage reports, but these don't explain the WHY behind them.
In this presentation, given with St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, we explore the combined use of experience map and decision factors research to get at the heart of the issue...which ultimately drives clinical volume.
How to apply speed dating techniques to persona developmentEndeavor Management
We had the privilege of leading this workshop recently along with SG2 and Roswell Park during the Annual PAMN Conference. This presentation outlines the importance and application of segments and templates you can use to accelerate your customer insight development. Personas are used to inform strategic decisions by putting the customer in the room. Learn how this technique can be used for your initiatives related to brand/marketing management, customer experience, and product/service innovation.
Strategic imperative digital transformation in capital projectsEndeavor Management
Radical changes to megaproject delivery will bring first adopters a distinct competitive edge, while writing the epitaph of those who stay stuck in legacy ineffective practices. Whether you are an operating asset owner or an EPC, you are confronted with reinventing the core of your capital projects delivery through digital solutions. Such strategic transformation requires holistic change that focuses not only on installation of a new software application, but also on people and work processes to achieve a sustained, culturally intrinsic result from new technology .
2017 Physician Strategies Webinar Series - Physician Relations StructureEndeavor Management
Acquire insight into how to develop a more strategic and operational approach that can grow your organization’s physician referral base in a continually evolving accountable care environment.
This white paper discusses physicians’ medical training and its relationship to effective leadership qualities, and demonstrates how the soft skills associated with emotional intelligence are essential in guiding physicians in the practice of leadership.
Why is physician engagement strategically important? How can you design a strategy that is laser-focused on increasing clinical demand by ensuring your medical staff is aligned?
This presentation highlights key data, a framework for focusing your efforts with an aim statement and developing a programmatic approach to physician engagement.
Why is physician engagement strategically important? How can you design a strategy that is laser-focused on increasing clinical demand by ensuring your medical staff is aligned?
This presentation highlights key data, a framework for focusing your efforts with an aim statement and developing a programmatic approach to physician engagement.
Traditionally development of digital tools was solely an IT initiative, but today it is a customer-needs driven initiative. Digital experiences are often times the first impression that potential customers have of you, and the first tools they turn to when they have questions or needs throughout their journey.
Best practices for developing digital tools exist, and it is common to partner with an advertising or web development agency for this purpose. However, each market and healthcare brand are unique, necessitating the inclusion of voice of the customer insight to ensure that digital tools are being built around the real (not just assumed) needs and priorities of users. So how can marketing and digital teams engage users in order to develop the digital strategy and deliver the ideal digital experience? In this paper, we present a proven process and research-based tools for obtaining direct user feedback about digital needs, preferences, and priorities.
Hiring an experienced, trusted advisor can be the difference between success and failure. That’s why the members of our Healthcare Expert Advisory Group have been there, done that.
Our Healthcare Expert Advisory Group members have served as system leaders, successfully designing and implementing strategic solutions to healthcare’s ever-changing challenges. We’ve been in your shoes and understand the intricacies of the most complex organizations. Our team has overseen, from the inside, how strategy is designed and successfully implemented. Whether you’re looking for operational excellence, strategic planning, financial strategy, or leadership development, our experts have the experience and expertise to help you achieve results.
Physicians are rapidly adopting social media tools such as Twitter and LinkedIn as part of their approach to keeping up to date with the latest developments in healthcare. As the use of these digital tools becomes increasingly commonplace and mobile apps gain acceptance for supporting healthcare interactions, the physician liaison team can leverage digital tools and social media to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the delivery of information. Digital tools can serve as a pathway to providing easier and more direct access to information and tools that help to strengthen relationships with referring doctors and their practice staff.
In this paper, we present a best practices from around the country in using digital tools to connect with referring physicians. When used appropriately, digital tools can configured and applied to improve relationships, grow referral volumes, and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your physician liaisons.
1. Constructing a Better Brand
Gelb
1011 Highway 6 South P + 281.759.3600
Suite 120 F + 281.759.3607
Houston, Texas 77077 www.gelbconsulting.com
2. Constructing a Better Brand
High-performance brands begin with a solid foundation.
By Kathleen DeVries and John McKeever
No matter the size of the organization, effective brand management provides the critical link
between ambitious business goals, employee behaviors, marketing communications and the
ability to deliver exceptional experiences. This is especially true for healthcare institutions.
Much has been written about the definition of brand, brand research and how to formulate brand
strategy. Getting started, it seems, is typically the most difficult step. In many instances, hospital
and healthcare system marketers identify the need for better brand management, but often lack
support to make the changes required.
Successful branding efforts have one thing in common: They are transformed from a short-term
project into a long-term discipline. Successful healthcare organizations are looking beyond an
annual plan or initiative; rather, they are establishing a different way of thinking about the
organization and demonstrating marketing’s role in fueling growth.
We have worked with academic medical centers, community hospitals, and health focused non-
profit organizations. We’ve helped these organizations grow smarter by successfully “selling in”
the notion that their brand can be a catalyst for change and can fulfill broader business goals.
Based on this experience and observations of world-class organizations, we have outlined several
concrete examples to support your next brand strategy development process.
Like building a new home, early actions in building buy-in, education and communicating
successes will make or break the entire effort. Choices about participants, scope and
communication about the purpose and progress of the process dictate whether brand management
becomes a source of alignment or
a symbol of failure. Therefore, we have outlined key questions to ask when embarking on any
permanent change.
Why are we building? Establishing a business case is critical. Your executive team must
understand the gains the organization stands to make by undergoing this time-and resource
consuming effort. The foundation for building an effective brand lies in its organizational
strategy. This typically includes a mission, vision and core values. You must ask yourself as an
organization: “How can a stronger brand support the mission, fulfill the vision, or achieve the
business goals?”
First, relate market dynamics to brand performance. These may include business goals for
market share improvement, payer mix and recruitment. Well-managed brands also translate into
more cost-effective marketing expenditures. Ideally, strong brands translate into operational
efficiencies as well. Turning to competitors or other benchmarks is often helpful in making this
case. When Competitor A is perceived to be a threat or a nationally renowned healthcare
organization is held as an example to emulate, use this as a means to make the connections.
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3. Constructing a Better Brand
It’s also helpful to identify existing Exhibit 1
change-based initiatives that can be Favorability measurements
linked to your brand strategy. For
example, efforts to improve the patient
experience and employee commitment
campaigns are all linked to your brand.
Similarly, the revamp of a Web site
serves as a highly visible cue that
things are changing. One of the things
that world-class organizations have in
common is that they deliver a
consistent patient experience and their
employees understand the real purpose
of their jobs. These must be explicitly
linked to your desire to build your brand.
Who’s involved? Begin a grassroots campaign by identifying and recruiting key stakeholders.
Analogous to subcontractors, these individuals are in a position to secure or advocate for the use
of resources in strengthening your brand. You must establish alignment in this group because the
likelihood of executive support is lower without a strong sense of ownership and active
participation. Organizations that fail tend to make this activity solely a marketing exercise and
never gain the buy-in from physicians or nursing executives.
In other words, the broader the scope of your alliance, the more difficult it is for opponents to
object. Key members of this alliance should include physician leaders, nursing management, and
of course external relations (e.g., marketing, public affairs, physician relations). If your
organization has multiple entities (e.g., healthcare systems), try to include a diverse set of
representatives to give each a voice in the process.
Furthermore, identify those individuals who are widely respected for their thought and opinion
leadership. As you recruit them to the cause, clearly articulate the business case and embrace
their contributions. Each individual on this team needs to have a sense of ownership to initially
support the strategic initiative and ongoing brand management. They need to bring a consistent
message to those they influence in the organization.
If you hire a brand consulting firm, look for those who are willing to impart their knowledge and
experience to your team. Examine their process—do they have a clearly defined process that is
easy to understand? Remember, you will need to convey and defend key ideas that result from
this effort, so it’s paramount that you understand the process and that it is translatable to
members of your team. To make smart choices, you should be able to visualize every workshop,
deliverable and presentation before it is completed. Otherwise, you run the risk of being
surprised, if not agitated, by a lack of clarity around the logic of the resulting strategy.
Once the project begins, this group becomes your brand team. Members of this team will be
critical in contributing input to the brand strategy and providing ongoing input to its rollout and
3
4. Constructing a Better Brand
management. The brand team should be cross functional in nature, ensuring that opportunities
are not overlooked and that employees will view the brand strategy as something created by their
leaders.
The most difficult requirement of the brand team is time. During the strategy development
process, there will be several required meetings, workshops and homework. A well-managed
process is not burdensome. Some successful tactics include preparatory work before each
meeting to ensure that time is used wisely and making use of questionnaires to evaluate ideas and
make contributions to the process.
Your brand team will outline goals for the initial scope and ongoing success of your brand. They
will also provide support once final ideas are presented to executive management. As a
marketing leader, your role should be to facilitate the process and guide thinking, rather than
attempting to be its sole author.
This will ensure broad distribution of ownership and responsibility for the brand.
How will we make decisions? By letting information guide your strategy, you can address one
of the idiosyncrasies of the healthcare industry: evidence-based decision-making. It’s in the
DNA of most healthcare organizations to have a validated approach, supported by facts and
astute observations. Much like academia or technical disciplines, healthcare decision makers
embrace information, particularly quantitative findings. Data is your ally—often confirming
notions that existed previously, but also presenting new insights in a visually stimulating way to
inform your strategy.
Often the insights you need are already included in the marketing research you have gathered to
date. Therefore, an information-based approach does not necessarily result in additional research.
Rather, it’s important to frame the data you have around the brand, identify information gaps and
use resources to gather missing information.
Qualitative and quantitative research reports are useful for understanding the current and
potential state of your brand. Focus group and in-depth interview transcripts are helpful to
understand decision processes, audience vocabulary and levels of conviction. Furthermore, it is a
best practice to formulate quantitative tools (surveys) using an initial round of qualitative
research to ensure the appropriate questions are being asked.
Quantitative research is most beneficial for identifying powerful qualities of the brand such as
access to the latest technology or personal attention. Analytical techniques like regression
analysis can identify principal brand associations that drive brand preference, loyalty,
satisfaction and reputation.
When considering your research tactics, you’ll need perspectives from both internal (e.g., faculty
and staff) and external (e.g., referring physicians, healthcare consumers) audiences. By
comparing responses from these audiences, brand teams can identify perceptual gaps and
recognize barriers for implementation.
4
5. Constructing a Better Brand
Consulting firms’ models differ, but most brand research includes measures of familiarity and
favorability. Familiarity measures should include awareness (heard of) and experience (used). In
your analysis, it’s helpful to recognize the differences between those with direct experience and
those who have only heard of your brand. It’s important here to recognize experiences with
competing brands as well.
Favorability measurements include high-order factors (e.g., reputation, perceived quality, overall
satisfaction, preference, likelihood to recommend) and specific associations (i.e., individual
words like “community-minded” that help describe the brand).
We have used the model shown in Exhibit 1 to incorporate these measures. In it, the ultimate
measure is trust, determined by advocacy for your brand. The other components include
customer value, a measure of preference based on benefits of high importance; competitive
difference, a measure of reputation based on brand personality measures; and consistent
experience, a measure of satisfaction based on steps in the customer journey.
The unique values of qualitative and quantitative research are worth noting. Qualitative
techniques such as focus groups should generate insights regarding consumers’ expectations of
brands, the words they use to describe them, and tactical ideas for brand-building. Quantitative
questionnaires are designed with this feedback in mind and used to identify drivers of brand
preference and strength of association.
A perceptual map is illustrated in Exhibit 2 to highlight the brand associations (derived from
qualitative research) and the strength of the associations with specific brands (derived from
quantitative research). The map is derived using special software designed for the task. In this
example, Your Competition holds a “leadership” position. Given the strength of this position, it
is often difficult (but not impossible with big budgets) to reposition that brand into more of a
humanistic brand (as with Your Organization) because most consumers don’t view the brand in
that light.
Exhibit 2
A perception map
5
6. Constructing a Better Brand
Beginning with the end in mind, you should assemble a list of key strategic questions the brand
research can answer, as indicated in Exhibit 3.
Exhibit 3
Key Strategic Questions
To answer this… Do this…
What is the market’s aware- Review familiarity results by audience of interest. This might
ness and understanding of our include payer mix, geography and groups who share similar
services? attitude about their healthcare.
How does the market The best insights come from qualitative interviews when
distinguish one hospital brand asking respondents to rationalize their choices. The results
from another? are often a mix of physician and service line preference (e.g.
Hospital ABE is best at heart surgery, but would go
elsewhere for cancer care.)
Will audiences believe out new Identify perceptual gaps among audiences. The greater the
position? gaps, the more difficult to align brand perceptions.
How strong is our current Construct a perceptual map that illustrates how strongly each
market position? brand is differentiated. The more closely the attributes are to
the brand, the stronger the association.
What are our strengths and Determine performance and relative importance of factors
weaknesses? that drive satisfaction and preference
How well does our brand In addition to side by side comparisons, use a brand equity
perform relative to our local scoring model to account for familiarity and favorability
competition and national factors. For example: familiarity X (preference + reputation +
benchmarks? satisfaction). This will establish an easy to understand metric
for tracking over time.
How difficult will it be to get Review internal perceptual gaps and commitment to the
employees to embrace needed organization. It is frequently the care that some areas of the
changes? healthcare system will be more difficult than others. Start
form the tails: those with strongest and weakest alignment
and work your way to the center.
6
7. Constructing a Better Brand
How do we plan for the future? Brand management is new territory for many organizations. In
addition to the business case, executives will need to share a common understanding of key
concepts. We have seen some organizations go so far as to hire a marketing professor to provide
instruction. As an unbiased third-party, he or she can be helpful in relayinginformation regarding
how to best work with brand management firms before developing a request for proposals or
starting the process.
One concept frequently misunderstood is the definition of brand. We have had success separating
brand into two components—the big “B” Brand and little “b” brands. The Brand is the promise
the organization makes to its audiences, both internal and external. It represents the aligning
principles of the organization and typically includes brand pillars and a resonant promise. These
are often reflected as words or short statements.
Every consulting firm has unique ways to define a brand. However, most should include a
positioning statement, value propositions and service standards, all organized around a brand
promise. A positioning statement crisply defines how audiences currently or should perceive you
and establishes meaningful points of difference. A value proposition, often created by segment,
will define the most important benefits provide at what costs (for healthcare, this is often
inconvenience). The brand promise is a mantra that guides the efforts of creative teams,
customer-facing employees and managers in making effective decisions.
A brand book is a lasting document intended to guide future decisions. This document is not a
graphics standards manual, but provides a thorough description of the strategic intent and pillars
of the brand. The more powerful examples use a visual vocabulary (i.e., pictures that reinforce
the brand) and a message map (i.e., words that reinforce the brand) and organize content in a
question-and-answer format.
Contents of a brand book typically answer the following questions:
• How did we arrive at this decision for our brand?
• What promise are we making to patients/physicians/ employees?
• How can employees fulfill this promise?
• Why are we changing?
• How will our customers recognize the change?
• What’s in it for employees/physicians/employees?
• How will we measure success?
The second reference to brands (i.e., visual representations) includes names and logos. These are
the visual representations found on signage, in communications materials, and on uniforms.
Tackling this naming issue before defining the brand promise is a mistake. Until you define the
central tenets of the organization, it is often useless to address hospital names, logos reinforce or
roll up to the overarching brand promise. For example, if part of your brand experience is to
provide seamless access to care, then this should be reflected in the branding conventions used
by each program, center and institution.
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8. Constructing a Better Brand
Furthermore, since many employees have high levels of emotional attachment to their respective
hospital names, logos and care center designations, they are often unwilling to initially embrace
change. Overcoming these attachments is much easier with the overarching brand or “promise”
in mind first.
Doing this serves to build consensus around a common idea, from which implementation
decisions are made.
How can we sustain momentum? Ongoing executive support is a requirement. It is not simply
a matter of approving a budget for the effort, but an explicit attitudinal and behavioral
commitment that the path being taken is the correct one. This includes discussions regarding the
brand at key meetings, ongoing reinforcement of ideals in public forums and a demonstrable
interest in its success. If your CEO isn’t demonstrating support for the brand, then other
employees are given permission to overlook it as well.
Changes will require routine internal and external communication. Detailed rollout plans should
be assembled, keeping in mind the variety of audiences with an interest in the brand’s success.
Successful organizations have a plan that includes details for initial communications and events
(remember executive commitment) as well as a strategy for ongoing reinforcement. Examples of
this might include worksite posters, presentations and even lasting mementos.
Some have used internal newsletters for this purpose, showcasing feedback or stories relating to
the brand. This gives the organization an opportunity to “catch them being good” and to
reinforce its commitment to the promise of the brand.
Having a clear vision for your brand will not only increase the likelihood for getting resources,
but will also create momentum within the organization for long-term success. By linking the
brand to business outcomes, educating key stakeholders, and letting information guide decision-
making, you will give yourself the best chance of establishing a high-performance brand.
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About the Authors
Kathleen DeVries is director of marketing, Barnes-Jewish Hospital.
John McKeever is president, Gelb. He may be reached at jmckeever@gelbconsulting.com.
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