How Healthy Is Your Brand?

Gone are the days of getting medical care at just a primary care provider (PCP) or a hospital emergency room. Delivery of care now happens via telemedicine, urgent care centers, outpatient clinics, home health care, walk-in clinics, pharmacies, and more. With this shift, hospitals have been merging and/or acquiring different delivery of care options, leading to the creation of health systems.

These types of healthcare mergers and acquisitions can offer several benefits to patients, including improved access to care and services, better coordination of care across specialties, and enhanced technological capabilities. The creation of health systems can provide benefits to individual hospitals such as geographic expansion, improved infrastructure, financial stability, and shared expertise.

However, organizations overlook the importance of their brand. They aren’t always looking at the integration of their brands or the overarching brand used in the marketplace which creates confusion among consumers.

Patients are confused about the changes happening and what they will mean to the services, access, and overall experience with their health. So, what should healthcare organizations consider as they continue growing, innovating, and expanding, while providing excellent patient care?

1. Focus on the brand strategy. Design a brand audit and action program to understand existing perceptions of your brand(s) and the competitive environment. Use insights to determine, for example, whether to use a corporate brand to unify the brand identity or to keep separate brands. Leveraging consumer and provider insights will allow decision-makers to make the right brand and marketing strategy decisions.
2. Leverage AI to better understand consumers perspectives. AI tools that scan, synthesis, and theme large amounts of data (think about online reviews or social media sites) to enable you to understand the concerns or frustrations with an experience. Identifying the greatest frustrations, prioritizing, and solving has a major impact on improving patient experiences.
3. Tap into consumers’ emotional states. Emotion runs high as consumers think about and experience healthcare for themselves and their families. How a brand or experience makes a consumer feel is relevant to the actions they will take. CMB’s emotionAI captures the types of emotions that drive behavior, anchored in key dimensions of feeling bad to good (negative to positive) and low to high energy (passive and active).

As the Healthcare landscape continues to shift, it’s critical to double-down on your brand health and positioning for long-term success. CMB’s Brand Health Audit & Action program fuses behavioral psychology with best-in-class analytics and AI to construct a program that is purpose-fit to your objectives and informs forward-looking actions to achieve your strategic goals. Want to get started? Contact us today.