The more you study the competencies of hospitals and health systems with leading brand perceptions, the more it becomes clear their effectiveness stems from multiple perspectives. An excellent patient experience requires engaged employees motivated to provide meaningful care and providers who believe in the organization’s practice environment. From there, and only there, can an organization cultivate a perception of quality within their community that defines their success.
It’s a recurring theme in these blogs that a healthcare brand cannot succeed without quality to back it up, but sometimes it’s best to see concepts like these in practice. Imagine a hospital struggling with their employee culture and physician partnerships, leading to patient experience scores and consumer perceptions that leave room for improvement. In the case of this hospital, leadership recognized the principle that marketing can highlight existing strengths but not create them, the latter being a misconception that has led to countless unsuccessful healthcare marketing campaigns. As such, the organization prioritized initiatives that would build a solid foundation of care through operational improvements before investing heavily in their marketing and branding.
Over time, the organization began to observe performance improvements across their patient, employee, and physician research. Recognizing how these gains could influence perceptions of the organization among their wider community, hospital leadership turned their focus to the last piece of the puzzle and launched a Consumer & Brand Study with PRC. While initial consumer perceptions may not immediately reflect the organization’s work that went into strengthening their care experience, the insights can still serve as a valuable baseline for marketing efforts moving forward. With the strong patient experience in place, marketing now has existing strengths to create an effective campaign. With strengths established and baselines from their first consumer study, subsequent research can measure the effectiveness of their latest efforts to progressively build a brand as successful as the sum of their healthcare experience.
This focus on quality may seem obvious, but it’s a proven strategy for healthcare branding. Our client partners at Community Hospital similarly focused on improving their care and using marketing to spread the word about their improvements to ultimately overtake the Brand Power Index® ratings of competition. Indeed, these success stories reiterate the “marketing can highlight existing strengths but not create them” principle. Our patient-consumer quadrants discussed in a previous blog show that it’s impossible to create high consumer perceptions with poor patient experience, which is why so much of PRC’s research and insights prioritize data-driven improvement. It’s also why PRC utilizes an end-to-end philosophy that seeks to strengthen healthcare experience from all perspectives that, when put together, helps you create a brand that showcases the excellence your organization provides.
If you relate to this piece and would like to establish baselines for optimizing your consumer perceptions, reach out to our Consumer & Brand experts to schedule time to meet.
About the Author
Keith Schneider
Director, Consumer & Brand
Joining PRC in 2002 with a lifelong passion for branding, Keith employs a deep-seated set of marketing and research skills to help clients obtain actionable insights that will enable them to make strategic decisions to deliver quality care in ways that elevate their brand. During his tenure at PRC, Keith has managed hundreds of complex, custom research projects for healthcare organizations throughout the United States, overseeing the sample design stages, script-writing functions, and sample generation for PRC’s computer-aided telephone interviewing system as well as electronic surveys. Through timely deliverables and engaging, informative presentations, Keith helps ensure that clients have the data they need to assess their image, interpret the findings and fulfill all their research objectives. He currently leads PRC’s Consumer & Brand division and guides custom research to enhance clients’ marketing and branding efforts. Keith earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from the University of Nebraska–Omaha.
