Healthcare marketing communications vs. interior design

Balancing environmental design and marketing messages

Finding places for brand messages is easy once you’re tuned into owned media. Imagine you’re a nurse or doctor on your way to work; look around as you enter the facility, walk down the hallways, visit the cafeteria. Along the way you’ll see blank walls, underutilized bulletin boards, staff memos and posters—each an opportunity for health care communications to reinforce your brand.

The challenge of owned media is to have an engaging message and mission-appropriate ways to deliver it. Ideally, it reinforces competitive positioning or unique brand attributes. It should mimic the brand, incorporating the identity, color palettes and typography into the environment.

Owned media also requires a careful balance between environmental design and marketing. Health care facilities spend a great deal of funds on interior design. They also have an important mission: to help patients get better. If owned media is overdone or poorly executed, it can get in the way of the mission and turn the facility into a gaudy billboard.

Targeting core hospital audiences

What can be achieved with this wonderful opportunity called owned media? Here are suggestions on how to reach your core audiences.

• STAFF: Inspire and inform staff. It’s one thing to promote your competitive position to the public, but if you’re not sharing the same ideas and messages with your team, staff and physicians, how can they deliver on your big promise? Owned media is a fantastic opportunity to translate brand positioning, share core values and model behavior to consistently deliver the expected customer experience.
• PHYSICIANS: Align physicians with the mission. In terms of patient referrals, brand advocacy and image, physicians are a powerful group, and one you want on your side. Owned media can help cultivate doctors as marketing partners and advocates for the organization.
• PATIENTS: Engage patients and their families. They can become loyal, repeat customers and active brand advocates. Leverage owned media to build long-term relationships, promote other service lines, and generate word of mouth recommendations.