Six Emerging Dynamics Of The Healthcare Brand
PUBLISHED: July, 2024
The Emerging Challenge
Differentiating healthcare has never been easy. But today’s hospital systems face more competitors, more comparison shopping and more media clutter than ever. Even long-established brands struggle to break through.
One school of thought says not to bother. Beds are full and appointments are hard to get anyway, so why build a differentiated brand?
Why Build a Differentiated Brand
Looming competition
Hospitals face mounting pressure from well-funded national players with strong brands and loyal customers. Amazon, Walgreens and CVS all offer clinical services, and Walmart Health plans to more than double its locations by the end of 2024.1 Indeed, the five fastest-growing healthcare industries all compete directly with hospitals.2 These competitive threats argue forcefully for a long-term brand strategy.
Consumer preference
As consumers become more involved in choosing their care, they’re actually changing the selection criteria. Objective measures like morbidity and mortality still matter. But subjective perceptions and emotional connections have become much more important. As one recent study put it, “…[healthcare brand equity] reflects perceived value as seen through the eyes of the patient, so hospitals need to establish a platform for consumer/patient relationships.”3 A strong brand platform provides exactly that.
Recruiting and retention
Study after study confirms the HR benefits of a strong brand, especially in a tight labor market.4 The best people want to work with the best programs, and a strong brand projects strength across the board.
Pricing leverage
Insurers want strong brands in their networks because consumers know and prefer them. To the extent that a brand raises the perceived value of the health plan, that brand accrues leverage for better terms and reimbursements.
Growth and expansion
The most consequential opportunities for any healthcare system will arise ultimately from the strength of its brand. The more highly esteemed among peers and consumers, the more value it brings to potential partners.
The real question is not whether to brand, but how. The answers lie in six emerging forces in the healthcare sector.
“The most consequential opportunities for any healthcare system will arise ultimately from the strength of its brand.”
Six Emerging Forces in the Healthcare Sector
DYNAMIC 1: BRAND AGGREGATION
Hospitals used to rely on geography and incumbency to define their brands. Today, amid mounting competitive pressures, they no longer enjoy that luxury. An historic shift in the healthcare market has left legacy hospital brands adrift, with the vestiges of a bygone era still evident in their taglines:
The care you need. The compassion you deserve. Advanced Medicine. Personal Care. Healing Hands. Caring Hearts. Passion for Excellence. Compassion for People.
They all sound the same. They promise the same thing. They all fail to differentiate because they were conceived in a world without competition.
That was then. Today, healthcare systems still struggle to define a consumer value proposition, for the simple reason that the consumer value resides not in the overall system but in the service lines where the care is administered. We can compare cancer centers to cancer centers, cardiac centers to cardiac centers. But it’s a mistake to think in the same empirical terms for the overall brand, which is best understood as an aggregation of sub-brands (service lines) whose essence is not a static value proposition but a dynamic conversation with consumers.
DYNAMIC 2: CONSUMER CENTRISM
Better information and more options have made consumers, not physicians, the final arbiters of choice. One key implication: selection criteria have expanded to include emotional as well as empirical metrics.5 These emotional metrics extend beyond the efficacy of doctors and therapies to include consumer perceptions of quality, empathy, and satisfaction.
Just as patient centrism puts the needs of the patient first, consumer centrism responds to competitive pressures by prioritizing the consumer experience of the brand, with the objective of generating and nurturing relationships.
To achieve this end reliably, health systems need to understand their consumers at a granular level.
“Better information and more options have made consumers, not physicians, the final arbiters of choice.”
DYNAMIC 3: GRANULARITY
Internet usage, cell phones, internet of things (IoT), and other connected devices now produce exponentially more consumer data than we’ve ever seen, in exponentially greater detail. On top of that, HIPAA requirements have forced the health industry to improve the quality of their data, compelling them to build out their data infrastructure to the point where most now have excellent data (anonymized) about past patients.
For health systems, this means the ability to target campaigns with extraordinary precision. We can now distinguish between people who respond to emails versus social media. We can identify the top four reasons for broken bones in a region and target everyone involved in those activities. We can spot the top health issues discussed on Facebook, and monitor the network for new ones.
We can, in short, target every significant demographic in a market with content that consumers actually want and value.
This, then, is the core value equation behind the aggregated health system brand.
DYNAMIC 4: PERSONALIZED CONTENT
Traditional media still play a big role in the healthcare mix. TV in particular confers status and authority. It inspires confidence and keeps the brand top of mind. In fact, when health systems combine broadcast and digital, the results can be spectacular.6
More and more, though, we see Tier 2 and Tier 3 campaigns give way to inbound strategies, most notably personalized content. Given the rising quantity and quality of healthcare data, health marketers can now create streams of content around the specific likes and needs of the consumer.
DYNAMIC 5: THE RISE OF THE NATIONAL BRAND
The COVID-19 pandemic sparked a rush to build virtual infrastructure that has permanently changed the way healthcare is delivered. The subsequent threats and opportunities have only raised the importance of a national (i.e., online) brand.
Local, regional and national competition
Urgent care clinics, outpatient facilities, imaging centers and even nationally-known health systems all compete with local systems for market share. A strong national brand can help fend off incursions.
Remote partnerships
Small and rural hospitals can now partner with larger institutions to offer leading-edge protocols like genomic and precision therapies.
The growing infrastructure for online conferencing makes it easier to collaborate with distant academic and research centers. Innovation can survive and thrive almost anywhere.
Staffing
Most hospitals need access to a national labor pool just to meet their regular staffing needs. A strong national brand gives them leverage.
Patient travelers
Better access to information lets consumers match distant providers to their own needs and preferences.
Telehealth follow-up and monitoring reduce the number of trips to the main campus, so patients can seek care within a much wider radius.
Healthcare tourism presents a growing swath of opportunities, with patients from other countries seeking high-quality care in the United States.
DYNAMIC 6: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Health systems are already using machine learning to collect and process market data. Analytic engines can scrape data from the web, apply algorithms, identify patterns, generate reports on the fly, deliver content automatically in response to market changes, test the performance of different executions and increase the rotation of the most successful.
Analytic engines put the power of granular data and streaming content within reach of the smallest health system. They are still the exception, but they will soon be pervasive. (And AI will not displace your data analysts. It will strengthen them.)
Takeaways
01
National, well-funded competitors are expanding rapidly into most American markets. Health systems need strong brand strategies to deal with that inevitability, with an emphasis on digital (i.e., national) branding.
02
Health system brands embody a fundamentally different value proposition than do their service lines. The latter promise value through medical care, the former through health information.
03
The role of the aggregated health system brand is not to generate appointments, but to generate conversations and relationships.
04
Consumer choice has changed the criteria for selecting healthcare, adding emotional metrics to the standard empirical measures.
05
Granular data and personalized content make it possible to create content streams tailored to the interests of individual consumers. These personalized content streams can raise efficiency and engagement dramatically.
06
AI-driven analytic engines can automate the collection and analysis of consumer data, providing real-time data streams that track changes in health system markets. Most health systems don’t use these yet, but most will. Early adopters will gain market share.
07
1 Carmouche, D. D. (2023, March 2). Walmart Health Nearly Doubles in Size With Launch Into Two New States in 2024. Walmart Corporate. Retrieved November 10, 2023, from https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2023/03/02/walmart-health-nearly-doubles-in-size-with-launch-into-two-new-states-in-2024
2 Boskamp, E. (2021, March 8). The 5 Fastest Growing Healthcare Industries. Zippia. Retrieved November 10, 2023, from https://www.zippia.com/advice/fastest-growing-healthcare-industries/
3 & 5 Górska-Warsewicz, H. (2022). Consumer or Patient Determinants of Hospital Brand Equity—A Systematic Literature Review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 1-36. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9331757/pdf/ijerph-19-09026.pdf
4 Santiago, J. (2019). The relationship between brand attractiveness and the intent to apply for a job: A millennials’ perspective. European Journal of Management and Business Economics, 1-16. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/EJMBE-12-2018-0136/full/pdf?title=the-relationship-between-brand-attractiveness-and-the-intent-to-apply-for-a-job-a-millennials-perspective
6 Brenner, M. (2022, June 1). How Empathetic Content Took Cleveland Clinic from Zero to 60 Million Sessions in 6 Years. Marketing Insider Group. Retrieved November 10, 2023, from https://marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/how-empathetic-content-took-cleveland-clinic-from-zero-to-60-million-sessions-in-6-years/
1 Carmouche, D. D. (2023, March 2). Walmart Health Nearly Doubles in Size With Launch Into Two New States in 2024. Walmart Corporate. Retrieved November 10, 2023, from https://corporate.walmart.com/news/
2023/03/02/walmart-health-nearly-
doubles-in-size-with-launch-into-two-new-
states-in-2024
2 Boskamp, E. (2021, March 8). The 5 Fastest Growing Healthcare Industries. Zippia. Retrieved November 10, 2023, from https://www.zippia.com/advice/fastest-growing-healthcare-industries/
3 & 5 Górska-Warsewicz, H. (2022). Consumer or Patient Determinants of Hospital Brand Equity—A Systematic Literature Review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 1-36. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/
articles/PMC9331757/pdf/
ijerph-19-09026.pdf
4 Santiago, J. (2019). The relationship between brand attractiveness and the intent to apply for a job: A millennials’ perspective. European Journal of Management and Business Economics, 1-16. https://www.emerald.com/insight/
content/doi/10.1108/EJMBE-12-2018-
0136/full/pdf?title=the-relationship-between-brand-attractiveness-and-the-intent-to-apply-for-a-job-a-millennials-perspective
6 Brenner, M. (2022, June 1). How Empathetic Content Took Cleveland Clinic from Zero to 60 Million Sessions in 6 Years. Marketing Insider Group. Retrieved November 10, 2023, from https://marketinginsidergroup.com/
content-marketing/how-empathetic-
content-took-cleveland-clinic-from-zero-
to-60-million-sessions-in-6-years/
