Healthcare marketers spend a lot of time looking at healthcare marketing. And when you say it out loud, it sounds entirely reasonable. If you’re responsible for a health system brand, you’d probably expect to learn from other health systems. If you’re in senior living, you look at senior living. If you’re in health insurance, you spend your days examining health insurance brands.
Which is why everyone starts to sound the same.
One way of broadening your thinking is to look at brand in other markets that have the same position in the market as you do. Every market has a leader, most have a number two, many have a challenger, an innovator, a value player, and so on. It is worth looking at the challenges they face and how they deal with them.
One of the more useful exercises I’ve been involved in over the years has been asking leadership teams to identify other leadership brands outside of their category and build a profile of what it means to be a leader. A good example was working with Andersen Windows, leaders in the windows and doors category.
We asked the Andersen team members to come to a two-day work session with an example of a leader brand from a different category and talk about:
- What made it a leader
- How it addressed the unique challenges a market leader faces
- How it behaved as a leader and what it did — and didn’t do — as a leader
I recall Apple, Fed Ex, Harley Davidson, Nike and a couple more leader brands were brought forward. As we worked through the examples, certain similarities began to reveal themselves. And though these brands faced different markets, different products, and different customers, many of the questions were remarkably familiar.
How do you lead? How do you represent a category? How do you continue to grow without losing what made you successful in the first place? After the first day we had unpacked the leader brands and had created a blueprint of leadership. Day two was all about holding Andersen up to that blueprint and giving them pathways to being a stronger and better leader.
These discussions were invariably more interesting than the usual competitive review, and arguably more useful for helping to model possible strategies.
Fixing a hole
There’s a danger in becoming obsessed with your own category. After a while everyone starts borrowing from the same references, attending the same conferences, reading the same case studies, and using remarkably similar language.
The next time you’re wrestling with a difficult challenge, resist the temptation to start with healthcare. Instead, ask yourself who else has solved something similar.
One of the great pleasures of strategy is a kind of intellectual trespassing. Wandering into places where, on the surface, you have no business being. Reading things unrelated to your category. Paying attention to organizations that seem entirely irrelevant.
Sometimes the connection never appears, but sometimes it changes the way you think about a problem entirely. You may discover that the answer you’ve been looking for isn’t sitting in another hospital boardroom at all.
It may be hiding in a theme park, an airline, a supermarket, or perhaps even a mustard factory.
And in the end
You still need to understand your competitors, your market, and the realities of the category you operate in. The best strategists know their own category intimately. They’re just curious enough to keep looking beyond it.
