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Cardio Service Line Introduces Revitalized Mercy Health

 |  By jfellows@healthleadersmedia.com  
   October 17, 2013

Instead of announcing its rebranding campaign all at once, Mercy Health rolled out its new look and tagline one service line at a time. Investing in market research upfront has been key to its success.

This article originally appeared in Healthcare Marketing Advisor, September 2013

Catholic Health East's Mercy Health System, a four-hospital system with senior and long-term care services based in Philadelphia, serves the Delaware Valley, which includes counties in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Patients who live in this area have access to some of the most highly acclaimed hospitals and health systems.

To compete for patients in a crowded and high-profile market, Mercy Health officials decided to do things a little differently to revamp the system's image. The organization developed a marketing strategy that rolled out its revitalized brand one service line at a time.

"We have very limited resources," says Gabrielle DeTora, principal of DeTora Consulting, who acted as interim chief marketing officer for Mercy Health during the development of the campaign, which kicked off in 2012. "Mercy probably has a marketing budget for all four hospitals equal to one competing hospital. In order to get the reach we needed, we took a pulse approach."

The "pulse approach" tactic began in February with Mercy Health promoting its cardiovascular service line followed by its orthopedic, cancer, and bariatric services. DeTora says that in addition to being financially limited, there was also not enough time to do a sepa­rate rebranding campaign for each business sector, which is why the health system decided to essentially find one message that would resonate with patients and use it for each service line throughout the year.

"To optimize our minimal marketing budget, we devel­oped an overarching brand campaign creative structure, but launched only service line campaigns all falling under the master brand umbrella," says DeTora. "This was to build brand consistency and frequency of messaging to drive overall consumer preference, while still delivering patients to very specific service lines."

Customer Survey
The first step was finding out consumers' perception of Mercy Health. DeTora partnered with Swanson Russell, a full-service marketing and advertising agency, to help carry out quantitative and qualitative brand research. A consumer telephone survey of 800 participants showed that preference for the hospital had decreased since 2010, the last time the hospital system had surveyed consum­ers.

Knowing that competition had increased, DeTora wanted to find out how Mercy Health could stand out from the crowd. Five focus groups, made up of 15–20 people each, informed DeTora that patients preferred a doctor who would spend time with them.

"They defined top doctors as someone who is going to take the time to listen to them, to understand their medi­cal issue, which was totally different than how the admin­istration defined a top doctor," she says. "That changed the language associated with the campaign."

Leadership believed consumers defined top doctors as those who worked at competing academic medical cen­ters. DeTora says when the focus group results showed otherwise, hospital leaders were surprised.

"We got a lot of lightbulbs going off," says DeTora. "They realized they had tunnel vision. We really needed to be clear about our target audience, and we needed to do something that was more appealing to them."

Message Development
Members of the ad agency DeTora used also spent nearly a week at Mercy Health hospitals to interview staff, including physicians and nurses. The agency team found out that what made Mercy Health unique was also what consumers wanted—extra time spent talking and understanding individual medical issues.

The informa­tion led the agency to develop four messaging concepts, but the one that scored highest in an online survey of Mercy Health users and nonusers was the one that pro­moted the system as high quality, and more, which was incorporated into the tag line, "But you deserve more."

"When you look at what Mercy can offer—they can do all of the same things as other community hospitals and then some—so we tried to level the playing field," says DeTora. "What's the difference? We really take the time."

The new brand and messaging concept was delivered in a multimedia ad campaign promoting Mercy Health's cardio care. For example, the print ad in the Philadelphia Inquirer stated, "Premiere Heart Surgeons? You Bet. But you deserve more.

The other ads are similar, with text explaining that "You deserve more" means more understanding from Mercy Health physicians and nurses.

Rebranding Tactics
The campaign also included a microsite, TV, direct mail, newsletters, banner ads that were interactive, heart healthy recipes, cooking videos, and physician market­ing. Unique Web traffic went up 50%, and call volume from the campaign went up 40%, year over year.

Web and call inquiries are soft measures of consumer interest, and DeTora says Mercy Health is now working toward a new customer relationship management system that will identify how many calls lead to appointments, then procedures, and so forth.

There is some evidence that the hospital system is see­ing real results from its campaign. DeTora says Mercy Health's goal of increasing inpatient invasive surgery and outpatient noninvasive surgery is on target, noting that all areas of cardiology services have increased in volume by 10%. Leadership at Mercy Health is also happy with the results.

Results
"We are very pleased with the campaign," says Daniel Bair, FACHE, administrative director, cardiovascular and radiology services for Mercy Health System. "Even with our limited resources and a highly competitive market, the results have been within expectation on most fronts and exceeding expectations on many others."

DeTora says the key component in developing this branding campaign was time spent talking to and survey­ing consumers. It really helped the system understand what its patients wanted and valued.

"What was most interesting was the quantitative and qualitative market research that inspired the campaign," says DeTora. "We really tried to understand what was more important to the consumer first. In looking at ourselves from the inside out, we really understood spend­ing time with patients was a big differentiator for us."

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Jacqueline Fellows is a contributing writer at HealthLeaders Media.

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