One of your organization's greatest assets is its brand. It is represented by everything you and your employees do and manifests itself in your message positioning, your creative advertising, and your communications. To clearly distinguish yourself in the marketplace, create a smart brand. A smart brand keeps its promises. It is compelling, distinctive, and relevant.
Creating a smart brand doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a long, complex process of discovery, research, and creative exploratory. However, for the sake of this article, the following outlines this process in its most simplistic form. The first step in this process is discovering your Unifying Brand Idea (UBI), which is a key element to achieving new levels of success, leadership and positive change for your organization. A UBI is a powerful guiding light for an entire business. For internal audiences, it serves as a rallying cry that focuses the decisions and energies of the organization on achieving one objective. A UBI sets clear direction for how an organization defines its customer base, operates its sales force, drives product development, and so forth. For external audiences, the UBI establishes a positive expectation that clearly differentiates the organization from its competitors on both a rational and emotional level.
So what is the unifying brand idea that will advance your brand? Before you can uncover your UBI, it is essential to conduct research about how your stakeholders currently think and feel about your brand. Begin with a quantitative research study given to consumers, physicians, and employees, and then cross reference the findings. You can learn a great deal about preference, loyalty, and attributes that drive decision making. You can review the information by the overall system, individual hospitals, service lines, competitors, etc. Conduct a gap analysis between perception and reality of preference, as well as differences in beliefs between various sets of stakeholders.
From this research analysis, form a list of key questions to conduct separate qualitative focus groups with consumers, physicians, and employees for further insight. The findings can be unveiled at a discovery session or a half-day or full-day retreat to review your overall business goals, critical success factors, competitive market share by service line, competitive marketing spending, positioning, and creative messaging. There, you can conduct a SWOT analysis of your system’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This work will bring to light your key marketing opportunities.
The next step in the process is to have an open conversation, a step which typically occurs during a Discovery Session. This structured series of exercises allows you and your strategic team to come together to address strategic questions and the Six Ps of Branding: Positioning, Promise, Presentation, Personality, Propositions, and Pipeline. Listening is the key. The pertinent facts rise to the top during these sessions. The Six Ps inspire the UBI, which inspires organizational performance and market appeal.
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Positioning
A positioning needs to be relevant, credible, and differentiating to occupy a position in consumer minds. Positioning creates a meaningful difference, a unique place for your brand in the hearts and minds of prospects. Your positioning is identified through all of the qualitative and quantitative research you’ve conducted. From the positioning, you can build the remaining Ps. |
Promise
The promise of your brand sets expectations both internally and externally. The positioning is articulated in a simple promise statement for the corporate brand and for the product and service sub-brands. |
Presentation
Presentation links the visual and verbal symbols of the brand. Presentation is the look and feel of a brand and sub-brands, delivered consistently in all media and touch points. It includes your corporate logos, product logos, taglines, program names and more. It defines how the brand is presented, at each and every touch point. |
Propositions
The brand propositions are what connect the brand rationally with the target audiences. Propositions support the brand and make it credible on a rational level.
Personality
The brand’s personality is what connects it emotionally with target audiences. The personality is expressed in the tone, “voice”, and the style of communications. Defining the personality traits of your brand and expressing them creatively will ensure you are approachable, likeable, and respected.
Pipeline
The pipeline is your communications delivery system, including advertising and collateral, public relations, community outreach events, association marketing and digital communications. Examine the relevance, marketing power, and efficiency of the entire pipeline and develop a media-neutral communications plan that properly expresses the brand.
Once you have distilled the research and gone through the Six Ps exercise, you now have the information to identify your UBI. This is where your brand creative exploratory process begins. Using the UBI and Six Ps as your framework, write a brand creative brief. Be sure to have it approved by all key stakeholders. The brief should highlight:
- What stakeholders currently believe about your brand
- What you want them to believe about your brand
- Who your target audience is specifically
- What channels you will use to communicate
- What is the single most important point you need to make
- What are the supportive points
- Your 6Ps and UBI
Now that your smart brand is firmly established, you will find that it's easier to build a strategic plan that makes sense for your organization. This is because your new brand is true to your organization and aligned with your core values. This process ensures that your audiences perceive your brand in a way that moves your organization forward with the ultimate result of building internal and external proponents of your brand.
It is important to identify the unifying brand idea that will shape your strategic vision and plan. Before you go out to market with a campaign, ask yourself what people currently think of when they see your organization’s name. Then ask yourself what it is you want them to think.
Smart brands don't just happen. They are built by people who know where the brand needs to go and who have the experience to take it there. For more information about building a powerful brand, please contact Jeff Chesebro, President at Princeton Partners Health, at 609-452-8500 or jchesebro@princetonpartners.com or www.princetonpartnershealth.com.
