From their thoughts on interdepartment collaboration to the mottos they use to guide their campaigns to how they execute a strong digital strategy, here are 10 key quotes about healthcare marketing hospital executives shared with Becker's Hospital Review in 2021:
Kevan Mabbutt. Senior Vice President and Chief Consumer Officer at Intermountain Healthcare (Salt Lake City): Healthcare has the same consumers as hospitality, retail, big tech, entertainment, travel and other industries, and yet the industry does not typically provide a comparable experience. This may have been tolerated by consumers in the past, but things are changing fast. The industry needs to connect the dots between digital and nondigital parts of the healthcare journey to create a seamless and consistent experience from end to end.
Jigar Shah. Chief Marketing Officer at Providence (Renton, Wash.): Healthcare is very personal, and the key to successful marketing is a relationship-based approach. This means using messaging to build and retain trust, meeting consumers where they are in their healthcare journey and giving them relevant, actionable information to make decisions about their care.
Tanya Andreadis. Chief Marketing Officer at UCLA Health (Los Angeles): Brand authenticity starts with knowing your customers' values. At UCLA Health, I am always so impressed by and grateful for how important the voice of the customer is to all of our executives. Our CEO reads daily reports with feedback from patients coming from social media and other channels. Brand isn’t about what you want to be or what you think looks really cool, it’s about respecting your customers and your staff, acting with integrity and providing high quality experiences at every touch point.
Jennifer Gilkie. Vice President of Communications and Marketing at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health (Lebanon, N.H.): We let collaboration drive our goals rather than starting from a desired outcome and working backwards. Ultimately, my mantra and my motivation for the entire communications and marketing team continues to be: Think big, innovate and collaborate.
Suzanne Bharati Hendery. Chief Marketing and Customer Officer at Renown Health (Reno, Nev.): The motto that guides the strategic direction for Renown's marketing and communications team is "create raving fans" — which we do in many ways. The best way to create a fan is to engage them in creating new programs, services and solutions. How do we measure Renown fandom? Engagement scores from our employees and physicians, as well as net promoter and reputation scores from our community, active patients, members of our insurance plan and MyChart active users.
Brian Deffaa. Chief Marketing Officer at LifeBridge Health (Baltimore): The shift from "patient" to healthcare "consumer" really reflects the seismic change taking place — "patients" are acted upon when treated; "consumers" gather information and make self-directed decisions. This approach mirrors the expectations of different generations and their comfort level with information (not just healthcare information), changes which mirror other parts of their lives.
Sara Saldoff. Director of Digital Marketing and Customer Experience at OhioHealth (Columbus): While our website is critical to our overall strategy, it doesn’t stop there. We take a holistic approach to understand how all our owned and paid channels work in concert with one another to support the overall experience. We build our digital experiences from a human-centered perspective by, first, utilizing our user experience team to ask what users need. And then work with our clinical and operations partners to create the best experience possible, while also delivering value to the organization.
Lori Howley. Executive Director of Corporate Communications and Chief Marketing Officer at MelroseWakefield Healthcare (Medford, Mass.): Digital marketing is about engagement and having the tools and ability to connect with — not just talk at — your audiences. All digital platforms have something to offer in the consumer journey — from awareness to use to advocacy — and using them together provides the most comprehensive level of outreach and data. That data, we know, in turn, is then critically helpful in planning what comes next.
Chris Roth. Chief Marketing Officer at UW Health (Madison, Wis.): How do you know whether you’ve outgrown your old brand? Your patients come from all over the world, but your messages sound more like a local hospital. Or, your patient base is growing, but your facilities are a sorted collection of localized and very custom names that don’t travel well.
Lisa Schiller. Chief Communications & Marketing Officer at UNC Health (Chapel Hill, N.C.): Collaboration between marketing and other divisions in the organization is key to developing successful growth marketing and brand marketing strategies and executing them. Marketing has a very close relationship with strategic planning, physician leadership, operational leadership and all the way through other support services and to the clinic level. These relationships have been built over time and have grown stronger through reaching goals and sharing positive outcome metrics.