Health-care providers tend to be respected and valued within the communities they serve. They are known for their good work and their reputations. And as providers have grown and expanded, merging and acquiring, they have come more and more to rely on their brands as identifiers for their organizations.

The single biggest challenge health-care organizations face in branding is maintaining consistency. With so many services to offer, the temptation – and often the real practice – has been to develop individual brands for these services, rather than housing them under the overarching brand of the health-care organization. The result is confusion for patients and the community at large.

A Simple Case Study:

A respected New Hampshire hospital invested in a series of television commercials and print ads which had a distinctive look. The campaign launched and established a look that was well received in the community.

A year later, various hospital departments approached the hospital’s marketing staff requesting support to promote new procedures and equipment. The marketing staff, wisely, wanted to utilize the established brand, but the department staffs were uncertain that the hospital-wide brand could distinguish their own service offerings distinctly enough. They preferred their own logo and their own look.

The marketing staff posed the question to StoreyManseau, LLC of how to evolve the hospital-wide brand to now highlight specific services – giving them a distinctive look, while reinforcing and not diminishing the hospital-wide brand.

StoreyManseau, LLC approached this effort with the idea that the overall brand should communicate not only the hospital’s image, but be able to articulate that services offered by the hospital carry the same quality and reputation promised in the hospital’s brand. With that in mind, partnering the service lines’ capabilities under the umbrella brand became the task at hand.

Maintaining color schemes, type treatments, common words and phrases in copy, the service lines were offered individualized characteristics with a commonality to the hospital’s brand. The result was that the brand integrity was maintained, and service lines were recognized within the community and by patients as being a part of the hospital rather than stand-alone facilities. Individual services benefited because they enjoyed the same strong reputation as the hospital, particularly among new patients.