Why your branding matters and how a branding workshop can help

With consumers taking greater control of their own health management, developing a strong brand is vital in shaping your patient experience. Years ago, patients would visit their nearest doctor and not have many alternatives to consider. Now, the healthcare industry has become significantly more competitive, and that competition is only growing.

This means it’s not enough to just have industry-best medical solutions and services — you need to present these via a strong brand that captures a customer’s attention.

With Google previously sharing that 1 in 20 searches were to find health information, it’s clear that customers are actively looking around to find the healthcare provider that best engages them — not just what’s close by.

Whether it’s working with a digital specialist or investing in your internal resources, you now have the chance to take advantage of branding power and set your business apart from the competition.

This article explores why branding is important, some of the specifics such as logo design, and the value of kicking it all off with a branding workshop.

The concept of branding

With consumer power growing in the healthcare industry, organisations must deliver high-quality and consistent brand experiences.

What is branding? Branding is the visual representation of a company’s identity; it’s what differentiates one company from another. Branding encapsulates the entire experience (of your organisation), and includes how you sound and how you act, as well as your visuals. With competition in healthcare only growing, having a well-defined and cohesive brand experience has never been more important.

In an industry where solutions can be similar, branding provides an opportunity to create messaging that shapes a patient’s emotional response to your organisation, and it’s products or services.

To do this, there are a number of branding tools that you can utilise to grow your healthcare business and engage patients on a deeper level.

The importance of having a meaningful and unique logo

Having an eye-catching logo to represent your business is key to leaving a good first impression. Particularly important in healthcare, logos are key to building a sense of trust between a company and a consumer. When patients see your logo, you want them to know they’ll receive the same experience and expertise regardless of location, both online and offline.

When it comes to logo design, colour can be very important. For example, blue appears in a large amount of healthcare logos. This is done specifically to illicit certain emotions from people. The colour blue is associated with feelings of credibility, knowledge, calm and focus — all essential emotions to illicit from a healthcare provider.

A logo can be a combination of recognisable shapes, colours and/or words. And these elements can help to build vital brand recognition.

For a successful logo, it needs to:

• Align with your company’s culture and values in a sophisticated manner
• Use shapes and colour to show a conceptual idea or message of your company
• Work across various marketing assets e.g. print, desktop, mobile
• Be distinctive and stand out amongst other healthcare logos

An impactful logo can create consistent and recognisable engagement, leading to a strong brand experience.

Getting started with a branding workshop

Coming together with relevant stakeholders to brainstorm and workshop branding ideas is important, as you’re able to work together to find the best strategy for your business.

In a workshop setting, you’re able to listen to a variety of voices and opinions across your company, and construct branding that meets all stakeholder requirements.

Come prepared

Before kicking off your branding workshop, it can helpful to come armed with as much data and insights — into potential target audiences — as possible. The fewer assumptions you have to make about how your audience behaves, the more accurate (and effective) your end result will be.

Create and target personas

Knowing your consumer is a key aspect of any branding, and a workshop can enable healthcare providers to clearly identify their patients. By identifying demographics, location, needs and interests, you can help create a persona that represents a certain type of user that you’d like to target.

As a healthcare provider, your focus should be on building a voice of the customer (VoC) program and understanding how to create an experience that meets a customer’s needs.

By collecting data and insights from a variety of patient information sources, your healthcare branding can speak to who you are as a business, how you want to be identified and what problems you’re able to solve for your customers,

Identify your competitors

Another important facet of a branding workshop is their ability to help discern your competitors. Especially important in healthcare, where it can be difficult to stand out from the pack, understanding what your competitors do and don’t provide is crucial to brand differentiation.

While this allows you to see what works (or doesn’t), competitor analysis also allows you to identify any competitor’s gaps, and provide a valuable point of difference. By conducting a competitor analysis, you may see opportunities to target different audiences, or better meet a specific need.

Completing a SWOT analysis

In addition to identifying your competitors, conducting a SWOT analysis can help you form a picture of their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Traditionally, a SWOT analysis is split in two. Firstly, strengths and weaknesses should focus primarily on your organisation i.e. internal. Opportunities and threats should focus on your competitors i.e. external. This approach can help create valuable insight and comparison by bringing stakeholders together to offer their thoughts on where the business is succeeding and falling short.

By diving into each of these elements, you can move forward and understand where the brand needs to go for future growth. You can help your business improve by undertaking an analysis of what areas are working, and where improvement can be made.

Establish a consistent voice and personality

Workshops aid your company’s communication by helping to create a consistent brand experience across your entire organisation. By doing so, you’re able to:

• Establish visual recognition (through your logo, colour palette, etc.)
• Communicate with a clear tone of voice (TOV) and brand personality (which includes your values and actions).

All of these elements need to be easily identifiable — as your brand — across all customer touchpoints.

Your personality and tone of voice (TOV) can be then slightly altered for different mediums, but is still consistent with what a healthcare provider wants to say to all patients.

What should you expect from a branding workshop?

Once you’ve conducted a thorough branding workshop, you will have clear brand goals and deliverables that can be easily embedded into your decision making, and business in general.

One tangible asset to come out of a branding workshop is a brand ‘cheat sheet’ or ‘guide’. This asset can help to ensure a consistent culture across the business. It can also make sure that any time you work with an external provider, such as a graphic designer, whatever they produce lines up with your brand direction.

With a detailed outline of how you want certain messages to be delivered and received by customers, you’ll have a firm understanding of how your brand needs to grow for increased success.

Setting both short and long-term branding objectives means that healthcare providers can start working towards aligning solutions and patient needs. In turn, healthcare providers with strong branding can stand clear of their competition.

Creating strong digital solutions in your healthcare business is how you can grow, transform your efficiency and provide best-practice digital support to your patients.

As discussed, your brand’s visual identity — including your logo — is just one element of a broader brand experience. For digital solutions that encompass the end-to-end brand experience, speak to us at Tadashi today.

Originally published at https://www.tadashi.com.au on October 18, 2019.