John McKeever recently spoke to the AMA Houston's Healthcare Special Interest Group (SIG) and shared how to effectively manage one's brand while navigating health reform.

1. Health Reform – Pressure’s On…Are You Ready? AMA Healthcare SIG

4. Uncertainty Still an Issue “ We have not initiated a real dialogue about this yet, as the continuing uncertainty in the healthcare bill makes it difficult to do so.” “ Not at all yet, since it's very unclear how, if at all, reform will change our economic environment.” “ Increased importance to create consumer demand for our product so they will advocate with health plans. Important to continue to demonstrate to managed care what distinguishes us from community providers.” “ Don't know. The legislation is a moving target with huge implications every time any paragraph (out of thousands) is edited. It would be a hugely unproductive use of time to plan anything at this point. It is all changing daily/weekly.” Source: 2009 Gelb study of academic medical center marketing executives

5. Recent Activity

6. Health Reform Isn’t a Marketing Issue? Source: 2009 Gelb study of academic medical center marketing executives

7. Marketers Need to Take Charge Source: 2009 Gelb study of academic medical center marketing executives

12. Building Trusted Brands A trusted brand consistently delivers superior value compared to competing brands Familiarity is required for consumers to recognize and choose brands Brand Equity = Familiarity X Trust = Familiarity X (CV + CD + CE) The quality of the experience delivered by the organization; how well the brand lives up to its promise The criteria used by decision makers to establish the considered set The attributes used to distinguish product/services from one company to another

13. Source: Marketing Health Services, McKeever, DeVries To answer this… Do this… What is the market’s awareness and understanding of our services? Review familiarity results by audience of interest. This might include payer mix, geography and groups who share similar attitude about their healthcare. How does the market distinguish one hospital brand from another? The best insights come from qualitative interviews when asking respondents to rationalize their choices. The results are often a mix of physician and service line preference (e.g. Hospital ABC is best at heart surgery, but would go elsewhere for cancer care.) Will audiences believe our new position? Identify perceptual gaps among audiences. The greater the gaps, the more difficult to align brand perceptions. How strong is our current market position? Construct a perceptual map that illustrates how strongly each brand is differentiated. The more closely the attributes are to the brand, the stronger the association. What are our strengths or weaknesses? Determine performance and relative importance of factors that drive satisfaction and preference. How well does our brand perform relative to our local competition and national benchmarks? In addition to side by side comparisons, use a brand equity scoring model to account for familiarity and favorability factors. This will establish an easy to understand metric for tracking over time. How difficult will it be to get employees to embrace needed changes? Review internal perception gaps and commitment to the organization. It is frequently the case that some areas of the healthcare system will be more difficult than others. Start from the tails: those with the strongest and weakest alignment and work your way to the center.

14. Experience Mapping

15. Executives Expect ROMI Source: 2009 Gelb study of academic medical center marketing executives

16. Telling the Story

18. John McKeever 281-759-3600 jmckeever@gelbconsulting.com www.gelbconsulting.com www.marketinginhealthcare.com