In today’s dynamic healthcare landscape, having a strong brand isn’t just a bonus – it’s essential. Beyond logos and slogans, your healthcare brand is what sets you apart and builds trust with customers and patients.
That is the prevailing belief of many in the Swaay.Health community. Here are five of the best comments we received.
Brand Can Drive Healthcare M&A
Kristin Russel, Chief Marketing Officer at symplr believes that a strong brand is a factor in M&A activity – a great reminder that brands aren’t just for customers/patients.
Establishing and maintaining a cohesive brand is essential in the face of the continued M&A activity we are seeing in healthcare. Dynamic organizations that meet the challenges of today and tomorrow by necessity must have dynamic branding to match. Key components to these brands include a strong overarching message and visuals that speak to the breadth of the company’s offerings with a laser focus on its mission. The cohesive brand should be recognizable, establish credibility, and strengthen the company’s industry-wide reputation to best suit the needs of the developing enterprise and its audience.
Brands Should Reflect History and the Future
According to Amanda Lomas, Vice President of Marketing at XSOLIS, brands should be grounded in an organizations history as well as its future. In addition, brands need to reflect the industry’s current state.
More than ever before, brands must be intentional in practice while staying tuned into the pulse of progress and the needs of the target audience. A good brand knows where it’s been and where it is headed – and should be underpinned by a solid understanding of the industry’s history and current landscape of a market. Competitive analysis is a key and early part of any branding process. No one wants to wear the same dress to the party. A good brand is also able to communicate effortlessly how it’s different and develop the brand voice in a way that resonates with the target audience. Understanding your audience is key. The biggest piece of the puzzle is having a unique value proposition that ultimately sets your brand apart from the crowd, using that to draw upon as inspiration for the brand itself.
Authentic Alchemy with Company Culture
Julie Wolk, Chief Marketing Officer at Carium had the best line in her comment on the importance of brand:
A brand isn’t a color palette, font style, logo or “jazz hands” website. A strong brand is an ethos born from the authentic alchemy of your company culture, your “why” for existing and how you want people to feel when experiencing your product or service.
Brand Can be Key to Competing with Retail Health
Retailers bake brand into their DNA. To compete with them, according to Katie Sorce, Marketing & Content Strategist at Overit, healthcare organizations need to ensure their brand message is clear, differentiated, and resonates with the intended audience.
A strong brand is essential for hospitals, health systems, and care providers as the healthcare field gets increasingly crowded. You must stand out and differentiate yourself not just from your direct competitors but also from the likes of CVS, Walgreens, and other healthcare disruptors. When is it time to audit your brand? When opening new locations or dealing with a merger or acquisition. If your new patient growth has been stagnant. If your community is confused about your brand or doesn’t understand all your offerings. If your brand has gotten watered down, disjointed, or outdated, so it no longer resonates with your audience.
Branding Can Deliver Meaningful Metrics
Laila Waggoner, Vice President Strategic Partnerships at Core Creative believes that branding is not a “soft science” that does not deliver meaningful metrics. She believes that branding can deliver, when done well.
There’s a common misperception that brand-building doesn’t deliver hard, meaningful metrics. And of course there’s an investment in time before you can see desired results. This is so often the reason branding has been given the back seat to performance marketing within many organizations. But this misperception is dangerous to your revenue, growth and value. When you invest in your brand and long-term goals, you will see short-term lifts. You just have to know what success metrics to look for.
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