This article appears in the May 2013 issue of Healthcare Marketing Advisor.
The details of rebranding Children's Hospital Los Angeles back in 2011 starts with the tale of a missing apostrophe. According to original documents dating back to 1901, when the Southern California pediatric hospital opened, a defective typewriter left off the important punctuation mark on the incorporation papers.
Despite the obvious grammatical error, the hospital name remained Childrens Hospital Los Angeles until just two years ago when the hospital decided to correct the mistake and kick off a rebranding campaign to coincide with its 110th year anniversary as well as the opening of a new $636 million hospital.
DeAnn Marshall, chief marketing and development office for Children's says building a new hospital and rebranding its presence in L.A. was long overdue.
"The hospital had not invested in building the brand externally or internally in large part because it was a hospital that was at capacity," says Marshall. "Our beds were full, almost all of the time, and there wasn't really an opportunity to really market the hospital externally because we could not accept new demand."
Not anymore. The hospital's new Marion and John E. Anderson Pavilion has 317 beds, 85% of which are private rooms. The old hospital had 286 beds, but Marshall says the figure is misleading.
"We had to cohort and aggregate based on age, sex, and so there were times when yes, we had 286 beds, but [some] children, who, based on their illness, needed a private room… there were two beds in one room; that took a bed out of service. So, that was a key change we made in planning for the new hospital," says Marshall.
Even though 31 beds represents a 10% increase and an opportunity for more patient volume, the hospital decided to keep the old building operational to allow for overflow, which happened during flu season. Since it kept the old building, Children's Hospital Los Angeles is now licensed for 603 beds.
"We wanted to let the greater Southern California community know that this was going to be a different experience than they previously had," says Marshall.
The opening of the new, bigger hospital also launched Children's new logo—a big four-color butterfly with the tagline, "We Treat Kids Better." The look is fresh and fun; a stark departure from the old tagline, "International Leader in Pediatrics."
Marshall says the new logo was developed internally by the creative director and came from a healing garden in the old building.
"You would see butterflies everywhere," she says. "There is a sculpture of a butterfly, and butterfly artwork that was designed by our cancer patients, and a lot of sayings that go along with [the artwork]. The saying that struck him most was 'Butterflies fly and they're free.' That was an important statement from one of our cancer patients and it really served as the creative inspiration for our new logo."
Wanting to weave some of the old logo into the new one, Children's adopted the rainbow color palette.
Documenting the creative process was also an important part of the rebranding campaign, says Marshall, because there were no records explaining how the old logo came to be: a graphical representation of two adult-sized hands reaching up for a child-sized hand amid a backdrop of a rainbow-colored circle. In fact, Marshall says when they started digging through the files, there were too many logos.
"We audited all of the materials and all of the logos that were in use as an institution because, really, it had not been watched for a long period of time," says Marshall. "[As] I shared with the board, we had about 50 different logos in use when I arrived. What that demonstrated to me was… we had degraded our brand awareness, if we had any to begin with."
Making sure that all the rebranding and advertising work the team was doing could be tracked back to measurable results, Marshall set out on aggressive path to start tracking important marketing metrics: top of mind awareness, market share, and brand awareness.
"It's incredibly important to make decisions based on real data, especially in Los Angeles. It's expensive, I can tell them [leadership team] whether we're moving the needle forward," says Marshall.
In 2011, baseline numbers showed Marshall and hospital leadership that Children's Hospital Los Angeles had 37% brand awareness in comparison to its peers. Its pediatric advertising awareness registered at 33.8% of the market. Both figures, says Marshall, showed the hospital leading in comparison to all hospitals in southern California.
Nearly a year and a half out, the rebranding campaign has increased brand awareness by 8%, and Marshall expects that to go higher when it surveys 40,000 households with children later this year.
"This is a journey, a marathon, not a sprint," says Marshall.
She attributes the increase in brand awareness to the advertising campaign premise of "It's the best children's hospital in California," which accompanied the brand re-launch.
"What people in L.A. want is the best of everything. They want the best shoe stores for their kids, they want the best schools, they want the best neighborhoods; it's very much an L.A. mindset," says Marshall.
Marshall cites the hospital's list of accolades from outside quality rating organizations as the reason they can make such a bold statement.
"What we use in our marketing materials and our advertising is our U.S. News & World Report Honor Roll status, which no other hospital in California has, other than us. We are [also] ranked as the fifth best children's hospital in the country by U.S. News and World Report," she says. "We are also a Magnet hospital, which is the highest designation for high-quality nursing care; we are also a Leapfrog hospital … so we're, quite frankly, very comfortable moving forward with the brand platform that we are the best children's hospital in California for the care of your child."
To connect with the L.A. culture of "wanting the best," Children's developed an ad campaign that posed questions to parents conversationally. For example, one of the ads features a pint-sized hockey player above the question, "You know the best leagues for your kids. Do you know the best hospital?"
Other ads featured questions about shoe stores, museums, and preschools. The ads were rolled out in a multi-media campaign through radio ads, bus wraps, and billboards. Marshall describes it as a "one-day media blitz."
A six-member media team at Children's stoked the interest of the community in the brand re-launch and the opening of its new hospital by taking on a unique challenge Marshall gave them: 110 media stories in 110 days. The "110" number hook came from the 110th anniversary of the hospital.
Lyndsay Hutchison, senior public information officer, who was part of the media team trying to push out stories to reporters, says they surpassed their goal.
"The final count was 135 stories," she says. "We had a calendar of events we were rolling out in support of the campaign, the opening of the hospital, and the anniversary of the hospital."
The story that got the most play was the hospital's opening day, when it moved 191 patients—from tiny babies to teenagers—from to the old building to the new hospital, 600 yards away. Nurses wearing black t-shirts with the phrase, "Baby steps to the Anderson Pavilion," held the IV bags carefully while they rolled children to their new rooms.
The human interest details of moving so many young patients got a lot of attention. Every local TV station covered the move and the LA Times ran a story and moving photo essay. "Move Day," as it was pitched to local reporters, resulted in two local TV affiliates covering the move with live hourly remotes during morning drive time.
The increased media attention certainly helped increase Children's brand awareness, but another way the hospital is tracking its progress is by monitoring its payer mix.
As with most children's hospitals, the patient load leans heavily on Medicaid as a payer. At Children's, it's 70%, but since the brand re-launch and advertising campaign, the proportion of families with private insurance has increased by 2% and the mix is now 70/30.
"Part of what we're doing is increasing awareness among those families [with private insurance]. Each payer mix increase equates to almost a million dollars in additional revenue," says Marshall.
Showing leadership how important strategic marketing is starts with giving them baseline numbers and then following up with useful and valuable metrics. Tracking those metrics may be new to Children's, but Marshall is confident in the strategy it deployed in 2011.
"Moving into a brand new hospital necessitated a new identity, a new way of doing things, and a new look … It was important to respect our former identity and the history that it had, and I think we've done that. It's now about moving forward."
This article appears in the May 2013 issue of Healthcare Marketing Advisor.
Jacqueline Fellows is a contributing writer at HealthLeaders Media.