Brand Strategy, Architec and Integration
Brand perception, awareness and market share were a challenge for a healthcare network of five hospitals and over 100 physician clinics that evolved from M&A.
I led a comprehensive brand initiative to integrate the organization and build holistic value and awareness. The effort began with a deep brand discovery, gap analysis and resulting insights that were shared during a collaborative knowledge exchange. Additional activities included defining the marketing opportunity, goals, resulting communications strategies and campaign execution to personify the brand.
Tangible deliverables included an in-depth brand platform, brand architecture and naming conventions, audience messaging, brand identity guidelines/style guide, etc.
Having evolved from M&A, my client showed inconsistencies across its healthcare network. From its core values and naming conventions across its hospitals and clinics, to patient messaging, visual print pieces, etc. One of our first discoveries was to understand the collective core values that existed across the system. From there, a brand audit was executed. This leveraged the brand philosophy and gap analysis shown above to evaluate where there was alignment and misalignment of every asset against the client's newly defined core values.
The core is at the center of all brand strategies. This includes not only your values but your vision, mission and purpose. Developing a brand architecture creates a hierarchy and platform from which to build upon. To unify my client's brand, I developed an architecture that included the brand vision, promise, differentiation and value proposition. Simultaneously, in-depth discovery was done on understanding the audience. From there we were able to delve into specific audience messaging. The messaging architecture framework above demonstrates how a platform message can speak to all audiences and tailored messages are created for individual audiences.
The naming conventions for this healthcare network consisting of five hospitals and over 100 physician offices and clinics, were extremely inconsistent. The emotional connection that existed within each of the locations however, was extremely strong. For years, their patients knew them as "x" clinic and changing was not well received. Balancing the need for consistency and individuality was a defining moment for this engagement. I was able to visually depict the current versus future state while outlining the benefit and implications for moving towards a more simple brand architecture.