Healthcare Branding: Physician Marketing 

To either maintain or gain market-share these days you need to work smart and work hard. How do you manage the illusive task of positioning your company as a trustworthy, professional, innovative, and reliable partner for their practice? As we spoke about in the earlier Healthcare Branding post, the fate of both the Physician and your company is intertwined – your company needs to help the physician to be credible, trustworthy, and professional. In short it’s all about trust. 

The job of healthcare branding is to create some calm amidst the storm. You want the physician to look at your website, marketing collateral or email newsletter and instantly feel that it’s easy to understand who it is, what they are offering and the good old WIIFM factor (What’s In It For Me) factor all wrapped up in an overriding sense of trust. 

So how do you do this? 

3Sixty has developed a comprehensive branding cycle framework. This process will result in a professional, effective and relevant brand that meets your business objectives and strikes a chord with all the people who will come into contact with your company. 





Information Gathering.
3Sixty works with you to exhaustively investigate your company, products, markets, competitors etc., that covers desk research and face-to-face meetings. 

Brand Research.
3Sixty finds your brand essence, roots, personality and characteristics. 3Sixty probes and validates the current brand by conducting qualitative interviews and quantative surveys with a number of key personnel from your business (customers, consumers, purchase influencers, distributors, investors, industry influencers and other stakeholders). This builds up a snap shot of your brand as it is perceived today together with any opportunities or issues there may be. 3Sixty will also look at your market and build up a picture of what it may look in a few years time and what your brand may need to portray. 

Brand Workshop.
3Sixty can plan and facilitate a brand workshop that meets two main objectives: Firstly, to get the best results when defining the future brand and secondly to help with buy-in from company personnel for the implementation stage. The brand workshop is a powerful tool to build consensus, understanding and commitment to your new brand. 

Brand Strategy.
It’s all about “sustainable competitive advantage” – the brand strategy that 3Sixty helps you to develop will segment the market, highlight target customers, be wrapped around relevant and effective brand values, will outline a brand proposition that allows you to communicate the perception of your competitive advantage in the mind of the customers. 

Brand Testing.
This crucial stage is to test whether the brand benefits are compelling, unique and believable. Employees, Partners, Customers, and Re-sellers will be introduced to the proposed brand in order to highlight issues and areas for revision. 

Visual Identity.
Only after completing all of the above stages do we tackle the design of your brand. 3Sixty believes in strategy first, design second. We work with a range of design partners and will bring the best company with the right blend of skills and experience to get the best design for your brand. 

Go-to-Market Plan.
One of the most important things is actually how you go to market, how you deliver the promise made to your customers. This needs to be done across your organization, inside and out - it all inter-connects. It needs to resonate from your brand values. This is at the centre of the plan. There are four key brand communicators (see diagram below) and 3Sixty will develop a plan to ensure your brand is communicated clearly, consistently and effectively. 



To find out more about how 3Sixty can help your brand please contact us or read more about 3Sixty’s Branding Services

Branding means so much more than a nicely designed logo. Over the years I have attended a couple of seminars that address issues relating to the human memory and how we basically use only 10 percent of our potential brain capacity. A common experiment the lecturer used was to test the memory of audience members by asking if they could draw the logo of a well known petrol station, supermarket, clothing manufacturer etc… Everyone in the audience was familiar with the brand names mentioned but very few people could remember the brand logos and what they looked like, let alone draw them correctly. 

This definitely provides food for thought, just think about how much time, effort and money you invest in the creation of a logo and on the other hand people may not even notice it. What people need to realize is that a logo needs to portray much more than just a pretty design, it actually needs to strengthen the company brand. The most common logo’s we all recognize belong to companies like Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Nike and Apple etc. 




 



The McDonald's Golden Arches logo was created by Jim Schindler to resemble new arch shaped signs on the sides of the restaurants. The two golden arches together formed the famous 'M' which is globally recognized. 




                                                    
                  


The FedEx logo is well renowned, widely spoken of and trusted upon by nearly all the business icons.  It is said that the negative space between the “E” and “x” form an arrow pointing to the right side signifying moving forward. 




                                                     
                          


The apple is a direct reference to Adam and Eve. The apple represents the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and a play was made around the word byte / bite (Apple’s slogan back then: “Byte into an Apple”). 





                           




BMW medallion represents a propeller of a plane in motion, and the blue represents the sky. This is because BMW built engines for the German military planes in World War II. 






                     



The 3 stripes on the Adidas Logo are formed in the shape of a mountain, pointing out towards the challenges that are seen ahead and goals that can be achieved. 

Healthcare Branding has come a long way but today it is more important than ever before. Going back 10-years the Healthcare industry was viewed as being stuck in the Stone-age when it came to Branding. Popular thought was that Physicians and Patients chose their product based solely on the best option or technology for the medical condition they were treating. Branding had nothing to do with it. 

As time passed by, the same technology was produced in different countries - some better, some worse. It was only then that branding was implemented as a tool to help customers identify companies that not only had the best technology but also the best trained, educated, and qualified staff, the best safety record for patients and the least down time for physicians. 

There are many healthcare companies today that still don't maximize on the benefits of sound branding practices. 3Sixty believes that good healthcare branding can be extremely strong and is a beneficial business tools that can in reality increase long term sales. 

1. Physician Marketing 

We have touched upon promoting the quality of your technology to the Physician however; you also need to position your company as a trustworthy, professional, innovative, and reliable partner for their practice. You are providing the tools that treat their patients - it is these tools that make the Physician credible, trustworthy, and professional. The fate of both the Physician and your company are intertwined. 

2. Purchase Influencers 

Physicians, technicians, nurses, budget holders and patients all have a part to play in deciding which company the product is purchased from. Branding influences them all. Make sure that you thoroughly research and understand all of your target markets and their environmental needs. Communicate clearly & effectively the benefits of why they should choose your product. 

3. Patient Marketing 

When marketing directly to the patient, branding is extremely important. How do you make the patient aware of your company / product? How do you influence them to ask their Physician about the treatment your product provides? Also think about patient psychology - the marketing messages you communicate have a huge impact on consumer choice. Highlight the positives of combating the medical condition rather than the negatives of having it. 

4. Customer Service 

Customer service can make you stand out from the competition. Take a person who is diabetic for example. They wear an insulin pump 24/7. This means that they interact with the product on a daily basis and will talk to the company who built it for advice and troubleshooting issues. When your customer has a choice of product options from numerous companies, one option to become the preferred vendor is by excelling at customer service. 

Healthcare branding has become both your weapon and shield when it comes to market share. Branding helps to form both your reputation and philosophy in the mind of customers and end users. In the current economic climate this is a very powerful tool that healthcare companies should be maximizing upon. 



Read about 3Sixty's Branding Services

Brand slogans, corporate slogans or brand taglines? Whatever you call them the big question is do I need one and what makes it good? Nike thinks “just do it”, Apple says “Think Different” and American Express will “never leave home without it”. However, that said, there are many examples of huge companies who don’t have a brand slogan – for example the BBC or Harrods to name but two. 


                                      



3Sixty believes in brand slogans. We think that done correctly they are a powerful tool to communicate your brand promise and achieve stand out amongst your competitors.

Why do I need a brand slogan? 

•  To provide a meaningful and valuable tool to convey your brand promise
•  To help you stand-out from the competition
•  To unify all your other marketing messages
•  To ultimately drive sales

How do I create a brand slogan? 

Brand slogans should be derived from your brand strategy in order to correctly represent your unique brand identity. 

Step 1: Your brand slogan should ideally be developed from your company positioning statement. Developing a positioning statement is not a simple task; it needs to address core customer needs & desires, company/product/service strengths and you unique competitive advantages 

Step 2: The positioning statement should be used as a basis for generating new ideas for your brand slogan 

Step 3: Your ideas need to be ranked according to how meaningful they are to your customers, how they reflect your brand promise and if they are easy to remember 

Step 4: It is crucial to test your top 5 ideas both internally and externally before making any final decisions 

Step 5: You then need to make a conscious decision if it is important for you to trademark your slogan 

Step 6: Now the hard work starts, how do you effectively communicate internally and externally your new brand slogan…but this we will leave for another blog post…

The general rule is to be clear and not clever. Be focused on your customer. It doesn’t need to be a clever play on words. Nokia chose “Connecting People” and BMW “The Ultimate Driving Machine” both of which are great examples of simple, concise brand slogans that are meaningful, memorable and valuable. 

3Sixty’s brand slogan is “Fresh Perspective. Focus on Results.” Following the format outlined above we put a lot of thought into how we want to communicate our competitive advantage, our brand values and our brand promise. 

On a final note brand slogans require a long term commitment. Too many changes to your brand slogan can confuse your target audience and make it harder to create brand awareness. Don’t forget, it takes time for a brand slogan to do its job! 

Read about 3Sixty's Branding Services