Brand & Marketing

Aligning Brand Strategy with Operations to Drive Business Performance

The Business of Branding:  Growth. Innovation. Leverage.

We work with health systems to establish brand as an essential business strategy for improving market performance.  Increasing volume, revenue and profitability.  Creating new markets.  Stimulating innovation.  Attracting top talent.  Building customer loyalty. Our in-depth and diverse expertise in branding, health system operations, service development, physician services, payer relations and marketing brings a unique perspective to our clients – one that aligns branding with business building, clinical operations, administrative systems and marketing investments to ‘deliver the brand’ rather than merely communicate it.

We know health care consumers and the role that brand plays in influencing consumer decision-making and choices regarding health and medical care.  We understand the complex referral and transactional relationships among consumers, health services, physicians, hospitals and payers, and how brand can be used to create premium referral, partnering and contracting advantages.  We realize that strong brands attract the best talent, and how brands can be leveraged to benefit recruitment and retention.  We know that brands are about growth, revenue, profitability, market leverage, staff commitment and customer loyalty.

Brand Strength Improves Market Performance

Brand leadership has never been more important – or more challenging – for health care organizations seeking to create and sustain competitive advantage.  Market consolidation, physician integration, medical innovations, networked technologies, retail competitors, organizational transparency and difficult economics are changing the underlying basis of competition – and taxing even well developed and established healthcare brands.

To date, brand investments in the health provider sector have been largely focused on brand communications, including brand identity systems, advertising and promotions.  The concept of brand and its interdependency on the ‘operating model’ is a fledgling one in the industry.

Health systems make sizable investments in brand communications, customer service, quality improvement, lean systems, service line development, provider acquisitions and information systems – yet, these are often pursued in silos, with little consideration for how such pursuits may or may not build brand equity, and with no master plan for integrating and aligning activities to achieve competitive advantage.

This undermines brand performance, wastes marketing dollars and creates organizational ‘fatigue’ for multiple initiatives that produce incremental gains but don’t substantially improve market position.

Rapidly Restructuring Markets Require New Approaches to Brand

Market consolidation, expansion, diversification, partnering and networking are on the rise.  Ever more complex relationships, expanding clinical portfolios, new business ventures and expansion into new markets require a proactive, focused and purposeful plan to build and leverage brand equity across the enterprise – across geography – across constituencies.

Today’s approach to branding must evolve to address and manage the complexities of:

  • Hospital and health system mergers & acquisitions
  • Physician integration, joint ventures and owned medical practices
  • Ambulatory, post acute and retail diversification
  • Academic, technology and business partnerships
  • Multi-market, multi-state expansion initiatives
  • Enterprise IT/EHR/Website strategies
  • Co-branding/co-marketing relationships

Closing the Brand Equity Gap of Investment and Realized Return

Brands are a competitive asset.  Many health systems have invested in brand building.  Some have succeeded in creating stronger brand identity. A few have improved market position. Only a handful has fully realized the substantial, measurable advantage of a fully activated brand strategy:

  • Strong brands influence consumer choice
  • Strong brands attract and retain the best talent
  • Strong brands create contracting, partnering leverage
  • Strong brands shape referral patterns
  • Strong brands build customer loyalty
  • Strong brands better weather economic cycles

The gap between investments in a brand and realized return cannot be closed with brand advertising alone; nor, can it be resolved by customer service, clinical quality, lean operations and other initiatives pursued in isolation of a comprehensive, integrated approach to leverage the results for market advantage.

We believe that the only way to close the brand equity gap is to effect strategic, operational, clinical, physician and marketing alignment to create and deliver a meaningful, differentiating and durable brand value proposition.

Our Brand Practice Capabilities

Brand Intelligence

  • Qualitative consumer, physician, employee research
  • Qualitative/quantitative concept testing
  • In market testing
  • In-depth interviews (IDIs) with payers, employers, physicians, referral sources
  • Organizational/customer/patient analytics
  • Segmentation/PATH profiling
  • Brand Tracker (brand performance, brand equity)
  • Competitive assessments

Brand Strategy

  • Brand vision and evolution
  • Brand identity, positioning and value proposition
  • Brand driven organizational, product and service delivery design
  • Brand portfolio management
  • Brand architecture and naming structures
  • Market, customer, channel segmentation strategies
  • Merger, acquisition, and joint venture brands

Brand Activation

  • Strategic, operational, functional and marketing alignment
  • Brand driven innovations (products, systems, service delivery, channels, marketing)
  • Brand touch point analysis and design
  • Brand activation planning, training and implementation
  • Experiential branding
  • Brand promotions planning
  • Strategic marketing planning

  • Brand management tools and systems

Brand Performance

  • Brand metrics, monitoring, reporting
  • Performance assessments, recommendations and renewal strategies

The Core Competencies of Brand Leadership

Brand Intelligence

Advanced brand research and analytic techniques to inform positioning, segmentation, targeting, product design, channel, pricing and promotion decision-making.

Brand Strategy

Strategic processes to create a core positioning strategy, articulate the brand value proposition, and formulate integrated operational, clinical, business development and marketing strategies to create meaningful differentiation and achieve growth objectives.

Brand Activation

Techniques to identify brand touchpoints; focus product design; align operations and policies; build and support effective channels; drive service innovation; create advertising that works; and build staff commitment to delivery of the brand-defined experience.

Brand Portfolios

Methods for determining, managing, and building brand portfolios in diversified health systems, addressing multiple facilities, strategic business units, markets, physician integration, and partnering ventures.

Brand Leadership

Analytic techniques to measure and track brand performance, and methods to evolve and renew brands to address new opportunities and competitive dynamics.

Our Approach to Brand Strategy, Alignment and Activation

Quantify the Opportunity - Developing Insight.  Discovering Opportunities.  Forecasting Demand.

We employ brand research, market analytics and forecasting techniques to identify and measure brand equity, understand customer, employee and physician value-drivers, discover growth opportunities and forecast demand.

In this first stage of the process, we help our clients develop deep insights and understanding as to how well their brand portfolio is currently working (as evidenced by consumer understanding, preference, volume, share, market position, etc.) and quantify the opportunity for improvement.

Our approach addresses:

  • Competitive positioning relative to the choices that customers have for accessing care in the market
  • Customer demand as influenced by physicians, payers and other referral sources and intermediaries
  • The needs, preference drivers, brand affinity and brand loyalty factors of key customer segments
  • The strengths and vulnerabilities of the current brand and brand portfolio

  • Market opportunities in key geographic, payer and referral channels

Armed with these diagnostic tools, health systems can:

  • Forecast opportunity by geography, customer segment and payer
  • Develop strategies to pursue growth in the right places
  • Focus product and service delivery initiatives to deliver the features, attributes and benefits that best correlate to the brand.
  • Create the means for building sustainable relationships with customers
  • Optimize performance of the brand portfolio

Define the Core Brand Strategy - Creating a Differentiated, Defensible, Competitive Brand Position

We help clients discover and create a core, differentiated, defensible market position, define the brand value proposition, align brand to mission, values and strategy, determine the critical success requirements, and identify growth paths.

Powerful brands do not happen by accident.  They are carefully discerned, purposefully positioned and aggressively managed to create connections that stimulate demand and build loyalty.  Brands must be distilled into actionable attributes that operations can translate into deliverable features.

Our methods will enable you to:

  • Determine the optimal market position, brand value proposition and brand building strategy
  • Define your unique brand-driven patient experience
  • Create greater differentiation and separation from the competition
  • Identify growth opportunities in key segments, markets, channels
  • Translate into actionable principles, features, service standards and behaviors
  • Address barriers that may limit the power of your brand to move market share.

As a result of this approach, health systems can:

  • Employ the brand value proposition as an integrating element to drive and focus strategic planning, business development and organizational design
  • Create a focused competitive position that addresses target audiences and sharply contrasts with competitors
  • Build discipline for physician, facility and operational strategies to channel investments to those things that matter most
  • Optimize marketing activities, resources and investments; and drive effective communications strategies

Align Business Strategies to Capture Customers and Revenue

We assist clients in building and aligning health system and service line strategies, new business ventures, physician integration initiatives, access channels, facility planning and service innovations to deliver on the brand value proposition and grow the business.

No matter how well-known your brand, market success depends on alignment of the brand to solid business strategies aimed at developing robust clinical programs, delivering quality service, aligning physicians, cultivating referrals and building convenient access points. Primary care offices serve patients and create channels to specialists.  Specialists to imaging and procedures.  Emergency rooms to critical clinical services.  Ensuring that your product portfolio, physician relations, geographic coverage and critical entry point strategies are aligned to your brand is an essential element of success.

We assist you in building service line, physician, facility and service innovation strategies that create powerful and consistent first-impressions of your brand, and affirm that the customer made the right choice in selecting your health system.

Among the benefits of our approach:

  • A research driven position and strategy that integrates all aspects of planning, business development, operations and marketing
  • Business models that serve as a sustainable platform for creating a common brand experience with patients, physicians and staff
  • Segment, product and channel marketing strategies to attract target customers and position the organization for growth
  • Alignment of systems, policies and incentives (e.g. compensation models that align physician incentives to brand performance
  • Strategies for employing and partnering with physicians, developing facilities, and creating service innovations consistent with the brand experience

Activate the Brand - Linking Operations to Deliver the Brand Experience

We strengthen the link between marketing and operations in order to leverage investments in people, processes, and performance improvement initiatives to deliver a differentiated brand experience.

Strong brands are built and sustained through a consistently delivered brand experience – which is created by people, systems and processes.  Operational execution is the most common cause of brand underperformance.  We have developed an approach to strengthen the link between marketing and operations, drive innovation in service delivery, and leverage investments in people, processes, performance improvement initiatives and marketing to build brand equity.

Our approach focuses on four domains of brand activation: people, processes, performance and marketing.

Results:

  • Brand defined experience
  • Operational alignment
  • Improved communications
  • Engaged employees
  • Satisfied, loyal customers
  • Culture of innovation
  • Effective promotions
  • Return on investments


Monitor Brand Performance - Delivering Measurable Results

We work with clients to establish brand performance metrics, as well as systems to measure and report progress, monitor changing market conditions, and evolve the brand to address emerging opportunities.

Upon completion of our work, health systems will be well positioned to:

  • Develop, deliver and build a strong brand that drives volume, innovation and market leverage
  • Generate understanding and shared commitment amongst employees, physicians, business units and sites of care for how to deliver on the brand value proposition and contribute to the health system’s success
  • Link, integrate and give meaning to multiple operational and performance improvement initiatives (such as Lean, Studer, eCare, etc.) to improve market position
  • Recognize and leverage brand equity to create new business ventures, build market-making partnerships, gain premium advantage and attract best talent
  • Engender patient and customer loyalty, and develop powerful word of mouth endorsements for your clinical services and physicians
  • Understand the structure and relationship of core and subsidiary brands, and optimize performance of the brand portfolio
  • Improve returns on marketing investments and advertising campaigns

We assist clients in determining brand performance metrics and establishing systems to measure and report progress; as well as to monitor changing market conditions and recognize opportunities to evolve and renew the brand.

For more information about our brand practice, contact us at info@navvisandcompany.com, or contact our Norfolk office at 757-640-8515.