Transcription:

Bill Klaproth: This is a special podcast produced for the 26th Annual Healthcare Marketing and Physician Strategy Summit, and we know it as HMPS, October 6th through the 8th in Aventura, Florida, as we speak with session presenters and keynote speakers. I'm Bill Klaproth. With me is Catherine Harrell, Chief Marketing Officer at Franciscan Missionaries of our Lady Health System; Christian Barnett, Senior Vice President of Strategy; and Chris Bevolo, Chief Brand Officer, both of them are with Revive.

Catherine, Christian, and Chris. We've got the three Cs here today. Welcome to the podcast. So this session focuses on building a brand that's not about you. Consumerism and competition from new entrants like Optum and Walmart Health demand that healthcare organizations take a completely new approach to brand. So Chris, let me start with you. Can you tell us about this approach and how this is different from most health system brands?

Chris Bevolo: Sure. The biggest difference is what we're talking about is a brand that is focused on something that is deeply motivating and emotional to the audience that you're targeting rather than focused on something that is about you as an organization. So it's not about promoting what makes you different and what makes you better, it's actually grounding your brand position, your messaging, all of it in something that's about your audience. And that's dramatically different than we see from the vast majority of health systems who have brands that are promotional. Whereas you see some of the leading brands in the world that have this, what we call personality brand or what we label a post health system brand, because it would move health systems beyond where this industry has been for the last 40 years.

Bill Klaproth: Okay. So speaking of some of these other brands, you say Nike and Starbucks and SoulCycle as examples of where the organization itself isn't the focus of the brand. So, Christian, let me ask you, when you say the organization itself isn't the focus, can you give us an example? Can you draw this out a little bit for us?

Christian Barnett: Yeah. I mean, when we think about Nike, we don't necessarily think about sneakers or clothing, or that may be what we buy. What we think about is kind of our aspirations and our sense of performance and, more laterally, kind of more social issues.

So in a way, Nike has had this fantastic insight about human nature, and our own personal and collective desire to perform at our best, and they've tapped into that insight. And what's brilliant about Nike is that they've kind of kept that insight going and going and going and going. Arguably, they've had one amazing insight and that's all it's taken.

And SoulCycle's in a way even more kind of explicit about this because it's about your wellbeing and your spirit. And the bike and riding is really just a mechanism to get to that notion of who you are and what your spirit is about. Those are really good examples of positioning yourself right inside the human psyche and then drawing the line back to the brand.

Chris Bevolo: I would add to that, just to build on what Christian is saying and compare it to health system brands. So most health system brands are out there promoting they have the best clinical excellence, they have great experience, their U.S. News & World Report. Their brands are again promoting what makes them better or different. Go back to Chris's example of Nike. Nike's brand is not about their shoes are better quality, they have lower-priced shoes, they have innovative shoe making technology, its great design shoes. It's none of that. Their brand is founded in that simple motivator that exists in most of us to move beyond any challenge put in front of us, not take any excuses, be something better and just do it.

Bill Klaproth: Yeah, that's a great example. And Christian mentioned positioning yourself inside the human psyche and then drawing the line back to the brand. And Chris, you said, find something that's deeply motivating and emotional to the audience you're targeting. So let's talk about these emotional motivators, since it seems to be revolving around the emotions of the target audience. So talk about emotional motivators. How can an organization find or identify their emotional motivators?

Christian Barnett: I mean, there's different ways to talk about this. I think one, perhaps the easiest way, it sounds rather obvious, but it's to find a big universal truth that we can speak to. And if we speak to it well enough and nobody else is speaking to it well enough, we start to own it. So to throw kind of the easy examples around, I think Open Happiness by Coke is a universal desired state, for a better word. In some ways, it's kind of effervescence and the bubbliness and the Open Happiness is like opening the cap from a classic Coke bottle. So although it's like a big kind of emotional vista, there's enough in the brand to link the two together.

On first sight, Open Happiness, I mean, so many brands can take that. And I think what we miss so often in what we do is that healthcare is so emotional and so fundamental. And we often get caught in the "Look at the technology we have" or "Look at the doctors we have" or "Look where we came in the reports" and forget that there are some really kind of big emotional truths out there, that in any given market, it's not too hard to go after and plant our flag and stick with it for a decade or more.

Bill Klaproth: Okay. So that makes a lot of sense. So how do we then take that and work that into our messaging without again then promoting our brand, which is the problem in the first place. How do we do that?

Christian Barnett: Then it's a case of, in a way, linking it back to that higher purpose or that universal truth and making sure that our brand is continually in that space, right? And it does require a little bit of trust from the client, right? Because the first time that Nike go out with Just Do It, or the first time that a health system goes out with fries, it might feel a bit generic. But over time and over time and over time, these big truths begin to feel owned by a particular brand. So there needs to be some trust and a commitment to the medium to longer term.

And secondly, the organization needs to accept that some of the kind of more tactical messages need to be subservient to this bigger thought. And the last thing, I think it needs to recognize that people are drawn to reputation and to the place of a system in their community, not to specific doctors all the time or specific bits of technology or specific service lines that are big thought can can cast an aura on all of those things.

Chris Bevolo: I would add to that too. And we'll cover this in the workshop in depth, because it's obviously going to be top of mind for any marketer in the health system who wants to pursue this. You still are going to promote your organization. You're still going to promote your service lines. You're still going to promote your doctors. You're still going to promote the opening of a new hospital or new clinic. It just won't come explicitly through your brand messaging, it'll come through other marketing messaging. So you have your cake and eat it too. But that's a huge, huge split from where we've been in this industry where we felt like we need to promote all of those things within our brand messaging. What we're suggesting here is you build a bigger brand without promotion, but you still promote on all the ways you need to at a marketing level through different channels.

Bill Klaproth: Okay. That makes sense. So we're still going to promote, but is it going to be under that umbrella of that emotional motivator that we've discovered.?

Christian Barnett: Good example we use is on the outside, from the non-healthcare is Dove. Dove has got an almighty campaign about real beauty. And they still have to promote male grooming products, female shampoo products, et cetera, et cetera. There's no dissonance. It may not be on exactly the same platform, but there's no dissonance between those product lines and the overall brand message. But it's not forced into, you know, "Hey, the inner beauty of a man with a grooming product." That's a great example of where they make that work really well.

Bill Klaproth: And it sounds like part of this, Chris, is getting there first before your competition does. Can you talk about gaining first mover advantage and why that's, you know, essential to success?

Chris Bevolo: Yeah, Christian hit on this a little bit before. But it's interesting because when you take an approach like this, again, think of Nike and going out with Just Do It, any shoe company could have had that message, right? Because it isn't about the product itself. It isn't about something about the organization. Like we said, it's not about them, it's about the audience, which should be any shoe company targeting that audience could have picked up that brand. The key is they were the first. They were the first to go out there and own the area of Just Do It, of that motivation, of that personal motivator in the audience. Once they owned it, it was there. And that's the key to being first mover, right?

So, an example is Hello, Humankindness from Dignity Health, where they built a whole brand around being civil in society and promoting kindness, because that has a huge impact on people's mental and physical health. Now, any health system could have actually gone out and done that. But once Dignity did it, that was their brand territory. They owned it. So if you want to own something like this, you have to be the first in the market. Otherwise, you're going to look like you're just following somebody else.

Bill Klaproth: Right. Christian said find something and then own it. All right, Catherine, let me ask you this question then. It sounds like we need to do a self-audit of where we're at right now, kind of like a situational analysis and try to understand our current approach to brand, to assess if it's properly embracing consumerism. I know you're going through this. Can you talk about that?

Catherine Harrell: Sure. And I think the bottom line there is reassessing your brand, it's really about a no-apologies-look-at-yourself and to be brutally honest, what's true, what maybe is not quite as good as you wish, but where can you as a brand live most authentically, where do you have credibility? And in this post health system brand work, it's really about meeting people, meeting consumers where they are. They're out there busy living their lives. And so in healthcare, where can we be most relevant to them in their every day, whatever they're doing.

Bill Klaproth: Yeah. I like what you said there. Really good phrases. Try to be as authentic as you can and meet the consumers where they are. So Catherine, when you were assessing your brand, did you go, "You know what? We're not saying the right stuff here. We're talking about us too much. We're not focusing on the consumer like we should." Did you find that?

Catherine Harrell: Oh, absolutely. And that is a regular checkpoint for us, even as a marketing team, because I think what Chris was saying that brand work lives alongside more traditional volume-driving work or acquisition work or new service introductions and things like that. So it's really about continually putting that together in a way that is cohesive. And for traditional health system marketing, it's often been just about that rationales out of the equation and less on the emotional. So we have to check ourselves and we work hard to do that as a team and say, "Is this coming from our point of view or is it coming from the consumer's point of view?"

Bill Klaproth: Well, this is going to be a dynamite session and I want to thank all of you for your time today. Let's get some final thoughts from each of you. Chris, anything you'd like to add?

Chris Bevolo: No, I really just look forward to sharing all this with the folks who come. And it's fantastic to have Catherine as part of this, because what we're talking about is pretty rare in the health system space, so it may seem out of reach for folks. Catherine has been through this, so she can talk to the benefits of this approach, but also share the realities. At the end of the day, this has to work for what you and your team are doing there.

Bill Klaproth: Chris, thank you so much for that. I appreciate it. And Christian, how about you? Any additional thoughts?

Christian Barnett: I'm looking forward to a kind of spirited session. And I do think that the healthcare sector is one which is riddled with emotion. It's so important to people's lives. And yet, we seem stuck in a kind of talk about ourselves world. So I'm looking forward to kind of nudging things forward a nudge or two, an elbow or two.

Bill Klaproth: Right. Right. Very good. Christian, thank you so much for that. We really appreciate it. And Catherine, Chris was alluding to the fact that you can talk more about this in a real world way. So can you wrap up our podcast today with your additional thoughts on this?

Catherine Harrell: I think this is one of the most exciting times to be in healthcare and healthcare marketing. And certainly the last couple of years have tested lots of things for all of us. And really, I think the importance of what we do and the seat we get to have as we move forward, what I will say and hopefully lots of folks will join us for this session, really look forward to that, but this brand work isn't easy. And it's really a journey of your organization as well as your own abilities as a healthcare leader. And to know that you get to help shape connections and relationships, that's pretty cool. So looking forward to being with everybody.

Bill Klaproth: Yeah, absolutely. It's going to be a great session. So my thanks to you and Chris and Christian. And thank you again.

Catherine Harrell: My pleasure.

Bill Klaproth: And once again, that's Catherine Harrell, Christian Barnett and Chris Bevolo. And for more information, and to register for the 26th Annual Healthcare Marketing and Physician Strategy Summit, please visit healthcare strategy.com/summit. Thanks for listening.