brand loyalty

How to Improve Brand Reputation

Recognizing When Your Brand Is Losing Its Luster

Illustration of people working together on building a brand reputation. Illustration includes a laptop, graphs, and social media icons.

If your marketing seems less effective or success benchmarks aren’t being met, it may be time to evaluate your brand reputation. Though some shifts in performance can be attributed to the ever-fickle consumer and rapidly changing marketing trends, sometimes the problem can lie deeper beneath the surface and may require long-term solutions. So how do you tell if your healthcare brand is losing its luster? And how do you stay nimble enough to avoid a sliding brand reputation?

Start by examining the relationship between brand and reputation. Your brand is the promise you make to audiences. You earn a reputation by how you fulfill that promise. When the gap between those begins to widen is when the brand begins to slide. You can be a bright, shining star one day with the brand reputation of a dull pariah the next.

Learn from Retail Brands

Paying close attention to the state of your healthcare brand’s reputation could save you from being faced with a timely and expensive rebranding effort on top of falling revenues. One retail brand that failed to keep up with its changing reputation is early 2000s fashion icon, Abercrombie and Fitch. The fashion brand hinged its success on a marketing strategy of elitism, positioning itself as the way teenagers can look cool.  Abercrombie & Fitch quickly fell from grace as changing social attitudes about racial diversity and size inclusivity stood in opposition to the brand’s messaging.

When a class-action racial discrimination lawsuit against the company came to light, it was clear Abercrombie & Fitch needed serious changes in its culture and messaging. In 2017, the brand underwent a full transformation to improve its brand reputation resulting in a resurgence of success with Gen Z consumers. Carey Collins Krug, Abercrombie Brands’ senior vice president and head of marketing told TeenVogue, “Abercrombie today isn’t about ‘fitting in,’ but instead is focused on creating [a] space where everyone genuinely belongs.”

Toxic company culture—mistreatment of employees, discrimination of any kind, misinformation, and inauthenticity—can also quickly tarnish a brand. Healthcare marketers can learn lessons from retail brands like Abercrombie & Fitch. Test your brand regularly to make sure you’re still relevant and well received by your target audience.

Don’t be afraid to ask hard questions.

There are two rules to maintaining a good brand reputation. First, never get comfortable. Second, constantly polish the brand.

Rule #1—never get comfortable or take your eyes off the ball.

Rule #2—constantly polish the brand and monitor your reputation.

How do stakeholders view your brand? Ask them. Perception research is critical to evaluating marketing programs and determining if messages resonate with audiences as authentic, truthful, and what they want.

Whether in-depth consumer and brand studies or short post-visit patient surveys, digital platforms place invaluable data at your fingertips. Questions or comments posted on websites or social channels can also warn of shifting consumer behaviors.

In monitoring your brand, monitor the competition as well. Look for areas where they may be outshining you or losing some of their lusters.

Step outside the marketing bubble to test the brand promise.

Being too close to creating and marketing a brand can skew the perceptions of even the most experienced marketing professional. If you haven’t tested your brand promise since pre-2020, quickly do so.

Does the promise resonate with patients, employees, doctors, and community stakeholders? Does it resonate with your barber, barista, or mother? If the reaction is “what does that mean?” you know it’s time to refresh the brand.

Brand reputation can be viewed as a Venn Diagram. One part is your brand promise. The other part is brand fulfillment. In the center you can build brand trust.

The Edelman Trust Barometer 2020 special report, “Brands Amid Crisis,” chronicled consumer values that quickly shifted from aligning with brands reflecting social status, success and lifestyle to those that put consumer safety first, showed value and cared more about people than profit. Edelman’s 2021 Trust Barometer declared a complete information bankruptcy, with consumers mostly distrusting everyone.

For your brand to stay relevant and resonate with audiences, remember they are watching how you treat employees, what you’re doing for the community’s health, how you’re taking care of them and how you react in times of crisis.

To retain brand trust with audiences, stay ahead of them. Implement such tactics as:

  • Provide the best digital experiences possible from website to mobile apps.
  • Curate content that’s authentic and relevant, not platitudes about the brand.
  • Invest and engage with community needs.
  • Position leadership as leaders in the community, particularly in times of crisis.
  • Identify local micro-influencers whose brand values align with yours; leverage their influence.
  • Listen to them.

In this time of rapidly shifting consumer perceptions and social attitudes, move swiftly and strategically if you recognize that your brand is beginning to lose its luster. 

If you feel your brand may be losing its luster, we can help with strategic planning, rebranding, and more. Email Lori Moore or call TotalCom Marketing Communications at 205.345.7363.

Hospital Marketing: The Future of our Brand is Determined by Random Contacts with the Patient

The brands that top the charts in customer experience are also winning the loyalty battle.

Forrester Research recently released its list of top brands for customer service.  Surveying over 4600 U.S. consumers about their customer experiences, Barnes and Noble topped the list.  Others making the top five were Marriott Hotels, Hampton Inn, Amazon and Holiday Inn Express.  At the bottom of the list were Charter Communications, United Healthcare and Citigroup. (A complete list can be seen here).

It’s always interesting to see how consumers rate businesses in regard to their customer service experiences.  And to examine what businesses do to improve their customer service.  It’s also interesting to see the correlation between customer service and other brand attributes.

One thing we know is there is a strong correlation between customer experience and brand loyalty.  Those companies that deliver superior customer service also build strong brand loyalty.  The brand image and perception are largely determined at the point it interacts with the customer.  Brand loyalty is determined at the point of customer contact.

As hospital marketers, this is invaluable information. We often put our emphasis on technology, convenience, services and a host of other things.  But how much emphasis are we putting on that point of customer contact?  What is happening when our brand interacts with the patient and the patient’s family?  Brand loyalty is being determined at those random points of contact.  The future of our brand is determined during these interactions.

This is undoubtedly the most difficult thing to control.  There are so many within our organization that have contact with the patient and each one of them can make or break the experience.  It’s very difficult to control all of these contacts.  But it is imperative that we create a culture, an environment, where there is consistent attention and a strong emphasis on positive customer service. Yes technology, convenience, services and a host of other things are important, but in a consumer-directed economy, customer service is at the top.  The customer experience will determine how our brand is viewed and if there is any brand loyalty.

Barnes and Noble and the other companies at the top of the list make great effort to create a customer-friendly atmosphere and attempt to deliver the highest level of customer service.  They make it their corporate culture.  The future of our own brand largely depends on how well we create that culture within our organizations.


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Marketing Your Hospital – Marketing The Milestones

Celebrating a milestone such as a 100 year anniversary can be a prime opportunity to tell your hospital’s story and build patient loyalty. 

Birthday Cupcake

If hospital walls could talk there would be incredible tales of hope, heartbreak and uplifting care.  And when your hospital reaches a milestone, be it 25, 50 or 100 years in existence, it’s a strong testament of success.

Many hospitals have interesting pasts that invoke a sense of community pride.  Gadsden Regional Medical Center in Gadsden, Alabama is one such example.

In 1906  Dr. Rawls started the city’s first hospital in a home.  By the 1950’s, the hospital was owned by the county’s Baptist Association and through their leadership and with major help from the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, a new hospital was built on land donated by Goodyear, a major employer in the area. The construction was funded in large part by payroll deductions of the Goodyear plant workers.

The rich and storied past provided a great opportunity to retell that history and highlight the hospital’s many accomplishments.

Things to consider for your hospitals special milestone:

  1. Community-wide events such as picnics, parties for people born at the hospital, galas for the physicians and major donors, dedications of new wings or the donation of a commemorative sculpture to honor the past.
  2. Erect a timetable display reveling major milestones of the hospital’s history in the lobby, cafeteria or other public areas.
  3. Develop a media campaign to tell the history in a compelling way.
  4. Design, print and mail a detailed history piece to the hospital’s market area or patient data base.
  5. Have clever, medical-related specialty items to give away at public events. Pill boxes, thermometers, first aid kits, water bottles, baby medicine dispensers are all good examples.
  6. Plan radio and tv show appearances to promote all the upcoming events.
  7. Use facebook and twitter to promote events in each phase of the celebration.
  8. Produce a short video on the history and celebration to post on youtube, use at speaking engagements and feature on the hospital’s website.

Seize the opportunity and make the most of these markers in time and continue to build patient loyalty.  It’s a wonderful way to sell your hospital to newcomers to the area as well as reinforce the brand to your community.

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