How important is brand in healthcare services?
Brand will become vital in healthcare services over the next decade. But most private healthcare operators, whether in care, ambulatory or hospitals, haven’t thought through their brand proposition and how it relates to the user experience. Even where they have, they aren’t spending serious money on it. We’ve talked to a dozen operators on the subject…
Brand will become increasingly important as the market consolidates, patient choice becomes a reality and the web creates more sophisticated consumers. Powerful brands should also enable companies to easily extend into new sectors. And governments are relaxing laws on promoting healthcare service brands. Doctors can now advertise in Germany.
It is also true that, as companies become larger, and, for example, employ more of their doctors directly on a full time basis, so they will have more and more control over the patients’ brand experience.
Probably the people who get brand best are the big insurers because they have been fighting it out in consumer markets for decades. Insurer Bupa gets brand. So does Sanitas, its Spanish offshoot, which runs a wide range of private healthcare which is only accessible to insurants. It has used its trusted brand to push into new non-insured services, such as Lasik and cosmetic surgery. And it is positioning itself as the leader in healthcare with a series of TV ads based solely on its recent creation of what it claims is the top cancer treatment in Spain. See it here on Youtube.
But so do others. Carema, the big Swedish care home and healthcare group, is taking brand very seriously. Marketing director Daniel Stålbo says he wants Carema to be as known and as trusted in Sweden as Volvo. To do this, Carema has to demonstrate openness and a willingness to be truthful.
Just look at this image of Carema staff – sturdy middle-aged women who look competent, caring and happy. The primary aim at this stage is to convince Swedes that private healthcare has a place to play in society.
Brand is also becoming more important for services which are bought on proximity such as care homes and clinics. Note for instance that French care home Korian has recently rebranded. A spokesman said: “Yes, local is important but relatives and residents like to know about the additional services and guarantees that we can offer as a national player with defined standards.” The new image is quite, well young.
All three ideas are light years away from the stock shots of handsome doctors, flashy
real estate and pretty nurses displayed on so many healthcare websites. Do these
meaningfully relate to the experience of a geriatric or someone undergoing bowel surgery? Do they really generate trust?
We’ll explore these ideas in more detail in our next issue. Let me leave you with a quote from Inaki Peralta, who heads up Sanitas’s hospital division: “To Sanitas, brand is not important, it is very, very, very important. It is essential we have the best reputation in the market. It is essential that we are trusted by the people who put their lives in our hands.”
We would welcome your thoughts on this story. Email your views to Max Hotopf or call 0207 183 3779.
