Embrace the virtue of distinction: Become unmistakably yourself
Confession
Healthcare marketers spend a lot of time looking at healthcare marketing, and for good reason. We need to know what competitors are doing, how they’re positioning themselves, where they’re spending money, and what they’re saying about the services we also provide.
The trouble starts when what competitors are doing becomes the template for what we plan to do.
A competitor launches a campaign around its expert physicians, so perhaps we should talk more about ours. They start promoting compassionate care, and suddenly compassion moves up our message hierarchy. They introduce a new message, visual style, or campaign idea, and before long something remarkably similar appears elsewhere in the market.
I’ve seen a lot of healthcare advertising in my career, across print, social media, outdoor, television, and just about everywhere else. Far too often, the organization is only identifiable because its logo is attached to the work. Change the logo, perhaps adjust a color or two, and the advertising could quite comfortably belong to somebody else.
When we become so determined to match what someone else is saying and doing that we lose sight of what makes us unique, that’s Envy.
Virtue
The opposite of Envy is Distinction, which we define as the commitment to express what makes you uniquely valuable, and it can be more difficult in healthcare than it sounds.
I don’t know of any health system that would say it doesn’t care about its patients. Most would say they have excellent physicians, improve access, pursue better outcomes, and serve their communities. Many invest in technology and research as budget allows. Because these things are pervasive in healthcare, they don’t necessarily give a brand something distinctive to say.
Even genuine differences can disappear. A new technology may give one organization an advantage until somebody else buys it. A physician with unusual expertise may move. A service that was once unique may become widely available.
A distinctive brand draws from its history, personality, relationships with its community, and the experiences it creates. The things it chooses to emphasize can all contribute to an identity people recognize. Together, consistently expressed, they begin to create something competitors can’t reproduce simply by matching a service or buying the same equipment.
That’s what I mean by recognizably different. People should recognize you as a healthcare organization, but they should also begin to recognize the particular way you show up. Distinction is building an expression of your organization that no competitor could comfortably claim as its own.
Repentance
Years ago, I worked on the GSK brand. Much of the pharmaceutical category at the time had a look that was dark blue, angular, and corporate. GSK stood out with a logo that was orange and rounded. Put GSK alongside its competitors and the warmth and humanity immediately stood out. You didn’t need to read the name.
Quite a lot of health systems can credibly promise compassionate care. That doesn’t mean everyone has to communicate it with the same reassuring physician portrait, patient testimonial, and carefully polished language. One organization might express compassion through warmth and humor. Another through candor about how difficult healthcare can be.
The same principle applies to color, typography, photography, illustration, sound, language, recurring creative ideas, and the experiences we create. Identify the ones that genuinely fit your organization and use them together in a way that becomes characteristic of you. Then protect them while familiarity builds. If something is distinctive, authentic to the organization, and beginning to become recognizable, don’t abandon it because a competitor launched something shiny last Tuesday.
And look beyond healthcare for inspiration. Other categories are solving many of the same problems we are: building trust, simplifying complicated decisions, creating loyalty, and making people feel cared for. Looking beyond our category can remind us how many possibilities exist beyond what the hospital across town happens to be doing.
One small act
Take the logo test. Look at your latest advertisement without the logo, name, and anything else that explicitly identifies your organization.
Now put your biggest competitor’s logo on it.
Does anything feel wrong?
If their logo looks perfectly comfortable sitting on your work, you may not have given people enough reason to know it was yours.
Take a deeper look at how Envy shows up in healthcare marketing and how to embrace Distinction.
