One of the keys to a strong brand is the ability to connect, or identify with a customer.  A brand that stands for something positive, has a nice [aesthetic] image, and attracts others like ourselves can be very successful in developing a strong following.

This is, of course, true of consumer brands such as Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Budweiser, but is also very true of professions such as medicine, osteopathy, physical therapy, acupuncture, and dentistry.  With regard to consumer goods, you probably know people (maybe even yourself) that would NEVER go to Starbucks, ALWAYS prefers Budweiser to Coors, and would NEVER be caught at a fast food giant, namely McDonalds.  Now, NEVER and ALWAYS are strong statements, which illustrates the power of the brand to help consumers identify with a good or a service.

A brand stands for something.  It’s a promise of a certain experience, a certain expectation, a certain way of doing things.  Because a brand represents something greater than itself, it can have much power over an audience to influence feelings, emotions, and behaviors - even to the point of making consumers ALWAYS or NEVER do something.  Pretty powerful.

The same is true of the healthcare professions.  Healthcare professions, while looking different than consumer brands, have all of the same attributes and are used in the same way.  Consumers (i.e., patients) identify with certain healthcare professions, and not with others.  I know people that will ALWAYS seek a physical therapist and NEVER a chiropractor.  I know others that would ALWAYS seek a medical doctor prior to seeing an osteopath.  Now, is this because a chiropractor is unable to help someone that needs physical therapy, or would an osteopath necessarily take a patient down the wrong path compared to a medical doctor?

No, not at all.

This is the power of branding.  By identifying with a certain consumer group or patient segment, healthcare professions, like other consumer goods and services, can influence behavior to the point of the ALWAYS and NEVER statements illustrated above.

So, how does this impact my healthcare practice you ask?  It impacts your practice and your profession (whatever it might be) because it is the brand conveyed to your target patient population that will drive whether or not you are successful in attracting patients in your area.  Whether or not patients in your community identify with your practice or your profession is a critical piece to the overall success of your practice, and it is wise to consider this as part of your overall marketing strategy and communication plan.

Make sure that your practice and your profession are finding ways to identify with your target patient population, and you will find yourself on the receiving end of the ALWAYS statement mentioned above.

I fly fairly regularly.  This said, I had yet to fly Southwest Airlines until this past weekend on my way to Orlando, FL to attend the Private Practice Section meeting of the APTA.  As I headed to the conference to do a talk on the topic of branding as it relates to the physical therapy profession, I had branding on my mind almost the entire time.  This is not too much of a variance from my day-to-day though, as I often think about branding as I go about my daily interactions with the world.  I’m a bit of a nerd like that.

For each decision we make, we rely on brands to help us out.  We may not realize it, but without brands we’d have a heck of a time making decisions about what to purchase, where to go, and how much we should pay for stuff. 

When my business partner tried to convince me to fly Southwest Airlines this weekend, my initial response was that of hesitation.  One thing I hate is uncertainty, and the Southwest brand that lives in my mind simply states, “cattle call.” 

That’s how you get on the Southwest flights, right?  A cattle call of sorts, finding your own seat according to some loose boarding structure based on a boarding “group.” 

My second thought when he suggested Southwest though, was that of good customer service and low fares.  I’ve seen plenty of Southwest ads over the years, and that much has become clear - I should expect to be treated well and won’t have to pay too much for it.  So, when I confirmed this with a price tag of about half what I usually pay for a cross-country trip, I made the decision to give them a try - how wrong could their brand be?

Well, it wasn’t wrong.  The low fare, the good service (it did happen), the cattle call; they were there, all three, just as promised by the brand. 

And so goes the story with healthcare.  In my talk on Saturday, I spoke of the “brand promise” that we make as healthcare practitioners, and how our promises help our patients (i.e., customers) make decisions about who, when, and how to seek our services.

Some professions, such as physical therapy, have much diversity and creativity to offer, landing physical therapists in a large number of different job settings.  This, while valuable to the industries served, does not necessarily make the branding process easy.  For a brand to help consumers make decisions it must be clear, concise, consistent, and regular.  That is, it has to make the decision process a “no brainer” in order to be a powerful, successful brand.

When a patient injures themself or becomes ill, they make a quick decision about who to see, and when to see them; and they make the decision based on the information stored at the “top of mind,” not the information they will find in a marketing pamphlet or a private practice website.  For this reason, it is important that a profession’s brand be abundantly clear to the consumer, providing guidance for both how and when to use the services in order to get better.

This week I’m attending a professional conference in Orlando, FL hosted by the American Physical Therapy Association’s Private Practice Section.  I’ll be speaking on Saturday about the importance of “branding” to the future of direct access physical therapy, and on that theme will be posting a bit about branding this week on The Healthcare Entrepreneur.

Branding is of huge importance in all of healthcare; not just physical therapy.  Branding is of significance to healthcare for the same reason that it is in consumer goods and retail - intense competition and a changing landscape require that we crystallize our messages to consumers so that they will best know how, where, and when to use our services.

At its core, a brand is a promise; a promise of something that will be delivered by your practice.  A promise of quality, a promise of an experience, a promise of an outcome.  Just as you use brands to help you make decisions about which detergent or soda pop to buy, our patients rely on our brands to help them determine where and who to go to for their healthcare services.

You don’t have a brand you say?  Wrong.  You always have a brand - you just might not have created it deliberately.  There is nothing that says a brand has to cost a dime, that it has to be strategically developed, or that you even have to know what it is.  If you have customers (i.e., patients), you have a brand; a promise of the experience that will be received when interacting with you, your practice, and your staff.

Do you typically run 20 minutes behind schedule for patient care?  If so, that’s part of your brand - it’s what your patients will expect even after one behind-schedule experience in your practice.  Is your practice warm and inviting?  If so, you can bet your patients will understand this as well.  These elements, while having nothing to do with a logo, brandmark, or marketing plan, have everything to do with the promise you are making to your patients.

When thinking about your practice’s brand, take steps to “promise” a deliberate experience; one that you would prefer yourself.  This is the type of promise that is made through actions, which speak ever so louder than a crafty logo or brandmark can ever do.

Before becoming a physical therapist, I remember working for a few PT practices that had “marketing personnel” on staff.  I remember thinking, what a waste.  For crying out loud, take care of your patients and people will continue to come to the clinic.  Simple as that…I thought.

How funny it is that perceptions change over the years, especially when enlightened by a bit of real world experience, and in my case, the study of marketing in business school.

Healthcare, like any business, is not a simple as “do a good job, and people will come.”  The inverse can actually be true however, whereby you can actually NOT do a good job, and people will STILL come, if the right experience and/or image is crafted, making the services look desirable (even if they aren’t all that good).

Now, there are definitely problems inherent with bad services that only look good, and I would never suggest that this is a route to take, especially in the practice of healthcare.  I only bring it up to illustrate the power of crafting an image, as it is the image the precedes, and hence, creates [much of] the reality of the experience.

The practice of healthcare, whether in your small dental clinic or you burgeoning dermatology practice, needs a good image to attract customers.  In marketing, “image” is somewhat synonomous with “branding,” and without getting too technical in this short post, it is the “brand image” that is responsible for your customer (i.e., patient) volume, or lack thereof.

A “brand” is nothing more than a promise.  A promise of something good, or something desirable.  For the physical therapy practice, the brand may be the promise of rehabilitation, or improved function.  For the boutique medical practice, it may be a personalized, comfortable medical experience.

Many things can be done to craft a brand in healthcare, including (but absolutely not limited to) the development of an appropriate corporate message and brandmark.  Deeper though, and more relevant, is the actual “promise” that you are selling when you ask patients to come back to see you again or when you solicit referrals from your peers.  The promise that the experience will be desirable to those that use your services, and consistent from visit to visit - that’s what fills healthcare practices.

Here is a link to a great post from Bnet.com on the topic of branding, which includes a list of the “five things every manager needs to know about branding strategy.”  It’s a great post, and well worth the read.

And branding, that’s even worse. It doesn’t help that the name conjures up images of branding cattle, or somebody being branded a criminal. How about that, branding has a branding problem. Ironic, isn’t it?

If you don’t get the irony, you really need to read this.

Here’s how it works. Your company and its products and services have associated attributes that affect customer buying decisions, employee morale, and investor confidence. They also affect your company’s market share, profit margins, and bottom line. 

Branding strategy enables your company to measure and change the perception and affect of those attributes. It’s really important. No kidding.

Decision-making, despite its importance and prevalence in clinical care, has a hard time fining its way into the business side of healthcare.  Let’s face it, decisions are hard to make for a cohort that cites risk aversion as one of the most common reasons for not starting a private practice in the first place.

And no other place within the business of healthcare is decision-making more hard to come by than with marketing.

It’s not the decision as to whether or not to market that’s so tough (though controversy exists there as well), but rather the decision about who to market to that reminds me of some of the most labor-intensive decisions we have to make in life.  And while deciding on a market for a healthcare practice may rank up there with the other big decisions we make (you know, choosing a color theme for our bathroom linens, deciding whether or not to get the extended warranty for the DVD player), it really doesn’t have to be that hard. 

The problem is twofold: (1) We generally think we’ve got one chance to get it right and really don’t want to blow it, and (2) we actually think we can be everything to everyone, so we give it the old college try.

Both of these are myths of course within private practice, and if we can dispel these and bring a healthy level of focus and distinction into our business strategy, odds are the decisions will fall right into place and we’ll not only know who our target market is, but we’ll be able to do a pretty darn good job of serving it.

Myth #1: We’ve got one chance to get it right.  Generally speaking, we actually don’t want to screw up on choosing the right market for a medical, dental, or physical therapy practice - each requires a significant amount of capital, and for the risk averse, this by itself usually lends itself to healthy deliberation.  The thing is, choosing a target market for a practice isn’t like trying to find the one blue marble in a bag of 500 red ones.  Think of the bag as containing every shade in the spectrum from deep red to bright blue.  Yeah, we don’t want to choose brick red, but it’s also OK if we don’t get sky blue the first time around. 

If you’re starting a physical therapy practice and aren’t really sure if you want to go after the women’s health market or the general outpatient orthopedic population (as you’re dually trained), realize that there are commonalities to both (yes, women do have general orthopedic conditions that crop up from time to time) and that by choosing a direction, you’re not casting an eternal spell on your practice that will never allow you to change. 

Now, there are some considerations that should be made when making this decision, including how to back out if indeed it doesn’t pan out for the long term, but these are well handled through a sound branding and marketing strategy that builds into it a flexible architecture and messaging strategy that can unfold in a couple of different ways depending on the direction the wind ends up blowing.

What generally doesn’t work however, is making the decision (not much of a decision actually) to do it all.  Why wouldn’t you want to do it all you ask?  Doesn’t that open up many more doors by casting a wider net?  Well, yes, but in theory only.  The reason you don’t want to do it all is because you likely can’t, which brings us to myth #2.

Myth #2: We can be everything to everyone.  We’re not designed to think of ourselves as incapable of doing what we set out to do.  In healthcare especially, the level of intellect and drive is of the highest around, so why wouldn’t we be able to go in multiple directions at once; be kind of a one-stop-shop to all who need us? 

We can’t do it because like any other mortal, when spread too thin we can only scratch the surface in terms of quality, time, and energy (sort of important in healthcare), and even if we could do a great job at it, the lack of focus wouldn’t communicate to the marketplace that we are distinctly different from our competitors. 

Surprisingly, being good - or being different, is just as important as communicating that we’re good - or different.  Certainly an argument exists that many of us would rather be good than have others think we’re good - the problem is, that if nobody knows we’re good we can’t really help those that need us anyway.  This is precisely what happens when we lack a defined focus in our selection of a target market and/or specialty for our practice.

Now, it’s important to understand that the takeaway here is not that one can’t be a generalist and survive in today’s healthcare marketplace - on the contrary, generalists are one of the most critical components of the system as a whole.  What should be conveyed is that even a generalist who has selected her specialty (general practice) has many decisions to make about how to focus her practice around other elements that will influence the level of focus and distinction the practice holds in the market.  Decisions regarding which insurance contracts to solicit (drives patient mix and revenue diversity), which age group to target, and which referral sources will provide the best partnerships for the life of the practice, will have longstanding effects on the practice, and aren’t amenable to a “straddle-the-fence” kind of approach.

By making decisions that limit the need for the practice owner to be everything to everyone, the quality, enjoyment, and overall experience within the practice is elevated significantly for those receiving the focus of the marketing and operational efforts; a big win for all involved.

Here is a post on the Entrepreneurial MD blog that speaks to this very point, and I recommend it as a succinct, quick read on the benefits of focusing on a target market.

In order to immunize your business against recession, you need to discriminate. While this is not a comfortable word for the politically correct amongst us, one of  Webster’s definition of discrimination is “the quality or power of finely distinguishing”.

Developing a strong brand has a definite place within private practice healthcare.  A lot of practice owners don’t (or don’t want to) acknowledge this, thinking [erroneously] that simply hanging out their shingle and providing good care will keep the practice full. 

Guess what?  Everyone provides good care…at least we all say we do.

To develop a following requires a brand, and it doesn’t matter if you are a doctor, dentist, physical therapist, or an auto mechanic.  Like it or not, your “brand” is what comes to mind when your patients are deciding whether or not to come see you for the first, second, and 100th time. 

One thing about a brand is that one will find you whether or not you put in the time, money, and effort to craft it yourself.  And depending on who you are and what you create, this can be a good or bad thing.  You might be the doctor with bad breath, the dentist with the rude front office staff, or the physical therapist who is always late for appointments - believe it or not, these brands exist even though we would never choose them.

The process of branding can be likened to the development of our own personal attributes.  Our looks, clothes, personality, achievements, networks, experiences, and anything else that adds to (or detracts from) our appeal to others is basically what constitutes our own “personal brand.”  Now, branding as related to our personal development is only partially in our own control - we can’t control what we look like (well, thanks to the medical field I guess we can), our personalities are inherently difficult to change, and our achievements, networks, and experiences are in part built from the innate attributes that we are born with. 

When branding our private practices we have much more freedom to carefully craft a brand position that will appeal to our market, helping to make our practices more successful through broader (or in some cases, very specific) appeal.  It takes time, energy, and often entails a reasonable budget, but is there any doubt that development of the right brand is worth it?

This post from the Branding Strategy Insider talks about the seven concepts critical to positioning your brand in your market.

What seven concepts are critical to positioning?

   1. Perception (their’s, not your’s)
   2. Differentiation
   3. Competition
   4. Specialization
   5. Simplicity
   6. Leadership
   7. Reality

We all know Google, many of us using their search algorithms daily when we “Google” products, services or people online.  For business owners, Google has become a research tool, allowing for “quick and dirty” searches of information about themselves and competitors.

As more people are moving to the web to find information about healthcare providers (read my posts about online physician ratings here and here), it pays for private practice owners to know what is being said about their practice in online news publications and throughout the blogosphere.  With more and more print publications simultaneously funneling their news stories online, web searches now provide a means by which to search local print media who may be publishing information about a practice from recent press releases, sponsorships or other local news stories.

Practice owners and managers don’t have the time to search the Internet daily for news stories or commentary about their practice, but they do have the time to take advantage of Google Alerts in order to have Google scour the web for them.  With Google Alerts, you simply enter the keywords you’d like searched, enter in a frequency of which you’d like the results sent to you by email, and you’re done.  You’ll soon be getting email in your inbox telling you exactly what is being said about your practice online - a great way to keep tabs on your practice’s brand in a way that is efficient, easy and effective.

This article from BizGrowthNews provides some more information about the benefits of this great tool.

I recommend putting in place a once-a-day Google Alert which you can then review at the start of each day.

Items that feature in the news, in blogs or on the web can be included in the alert.

Building a brand in healthcare is a bit of a funny concept.  Not “ha-ha” funny, but funny that some practice owners simply don’t understand how important it is.  And whether you practice medicine, physical therapy, dentistry, optometry, or something altogether different, the importance of building a brand is all the same.

A brand is a promise.  When you deliver a product or service, consumers want to know 2 things: (1) what they can expect, and (2) how much it is going to cost.  Using those two pieces of information, the consumer can determine if there is enough value present to warrant the purchase (i.e. does what I can expect outweigh the price I feel is reasonable).  And while some will debate that the pricing/cost issue is less relevant in healthcare transactions that involve 3rd party payment, there is no doubt that in order for consumers to know what to expect when making decisions about where they receive healthcare, they have to believe in a practice’s brand - the promise.

Building a strong brand in your community can take a lot of shapes and forms.  From logo design/redesign to advertising campaigns to promotions, building brand recognition can be an expensive proposition.  The good news is that it doesn’t necessarily have to.

Remembering that a brand is a promise, a medical practice, dental facility or physical therapy clinic can build a successful brand simply by articulating a promise, and then delivering on it…over and over and over again.  Here are a few tips for building a brand without a corporate-sized marketing budget.

1. Craft a mission statement and communicate it to your consumers.  A mission statement often forms the essence of your brand as it speaks to your practice’s core identity, and what it is trying to do in your community.  Letting your consumers know of your mission is a good first step towards letting them know what they should expect from your practice.

2. Use scripts.  Ever notice that when you call your cell phone company you never talk to the same person twice but you always hear the same thing?  Without daring to suggest that your medical practice should be run like a cell phone company, there is definitely something to learn here.  The reason you always hear the same thing is because large companies have a lot to lose if their brand gets diluted by consumers not knowing exactly what to expect - so, they use scripts.  Believe it or not, the same is true of your small practice.  If your patients become disenchanted with just one of your staff, your brand can become tarnished because expectations are now in question.  Using scripts to better control (and refine) what is said by your front office staff as well as your providers can go a long way in protecting your brand by ensuring that your patients will experience consistent care no matter who they come in contact with.

3. Tell your patients what to expect.  Again, a brand is a promise, and what better way to communicate that promise than to get literal.  If I walk into a physical therapy practice and I see on the wall that I can expect to (1) wait no longer than 5 minutes past my scheduled appointment time, (2) always be able to get a call back from my provider in the same business day, and (3) always be included in the development of my own plan of care, I will know exactly what to expect and I will feel comfortable holding this practice to those standards.

4. Be nice.  Having a customer-service focus is one of the easiest and most effective ways to build a healthcare brand.  Healthcare is a service industry and the customer should be king (or queen).  If there is any part of your practice that thinks that it is acceptable to ever disrespect, insult, or ignore a consumer, you might as well throw in the towel now.  Just one staff member that doesn’t understand that it is their job to always be nice to your customers can quickly unravel any brand building you’ve done, no matter how much time or money you’ve put into developing and communicating your promise.

5. Be different.  Doing something different for your patients is a very effective way to build your brand in a short amount of time.  I’ve had a lot of cars and have bought a lot of tires throughout my life, but never have I had the experience with buying tires that I’ve had at Les Schwab Tires.  Every time I pull into Les Scwab I am greeted at my car door by a salesperson running out to greet me (that’s right, running - not walking).  This has made an immediate, lasting impression on me because I quickly realized that this company was different.  I’ve yet to receive services anywhere else where I’m greeted by someone running up to help me as I arrive.  My first experience with Les Schwab was 6 years ago and I’ve never bought tires anywhere else, and I don’t expect to.  Les Schwab is different in a way that focuses on me, and it makes me want to see them for my tire needs.  Implementing this same type of difference into a healthcare practice is just a matter of determining how you’re going to treat your customers differently, and then executing on it time and time again.

The importance of brand building in private practice healthcare is tremendous, and it doesn’t have to be expensive.  I’ve outline 5 simple methods for building your brand, and not one of them required a marketing dollar be spent.  In a nutshell: Figure out your promise, communicate it to your customers, and deliver on it - yes, it’s as simple as that.