Managing the healthcare brand identity

Brand tools ensure consistent communications

Building and maintaining a strong brand identity requires constant vigilance. Defining brand standards, sharing them widely, and policing brand communications for consistency is critical.

Over the last 20 years, we’ve developed several practical tools to help our hospital clients maintain their brand positions and identities. These help marketing teams focus on the core messages and test the clarity of every piece they create. These tools can be applied to almost any media channel, too, from internal communications to broadcast media, personal interactions to social networks, even extending to owned media such as signage, uniforms or web sites.

Here are a few proven tools for policing hospital brands:

• Brand Vision Board: A combination of photographs, graphics and words on a single panel that reflect the desired brand position (rather than the current position) and help establish the personality and visual identity of the brand. Vision boards are very helpful for getting buy-in on positioning initiatives, communicating the brand to frontline staff and as decision-support tools. In a world of subjective opinions about design and communication, the brand vision board can provide an objective tool to help you make important decisions.
• Brand Guidelines: Also known as graphic standards or brand standards, this document is an instruction manual for creating communications that are aligned with the strategic position and identity. It provides specifics for layouts, fonts, colors, artwork, even the proper tone for strategic managers, creative directors and writers. The guidelines help keep the look and voice of communications the same, so every communication comes from a single voice – recognized, trusted and true – no matter who creates a piece.
• Advertising Toolkit: Like a craftsman’s tool box, the brand toolkit contains resources for marketers and designers: electronic art files, logo graphics, photographs, stationery, ad formats, signage or almost any visual elements that have been created in support of the brand identity. Delivered on a CD or DVD along with the brand guidelines, these files help designers execute the identity consistently, and save time by eliminating the need to recreate graphic elements of the brand.
• Brand Czar: A person or team assigned as the keeper of the brand vision, the overseer of all brand communications and identity executions. Depending on the organization, this may be a full-time position, an informal role assumed by someone close to the branding process, or outsourced to an independent contractor (your agency, for instance). But be careful; a hired brand czar must understand what a brand can and can’t do, place the hospital’s interests above their own, collaborate with internal staff and vendors (with whom they might naturally compete) and be willing to take unpopular, yet strategically appropriate positions when policing the brand.

Learn more in our white paper, Four Reasons to Invest in Hospital Branding.