As reimbursements shrink, competition proliferates, and public awareness about healthcare quality grows, hospitals and other healthcare providers are exploring every avenue to get their message out. Beginning in the 1980s, the healthcare profession grudgingly embraced marketing and advertising. Branding is the next step.

The rewards of branding can be great as it provides an opportunity for healthcare organizations to more effectively communicate their capabilities to meet patient needs. Integrated strategic communications plans, direct mail, public relations, special events, community sponsorships, health fairs, screening, and logos can all be incorporated in a branding program.

“The whole purpose of developing a popular brand is to drive differentiation and to gain awareness of and recognition for the way you do business,” says Jeffrey Nemetz, principal and co-founder of Chicago-based Healthcare Branding Group, Inc. His company has assisted 350 clients over the years, including ARAMARK Healthcare Management Services, a division of the Philadelphia-based ARAMARK Corp. that was formed in November 2003 to combine the company’s healthcare-focused food, facility, and clinical technology services businesses into a cohesive organization.

When Healthcare Branding Group was finished with its makeover of ARAMARK Healthcare Management Services, it had a new name — ARAMARK Healthcare — and a new identity.

The market had perceived ARAMARK as providing food services with little awareness of its other service offerings. ARAMARK was also seen as an outsourcing company that was secondary to the healthcare delivery process. To position ARAMARK Healthcare as a provider of a wide range of non-clinical services that are core to healthcare delivery, Healthcare Branding Group developed a unified and integrated strategic brand for all services provided by ARAMARK Healthcare, as opposed to focusing on the individual service lines.

In addition to changing the ARAMARK division’s name to ARAMARK Healthcare, Healthcare Branding Group also changed the division’s tagline from “Best Environments, Best Care” to “Best Care, Best Environments.” In doing so, the emphasis was placed on “care,” indicating that the services ARAMARK Healthcare provides are essential to the healthcare delivery process.

Dr. Jesse Viner is another of Healthcare Branding Group’s clients. Viner is founder and president of Yellowbrick, a physician-owned psychiatric healthcare company in suburban Chicago that opened in the summer to treat behavioral issues of adults between age 18 and the mid 30s. Viner is no stranger to marketing nor does he oppose it out of medical snobbery. A psychiatrist for 30 years, he has run large medical centers and psychiatric hospitals.

Viner hired Nemetz to develop a distinctive presence for Yellowbrick in the marketplace. Healthcare Branding Group created a marketing plan for Yellowbrick that included a mailing with emotionally evocative pictures to every mental health provider in the upper Midwest and to 40,000 families making over $200,000 a year.

Because his company is new, Viner can’t quantify the bottom-line results of Healthcare Branding Group’s work. In two months, Yellowbrick received more than 300 phone inquiries and the occupancy rate at his 12-bed facility is running at 40 percent. “Outpatient programs are starting to develop a very active momentum, and we are developing partnerships locally and nationally,” he says.

The emerging branding plan resulted from many hours of meetings with the key people in the Yellowbrick Program. “We spent four months talking about who we are, what is the market, and where we fit in,” says Viner. “Everyone is aware that the Yellowbrick Program does many of the same things that are done in other organizations, but now they know we are the experts for this emerging adult population, providing services typically not available elsewhere. Healthcare Branding Group helped us script our story.”

Another proponent of branding is Darren Cahr, a partner in the intellectual property practice of the Chicago-based law firm of Gardner Carton & Douglas. “The strategic branding of healthcare organizations has moved from novelty to necessity,” he says. “For-profit healthcare organizations have been quicker to embrace branding than the nonprofit sector. That’s primarily because nonprofit hospitals have developed from a different business model, a charitable model. Nonprofits never thought about branding or how associations built through branding with the consuming public can affect them. Branding tells everyone who you are and carries with it a basket of associations that we control. We want people to think, feel, or believe certain things when they hear our name.”

Eric Smallwood, vice president of marketing and research for Front Row Marketing Services, a unit of the Philadelphia sports and entertainment firm Comcast-Spectacor, says some modest form of naming rights is another way to build brand identity. “Hospitals have to cut expenses and they can leverage all their expense streams through a form of mini-naming rights called co-venturing,” he says.

Smallwood offers the following example: “If General Electric is the supplier of key diagnostic machines, perhaps it can sponsor a hospital wing and reduce the price of their machines in return for public awareness. Or, it can name a paper supplier such as Georgia Pacific as the official supplier of goods, giving the company signage and other visible advertising.”

“What hospitals are contemplating is little different than what most U.S. high schools are doing when they offer brand-name soft drinks in vending machines. This is simply consumer-to-consumer marketing,” Smallwood says. “A hospital’s best brand advantage is its name and it would have to be foolish to sell its naming rights to a private company because its identity and capabilities are firmly ensconced in the public mind. There is a certain amount of marketing value tied to the hospital.”

“Therefore,” says Smallwood, “There’s more value in venerable Hospital A opening a cancer center and calling it the Hospital A Cancer Center than in finding a national company to put its name on the building. Hospitals have to be careful about the companies with whom they associate. You wouldn’t want a funeral home or insurance company, that would show preference.”

Smallwood says his company has been contacted by hospitals looking for incremental revenues through co-venturing but declined to name them.

“Developing a brand is not an exercise in putting an ad together with a fancy slogan,” Nemetz says. “A brand allows you a platform upon which to stand and tell the world who you are. Providers who are proud of what they are want to communicate that successfully.”

“More to the point, if people don’t understand who the provider is where they live then they might go past your services and take someone else’s services,” he adds.

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