The Benefit Of Healthcare Branding
Effective healthcare branding is an essential component for any business that wants to be successful in the health and wellbeing space. It is more important than advertising your services, and this is because it goes a step further to reach patients who have the same values as you do
In the past, healthcare service providers didn’t need to brand themselves because they didn’t face the level of competition that they face now. There have been major increases in the amount of consumer choice available on the market, and suddenly brands have to appeal to customers in ways that they haven’t been expected to previously. This means that healthcare businesses face new challenges, and new opportunities are opening up for them to brand themselves effectively.
There are at least 100 billion searches for healthcare on Google alone each year. That’s 273 million healthcare searches a day! This shows just how much healthcare services need to embrace the potential for well-designed branding.
In a nutshell, effective healthcare branding focuses on what differentiates you from your competition. But one might ask, what do healthcare providers stand to gain? Well in a wide market with so many providers to choose from, there are more benefits of branding than you can imagine. Let’s take a closer look at some of them.
Establishment Of Trust
Trust is the backbone in any relationship, more so in a customer-retailer relationship. Customers need to rest assured that what they are paying for will satisfy their needs and fulfil the expectations they have in a branded proposition. Companies have to respect, reassure and convince customers in their products and services – because customers simply won’t buy from companies they don’t trust.
Effective brand communications are particularly critical in the healthcare industry. Many of the retailed products in healthcare are intended to be ingested, and with customers often then administering them to loved ones and children, it is absolutely crucial that they feel they can trust the brand they are buying from. Healthcare steps in when consumers are at their most vulnerable, so establishing trust and reliability is essential.
Good branding can create trust and demonstrate to customers that the branded proposition fulfils its promises. Giving customers a better understanding of the goods and services that they are buying and how they will work helps maximize their trust.
Identify Changing Patient Needs
As with any business, a healthcare company must know its potential customer as intimately as possible. It should have a good understanding of people, not simply in terms of demographic profile age, gender, socio economic status, location) but the mindset, beliefs, and cultural preferences of its customers to effectively engage with them. It is important to collect data to build knowledge of and empathy with your audience and take time to consider how they are likely to respond to your products and services. Today, the key to success is in taking an insight driven approach to delivering the best patient experience.
A good branding strategy gives you the tools to understand and respond to constantly changing patient needs more effectively, and to refocus or rebrand your proposition to meet them if necessary. In a WE Communications’ Brands in Motion 2018 global study, Catherine Devaney, Deputy Managing Director and Head of Health, UK says “Consumers want good products and proof over promise. Data shows that consumers’ needs, for some reason, are outpacing their needs to feel emotionally connected to a brand, with average scores up 16% for rational drivers and only 14% percent for emotional drivers from 2017 to 2018. Basically, brand marketers need to think about the balance of emotional and rational content they are creating.”
Strategic insight for brand design and development can include both qualitative and quantitative research. Qualitative research includes activities such as one-on-one patient interviews, while quantitative research uses techniques such as online surveys to test hypotheses developed in the qualitative research phase.
Insights gleaned from brand research are critical in determining the market positioning of a healthcare brand, especially periods as dynamic and unpredictable as that resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Beyond brand research, effective brand management ensures your healthcare brand is continually aligning tactical needs with longer term market trends and their future impact on patient needs and preferences.
Setting Your Brand Apart from the Competition
Gone are the days when a healthcare organization would be content with being judged solely on the established reputation of its medical practice. In the modern age, legacy trust is just not enough for healthcare brands to get an edge over their competition.
As patients continue to become more empowered consumers, the competition to provide them with the relevant services is becoming increasingly fierce. There is so much more information and many more solutions available for the digitally aware patient to choose from. And as a consumer, the decision of the patient is more often driven by the level of their emotional buy in.
There are many ways you can help your healthcare company stand out in today’s crowded marketplace but being distinctive and relevant is more important than ever; investing in effective branding that understands how to deliver the right values will be a critical part of establishing and maintaining a competitive advantage. To understand more about how to invest in the right healthcare branding services you can schedule a no cost consultation with an expert at Recipe Design. We work with you to identify the right approach for your business based on your unique strengths and finding powerful and sustainable ways to set your brand apart from the competition.
Taking an insight driven approach to branding, creates ways of identifying and leveraging unique opportunities in the market. Translating new insight with great design and powerful storytelling can take your brand to an entirely new level.
Brands Value Simplicity
Nobody likes complexity - even less so if they are anxious, fatigued, unwell or in pain. Patients need to find straightforward and credible solutions that ease concerns and provide a sense of comfort and reassurance.
Customers should be able to engage what they need without being challenged to read extensive text and explanations - they will expect good branding and design to communicate information in a form that is as easy as possible for them to understand and relate to. This can be a very powerful way of driving preference in the market.
Pricing needs to be clear and simple, so your customer can easily identify the value in the proposition and interpret the investment in health in the right way.
Organic search is essential for online visibility and is often the first touchpoint in the customer journey. Additionally, 66% of internet users look online for information about a specific disease or medical problem, according to Pew Research.
This means that before reaching out to a healthcare practitioner, patients will have a sense of expectation. Having an effective brand strategy in place that delivers good design across the patient experience will go a long way to make that person feel understood and their needs properly catered for.
This article was first published in December 2021
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