Campaign Balances Health System and Individual Hospital Brand Awareness

After establishing a unified brand, the campaign focused on individual hospitals, their services lines, and staff.

MedStar Health has been fighting an uphill branding battle since 2010, when it commissioned a consumer research brand health baseline survey and discovered its brand awareness ranking was below several of its Washington D.C. and Baltimore-area competitors.

At that point, the brand was fragmented, with each of its 10 hospitals and other diversified businesses using a unique name, tagline, and advertising style. Marketers unified the brand by re-naming each hospital to reflect the health system brand (for example, Georgetown University Hospital became MedStar Georgetown University Hospital) and by creating cohesive logos that aligned all hospitals under the MedStar brand umbrella.

In January 2012, MedStar Health launched a major rebranding campaign that illustrated the size and scope of the organization.

"Through this campaign, consumers could now see MedStar as the largest integrated health system in the region, with locations throughout the area where consumers could access our community-based services," says Ty Kennon, vice president of system marketing for MedStar. "And for the first time, they could more easily link each hospital and diversified business to one another?under one brand name. Moving forward, all advertising had a consistent appearance with a designated color palette, a designated style of photography, prominent maize and navy swooshes, a logo starting with MedStar and one tagline."

An Awareness Balancing Act
As a result, MedStar's brand awareness climbed, edging out several of the competitors it had previously ranked behind. There was just one drawback; as the brand's overall standing improved, awareness for its individual hospitals began to decline?particularly in Baltimore.

So when MedStar and its creative agency, ab+c Creative Intelligence, launched a third-wave of brand advertising in November 2014, marketers employed a unique strategy in the Baltimore market.

The service-line-centric campaign used a unique documentary-style, fast-moving format to differentiate the organization in its crowded marketplace, with the ads featuring MedStar physicians, nurses, and other associates for the first time. While the TV spots were the cornerstone of the campaign, it also featured print, digital, and social media elements.

"In that market, we created one overall TV branding ad that promoted key services in the region, and one TV spot for each of the four Baltimore hospitals. These five spots ran in equal rotation, so each got 20% of air time," Kennon says. "The Baltimore hospital spots showcased key services offered at each hospital. The reasoning behind this change in strategy was to determine if consumer awareness of these four hospitals would increase. In the D.C. market, MedStar continued to promote the region's five key services, featuring physicians, nurses, and associates like the Baltimore spots."

A Versatile Creative Concept
To develop a creative concept that would be versatile enough to uniquely represent each of the Baltimore hospitals, but also work to promote regional service lines in the Washington market, ab+c's creative leadership spent time in each MedStar facility in Baltimore. They discovered that what sets each hospital apart is its staff.

"Every day is different, and who best to tell their story but them," says Maria Stearns, healthcare team director for ab+c. "These slice-of-life commercials gave us the opportunity to feature more than 20 MedStar associates in each spot with their story being told by their colleagues."

After identifying which key service line would be featured for each hospital, ab+c managed two camera crews, spending a day at each hospital following the clinical teams and trying to capture those everyday moments.

Even though the Baltimore hospitals are located reasonably close to each other, "it was important to capture the unique culture and identity of each hospital," Sterns says. "Our team spent hours talking to staff and physicians, and the result are special moments like the two women hugging on the bridge at MedStar Union Memorial Hospital and the violin player at the Cancer Center at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital."

Marketers built the campaign around the TV spots, which accounted for 79% of the ad spend, with print and digital advertising accounting for 11% and 10%, respectively.

"Television is the most effective form of media for brand advertising because of the size of the audience that can be reached," Kennon says. "Television can also bring an organization to life and personalize it?through visual imagery and sound. It can create an emotional connection. One of reliability and relatability. One that generates awareness?and ultimately preference."

Results
While MedStar won't know the full impact of the campaign until its 2016 brand study has been completed, early indicators are promising.

"The community responded very favorably by sharing feedback that MedStar physicians and associates received from friends and neighbors, as well as through the social media posts and visits to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube," Kennon says. "Based on YouTube analytics, visitors to the campaign landing pages took the extra step to watch the brand videos either via the embedded video on each landing page or through YouTube. There were 10,000 such views."

The effort, which consisted of two legs?November 2014 to February 2015 and November and December 2015?had the added bonus of becoming a source of pride for hospital staff.

"These branding spots generate significant pride among our associates, nurses, and physicians?thereby helping to build brand ambassadors," Kennon says. "They see their organization on air, online, and in print?as do their family members and friends. With the organization's far-reaching visibility achieved through a branding campaign, it generates an enormous sense of pride among our 30,000 associates and 6,000 physicians."