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Don’t Leave Meaning on the Table – A Conversation on Healthcare, Purpose & Brand with Nathan Goldstein
EP. 24 | Nathan Goldstein
Read time: 3.5 min
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What do Healthcare companies typically over promise? Why is it important to work on your brand at the beginning? What do people often get wrong about corporate culture?
I had a fascinating discussion with Nathan Goldstein, Founder and CEO of Duo Health, a new kind of medical group serving patients with chronic kidney disease about all things healthcare and brand. As a highly successful executive and entrepreneur, Nathan shares his views about how to build organizations that can make a practical difference in healthcare.
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In this episode, we explore a variety of topics:
Duo Health, a new kind of medical group that promises to be by your side
If you don’t have a brand, you can’t scale
Think behaviors NOT culture
Develop mavericks not renegades through organizational identity
Don’t make promises you can’t keep – ie. transforming healthcare
Serve EVERYONE, don’t leave money but most of all meaning on the table
Health equity doesn’t happen on its own
Brand is relationships and relationships grow at the speed of trust
Strategy is defining the obstacles that are in your way
KEY LESSONS
Define Your Brand Early for Effective Scaling
A well-defined brand serves as the foundation for scalability. While scaling involves implementing systems, technology, and standards, the importance of understanding the "why" behind the business cannot be overlooked. Without a clear brand identity communicated to employees and customers, scaling becomes challenging. As a company grows, you simply cannot micromanage and process to death every interaction, especially if it involves a level of service that is responsive to a myriad of situations.
This is the case for Nathan’s Duo Health, which has experts and care teams working with patients. Hence the brand's essence, the "why," is important in creating a sense of purpose and empowers teams to develop their own relationships with that meaning, leading to better experiences for employees and clients.
“A brand isn't a logo… it's a promise you make to the market or to your consumers. It's the why behind the business. if you don't define that early, really have a sense of it that you can communicate to employees, to your end users, to your customers, to your clients, you actually can't scale.
The scale is certainly about systems. It's certainly about tech technology. It's about standards of care in our case. And having defined care pathways, your nurses know what to do in any given morning, but if they don't understand the why, you're robbing them of the opportunity to develop their own relationship to that meaning.”
Brand Guides Autonomous and Flexible Decision-Making
Nathan emphasized the significance of providing teams with a clear sense of purpose and rules of engagement. By understanding the brand's North Star, teams can autonomously and flexibly navigate challenges and make decisions aligned with the brand's essence. This autonomy fosters a better experience for employees and enhances the care relationship with patients. The distinction between mavericks (who understand the intent and improvise) and renegades (who disregard the intent) further emphasizes the importance of aligning behavior with the brand's deeper purpose.
“A maverick by his definition is being one who understands the commander's intent and improvises on their way to success. And a renegade is someone who doesn't give a flip about what the intent is. Maybe they're just in it for the notches on their belt or glory”
Brand Behavior Trumps Abstract Culture
In our conversation, Nathan also challenged the notion of abstract culture and highlights the value of brand expression through behavior. While culture can be abstract and difficult to address, brand behavior offers a tangible framework for individuals and teams to understand their actions' alignment with the brand's standards. By providing feedback on behavior that deviates from those standards, a company can maintain a cohesive brand identity and ensure consistent experiences for stakeholders.
“Rather than talking about the culture decals that go on the walls. The question that the executive leadership team and the senior leadership team is, are the behaviors that I'm portraying first aligned with that brand, that value, that why and that promise? And then am I holding accountable my peers and subordinates and, and frankly my superiors to that same standard?”
Don’t make a promise you can’t keep – like transforming healthcare
One of the biggest pet peeves for Nathan are companies claiming to transform or disrupt healthcare. We’ve all seen it, big statements about transforming healthcare on website homepages and launch campaigns, but it’s fictitious. He believes that the fragmentation of care is not something one company can change. Many different stakeholders with different incentives make for a very complex system to align and anyone who promises to completely change the experience is making a false promise.
“I don't know many people who are receiving care that want things disrupted. I'm gonna disrupt surgery <laugh>, please don't. To my internal team, something that I've become fond of saying is, we can't promise to fix the healthcare system. That's a promise you can't keep.”
Conclusion
Nathan’s experience in building healthcare companies and philosophy for brand speaks to me deeply. He underscores the significance of defining the brand early on and aligning it with organizational behavior for effective scaling. Moreover, he emphasizes the role of brand behavior in guiding autonomous decision-making and fostering meaningful relationships with stakeholders and not making any sweeping promises you can’t keep. By incorporating these lessons you’re your brand building strategies, businesses can harness the power of purposeful branding to achieve sustained growth and create a positive impact on their employees, customers, and communities.
Learn more about Nathan:
Other Resources:
Book mentioned in the podcast: A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
A Contrarian’s View on Branding - How to See, Think, & Do Different with Ulli Appelbaum
EP. 23 | Ulli Appelbaum
Read time: 3.5 min
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What does it mean to be a contrarian? How does taking a contrarian view help with brand strategy and branding? How can all of us be more of a contrarian?
In this conversation with Ulli Appelbaum, Founder and Chief Strategist at First the Trousers then the Shoes – a brand research and strategy boutique, author and creator of the brand positioning workbook and a set of best-selling positioning method cards, we break down how Ulli became a contrarian and get his take on using that superpower to build winning brands.
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In this episode, we explore a variety of topics:
Ulli’s journey of becoming a contrarian
How to protect the core business while disrupting it
Shepherding the brand from the POV of the customers
Three ways to thrive as a contrarian
Curiosity of a contrarian - hold strong opinions loosely
Learn from failures and don’t hesitate to change your mind
Discussions and stories about Hallmark, Bud Light and Wrigley
KEY LESSONS
How to protect the core business while disrupting it
To Ulli, being a contrarian doesn’t mean just disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing. He defines it as follows:
“Contrarian is not the pain in ass that contradicts, everyone all the time. That's not the idea of being a contrarian. It's a skill. It's the ability to adopt an opposing point of view of maybe what the majority might think.
So if everyone is focused on brand purpose, you're able to step back and say, well, maybe it's not about brand purpose. Maybe there is something deeper going on. I think that is at least for me, the essence of being a contrarian”
So for organizations to adopt a contrarian POV, it needs to look beyond its core business and experiment challenging category conventions. But how do you do that and not risk the core part of the business? Ulli offers a suggestion.
“A company spends 99% of its energy to maintain success, to maintain the way things have worked. You would be crazy if you say, you know what, in the next 12 months, we are gonna risk all of that.
Instead, the bulk of our effort is going to be focused on maintaining our success, but let's carve out resources and a team, or several teams to explore, to look for new ways of doing things to challenge the category conventions, to look at a new way to engage consumers”
This way, you get to continue with the core business while green housing a separate group to look at the world differently to continue growing in new ways. If not, your business will be waiting to be disrupted by others or fail to become relevant in the shifting consumer landscape.
“If you identify a skunk team or a group that you take out of the organization and the regular way of working of that organization, then you can be innovative, then you can be contrarian and challenge all the ways the business has been built without threatening the core business. It's easy when the market is in decline, but more difficult when the business is doing well”
Shepherding the brand from the POV of the customers
One of the topics we discussed was the Bud Light debacle and Ulli’s point of view was that it can be risky to bring personal beliefs to a brand.
“I'm pro inclusion, that doesn't mean that everything I do in my work needs to be pro inclusion. That's a potentially damaging comment I'm making here that can easily be used against me, but it's the reality.
I think in her interview, she (Alissa Heinerscheid, Bud Light Marketing VP) said my job is to bring my beliefs to the brand. No, that is not your job. Your job is to revive the brand, to make it relevant to a broader audience while not leaving behind your core audience.”
It's more about the strategy and then the nuance of how you execute on the strategy.
“It doesn’t matter what political view you have. Is your strategy a bad or poor strategy?”
And in the case of Bud Light, strategically it seemed right, but tactically failed. Ulli recalled a conversation with someone at Budweiser.
“I've talked to a guy who was an insider at Budweiser. Bud Light has been supporting the LGBT community for many years. They just never overlapped the media, and they always were very targeted in their effort. And Bud Light is a very inclusive brand. If you are the market leader, by definition, you are an inclusive brand because you appeal to a broad, um, spectrum of the population. So it wasn't that ‘they took a pro LGBT stand, they have done that 10 years ago successfully, it's how they've done it”
Four ways to thrive as a contrarian
1/ Leave your ego at home
“It is so much about identity politics nowadays, but you know what? Your identity doesn't threaten mine. And what you say about your identity or your opinion doesn't threaten who I am and how I feel about me. So leave your ego at home and try to really understand what the other person is trying to say.”
2/ Assume good intention
“So let's say we have different opinions and that's perfectly fine. I'm sure there is a strong rationale or good reason for why you have this opinion. There are very controversial areas, example the Arabic world versus the western world. Try to understand why the Arabic world thinks the way they do about the U.S. And trust me when you do that, there are 25 good reasons why a lot of them hate the United States. They have their reasons like you have yours.”
3/ Think critically
“Often people confuse critical thinking and criticism. I'm an immigrant. I moved to the U.S. 20 years ago. I absolutely love the U.S. My wife is American. My kids are maybe way more American than I wish they were. I love it here. But looking at some of the policies or the cultural things going on. I love the country, but I don't agree with this. The typical reaction is, well, if you don't like it, why don't you go back home? You know that is the dumbest answer I've ever heard to any form of comment because that shows me you don't understand the difference between being critical, having an assessment and criticizing.”
4/ Practice real empathy
“Empathy doesn't mean accepting and being nice to people who have similar views to me, and then dissing people who have the opposing views to me. Empathy is really the ability to put yourself in the shoes of, you know, that single African-American mom that raises two kids… a liberal that goes and talk to a hardcare Trump fan to understand why they are the way they are.”
Conclusion
Thinking like a contrarian is actually not contrarian at all. In order to build a brand that is relevant and distinct, you have to be seeking alternative points of view, irrational truths and non-standard insights. In order to do that, leaders cannot be seeking validation, afraid of conflict or act solely through their ego. Are you ready to be one?
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
Using the Power of Archetypes to Transform Organizations & Build Brands with Margaret Hartwell
EP. 22 | Margaret Hartwell
Read time: 3.5 min
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Have you ever wondered why the same character types, themes and settings recur across time and place in stories, myths, and literature? What can we learn from archetypes and how do we apply it?
Margaret Hartwell is a creative catalyst for organizations and author. She helps innovation teams, CEOs, and emerging leaders with transformation, culture, team development, and anytime their teams get stuck. In this episode, we talked about what are archetypes and how do we leverage them when building brands.
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In this episode, we explore a variety of topics:
Archetypes are a means to emotional magnetism
The rule of three in brand archetypes
The pitfalls: too meta, trying to be perfect, stuck in a style guide
Stereotypes are reductive and archetypes are expansive
Don’t use archetypes as personas – focus on the organization
Techniques to warm up a group for an archetype workshop
The critical litmus test for any engagement
KEY LESSONS
Archetypes are a means to emotional magnetism
What are archetypes? Margaret gives us a reading from the Oxford Concise Dictionary:
Archetypes are symbols, themes, settings, or character types that recur in different times and places in myth, literature, folklore, dreams and rituals. And they appear so frequently or prominently as to suggest that they embody some essential element of the universal human experience.
In the broadest of strokes, Margaret shares with us three principles of brand archetypes:
Everybody has access to the archetypal field - it’s a part of our collective unconscious so we all have an innate understanding of it.
Archetypes are a way for us to understand ourselves and we can’t help but have an emotional reaction to it.
Every culture has archetypal underpinnings whether or not we are conscious aware.
From talking with Margaret, a powerful perspective about archetypal work is that it is an exercise in lateral thinking, helping an organization to its truth without being bogged down by rational analysis.
If you go in through this side door, that's not about anyone being right or wrong and you're talking from an archetypical story perspective, you start to unearth aspirations and preferences of the business, which ultimately leads them to a more confident place of understanding what they stand for
The rule of three in brand archetypes
When trying to figure out brand archetypes, it’s really important to not use it as stereotypes. Margaret offers a simple way to steer clear from it:
Stereotypes are reductionistic and archetypes are expansionistic… take the classic example of the soccer mum, is that reductionistic or expansionistic?… it is a slippery slope to stereotyping when you use archetypes for personas.
When developing an archetype for brands, there is a magic number.
Three. It proves to be a magic number. It gives enough breadth and scope without brutally confusing everyone… you can then start to bring in the symbols and metaphors of this new character that includes all aspects from the three different archetypes.
By having a process where you create and develop this character, then express it creatively across the organization and then put it out in the world to see how it works, it guarantees that the brand archetype is never stale and irrelevant.
Avoid the typical pitfalls of archetypal work
1/ Too self-important or academic
People getting too meta. They are not doing the inner work themselves to understand how these energies are alive in them, but just talking about them. You lose the whole reason that you're doing this: to find an emotional relatedness and an emotional through line between the business, the brand, and the person that they're serving
2/ Aiming for perfection
You’ve got to keep it living and breathing. Trying to be perfect I think is a really big problem, as opposed to recognizing that there's a vulnerability in all of us and that's what actually can be connecting us as well.
3/ Adopting archetypes as a label
Unexpressed biases by the use of labels and turning an archetype perspective into a label. I've seen this more in personal branding than I have in corporate, where people will say, I'm a caregiver, and I'm like, no, you're not <laugh>.
Conclusion
Archetypes are powerful if you can wield it in the world of brand and anytime you need to better understand and influence human behavior. But beware of its pitfalls, else it becomes a limitation, a reductionistic effort, rather than an expansionistic one!
Learn more about Margaret:
https://www.archetypesinbranding.com/
Other Resources:
Archetypes in Branding by Margaret Hartwell and Joshua C. Chen
The Hero and the Outlaw by Margeret Mark and Carol S. Pearson
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
A Creative & a Strategist Walk Into a Studio: Creating Desire in Brands with Meg Beckum & Paul Collins
EP. 21 | Meg Beckum & Paul Collins
Read time: 2.5 min
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What if creatives and strategists worked seamlessly together? What if they were able to put aside their egos and created brands that were desirable?
In this episode of the Healthy Brand Podcast, I had a great discussion with Meg Beckum, Executive Creative Director and Paul Collins, Executive Director of Strategy & Innovation from Elmwood, a brand design consultancy. We dove into the potential conflicts of creatives and strategists, where to find big ideas, and how to create desire in the world of healthcare.
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In this episode:
Strategy needs to be provocative by having a point-of-view
Choose debate over framework, conflict over compliance
Make healthcare brands desirable through emotional rewards
Get strategic inspiration in the arts and culture instead of peers
How to be a super star creative
The epiphanies of Paul and Meg during a pivotal moment of their lives
KEY LESSONS
Strategy needs to be provocative by having a point-of-view
“How do we be very commercially sound in our recommendations? How do we create the urge to actually want to work on this brand? It should make people say - Oh my god, I never thought of this category like that.”
Paul Collins
One thing that both Paul and Meg emphasized was how the brand strategy needs to provoke new and expansive thinking about the brand.
The rigor of analysis needs to be there, but the end result is a definitive point-of-view, a distillation of research and creative thinking.
“Love your hundred page deck, but we’re going to put everyone to sleep. A strategist needs to bring things to a hard point”
Meg Beckum
Choose debate over framework, conflict over compliance
“That's something that we'd really try to encourage in our studio. Maybe we frustrate each other a bit with that. But I think our best work comes from all of us sitting around the table debating - are we pushing this far enough? Is this interesting?”
Meg Beckum
When asked about whether they use templates and frameworks, what was more important to Paul and Meg was the culture of debate and critical thinking. Rather than filling out a template, it was more important that creatives and strategists get into a room and push on the idea.
“We are building a learning culture that's based on crits or critiques, infusing the values into those meetings because you don't want it to become like a checklist. And so the idea is to be meeting frequently and having conversations and reinforcing those beliefs. So it becomes more organic to the work versus formulaic...”
Paul Collins
In this way, there is actually more learning and it becomes more specific to the context and problem at hand.
Make healthcare brands desirable through emotional rewards
Healthcare has a dearth of desire and that is impacting people’s lives. Meg and Paul sees a world where healthcare brands are attractive and desirable, helping to remove psychological barriers so people can live healthier.
"People talk about experience all the time, but it's less about the path to purchase or moving commercial drivers. And it's really about saying, what are the psychological obstacles or barriers that are preventing people from taking this action. And then how do you actually design the experience to remove those obstacles and barriers?"
Paul Collins
Paul shares three things to think about when creating desire:
Vision: Paint a really interesting and compelling vision of the future instead of just talking about what the brand does for you in the here and now.
Chemistry: Express beliefs, values or point of view to establish a rapport between the brand and the audience.
Agency: Through effective communication design and experience design, give people the control over their destiny and “art direct” their own future - part product, part perception and framing.
The trap that most healthcare organizations especially those creating medicines and devices is communicating solely about their science. According to Meg, what they need to make happen is creating a world where that abstract science becomes tangible and real. That’s how desire is created.
“A lot of organizations come to us and are like, we really want to talk about the science. The science is so advanced. And it is, it absolutely is.”
“Imagine a cancer drug or something like that. Yes, I want to know it's the very best science imaginable, but I also want to feel better. Making the abstract of science feel real and see how people can make that progress and paint that picture for them. I think that's sort of the power of a designer - you can make that abstract science real”
Meg Beckum
Conclusion
When strategy and creative can move and groove together, amazing things can happen. Whether you are in an agency or a client working with one, make sure your teams are aligned, willing to debate, so the best work prevails.
Learn more about Meg and Paul:
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
From a Copywriter to an Agency CSO: Brand Strategy Principles with Maureen Alves
EP. 20 | Maureen Alves
Read time: 4.5 min
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What is Brand Strategy? Why does it matter? And what are the key principles to becoming great at it?
In this episode of the Healthy Brand Podcast, I had a lovely discussion with Maureen Alves (Mo), Chief Strategy Officer at Havas Health Plus, an integrated agency focused on healthcare. We talk about her journey from a copywriter to the top of her profession and her philosophies about brand building.
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics on brand strategy, arriving at a solid list of the top 10 principles of brand strategy you need to know.
TOP 10 PRINCIPLES
Brand Strategy is…
(1) Leading with empathy
Mo was very candid about what she thought and what she believed:
One of the biggest traits we need as strategists is empathy. Let’s keep it real, I don’t like a lot of business talk. I hate words like utilize and I show up as a human being… I often tell my teams, we don’t take off our human skin when we come to work, we come to work as people.
Because the ultimate task for a brand is to influence human beings, we need to understand humans and be empathetic about what they (we) are facing.
(2) A state of mind
Brand strategy is not about writing briefs and making templates. It’s a way of thinking.
I’m not precious about strategy. If you can ask questions, you are curious, and connecting dots, you have the makings of a strategist
(3) Nature with nurture
When pushed on what really makes a strategist, Mo offers a perspective that starts with some natural qualities.
I think it can be trained, but it’s like you have some natural ability for it. If you love strategy, you are probably good at it.
There definitely needs to be an innate nature to be curious, an ability to see patterns and then the desire to build the skills on top of that.
(4) Starting with clutter, ending in clarity
We talk about our process as a strategist and it’s typically split into three phases. Phase 1 is the mess and the clutter, phase 2 is stepping away and disconnecting, phase 3 is getting a spark and getting to clarity. (I actually wrote a piece on insights for one of my newsletter issues).
You have to kind of go down a rabbit hole of a lot of things and then you're like, what am I doing? Where am I? And then walk away from it. And you know, it's rarely that I'm sitting at my desk that I have that aha moment first. It's always like, I've walked away or I'm in bed, or I'm on a walk or I'm on the airplane and all of a sudden I'm like, oh, it's that
(5) Seeing from different perspectives
Mo talked about an eye opening moment for her when she was teaching in Thailand. It helped her realize that we are often trapped in our own perspectives, but that is such a limiting view of the world.
I had one of my transformative life moments. Right out of college, I taught in Thailand for a year. I went on a field trip, Buddhist Saturday. There were like thousands of people there, there were alters and certain kinda things. I grew up Catholic. I had to go to church every Sunday. I was like, all these people don't believe in God the way that I was taught and I had this moment.
The logical teaching extrapolated here is that if you don't believe in God, you're gonna go to hell. All of these people here are going to hell? Like no. They believe in this other thing… My mind kind of just exploded. It sounds very obvious…but your perspective is not the only perspective. Someone else's view does not have to be wrong for your view to be Right.
(6) Multi-dimensional and evolving
There are many types of strategy and different sub-specialties have been evolving over time - content strategists, digital strategists, customer experience (CX) strategists etc. One thing is clear, strategists need to know a lot about a lot of things with a particular specialty, so they can connect the dots holistically for the business, but also deliver on a specific need.
Where does brand strategy end and CX strategy begin? The solutions are getting more sophisticated and more on the business side.
(7) Finding the hidden gem
With a background in copywriting, Mo shared a couple of stories in which following an instinct on a lead and an idea, it led to some amazing things happening. The linch pin of any brand strategy - uncovering the insight that leads to everything else.
It was a breast cancer awareness event. So these women were driving cross country on motorcycles to raise awareness for breast cancer. They handed me a flyer all about breast cancer. And the very last line, there was a bullet point that said 10% of breast cancer patients are men. And I was like, wait, what?
And then I dug in and I found out my uncle had had breast cancer. I wrote an article for the American Cancer Society, and the local hospital found a male patient. Maybe I saved somebody's life?
(8) Not being afraid of being human, being vulnerable
Most companies and brands shy away from what’s uncomfortable, but the truth is that human vulnerability is the thing that connects us. Mo said it superbly:
There’s great risk in doing great work. And you know what? Being afraid of failure is actually what connects…so if you are comfortable, you probably should have pushed it
(9) A team sport, not a solo endeavor
Brand strategists sometimes find themselves working alone. It might be a problem of budgets or simply just the mindset that the insights should just come from one person. Mo offers a different perspective:
As a brand strategist, sometimes we think we should do it alone. Don't go out there and struggle on your own. Take advantage of the fact that you have people who are down the road a little and always use people to balance your ideas.
I always like to encourage people to cross pollinate. Cause I think as strategists, we are sort of like writers where you have your five favorite writers and you take little pieces from people who I have worked for and people who have worked for me, from everybody.
(10) Honest and true
A great bit of wisdom from Mo nearing the tail end of our conversation was about being true to our values and our voice. While this is not specific to brand strategy, it relates to its practice and for the clients it serves.
Live your values and truth, not producing or doing things the way you think other people want it to be. And if you're really in a space where you feel like your genuine self can't be heard and you have to be different, you just need to change it.
Learn more about Maureen:
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
No Name, No Brand: Everything You Wanted to Know About Naming with Scott Milano
EP. 19 | Scott Milano
Read time: 3.5 min
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Names are typically the first thing founders and entrepreneurs think about when starting a business and launching a brand but it’s not as easy as it seems…
In this episode of the Healthy Brand Podcast, I sat down with Scott Milano, founder of Tanj, a brand naming and language studio specializing in helping brands change the world one word at a time. We talk about the considerations you need to have when naming, why naming is not as easy as it seems, and how he came to name the Nintendo Wii.
APPLE PODCAST | SPOTIFY | STITCHER
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
Your brand name is the tip of your storytelling spear
Naming can seem easy, but DIY at your own risk
Context and creativity is the secret sauce to a great name
How Scott came to name the Nintendo Wii and a really interesting name that was put on the table
The link between the brand name and its visual and verbal identity
The threat of AI on the business of naming
KEY LESSONS
Your brand name is the tip of your storytelling spear
“If you don't have a name, you're not in business. How can people talk about you? So it's like an essential ingredient, it's an identifier.”
Names are important in branding. It is the first thing people hear and it can help your brand spread or it can confuse the heck out of your audiences. Scott points out some basic criteria:
Good name: memorable, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and lets an interesting brand story unfold
Bad name: complicated, hard to spell, hard to pronounce, and misleads the audience about the brand
“The right name encodes some sort of DNA about the broader brand, becoming an entry point to the story and experience that comes afterwards”
There are many different types of names and there is no “right” answer for any given situation, so part of the process is to leave no stone unturned.
Scott didn’t go through all the types of names in this podcast, but shares a construct below:
Naming can seem easy, but DIY at your own risk
“I can name my kids or my dogs, why can't I name my own brand? They think it should be easy and it should come quickly, and sometimes that is the case. But more often than not, it's not. I think anyone who's named a brand as an entrepreneur, as a brand manager, as a CEO realizes that it's a pretty significant decision.”
When speaking with Scott, he talked about their process and how data driven it is. It is certainly a robust undertaking making sure that no stone is left unturned.
We have catalogs of thousands of names that we amass for any given project. For each of those names, there's probably 40 or 50 data points that we have to work through.”
Scott also talked about some areas of naming that clients often forget. It’s not just a creative undertaking. It’s about risk.
“There are other essential parts about naming - in terms of trademark, it's a way to protect all the intellectual property that's a part of your brand”
When you're talking about global brand names, how do they travel across the world? Does it mean something offensive in a key language and market? Or is there some sort of cultural sensitivity that you should be aware of? So it's just a lot of due diligence”
Context and creativity is the secret sauce to a great name
The naming process is unchanged, but the journey to every name is distinct. Scott was very quick to emphasize that the context of any brand dictates where the project goes.
Some examples of context:
Audience
Competition
Business and category
Brand strategy and persona
So before starting a naming project, have a brand strategy and understand the context and how you want your brand to show up. Psst…you know someone who can help you with that 😉
If not, just make sure you have answers to these questions:
What is your brand doing?
How is the brand doing it?
Why does it matter to the world?
Geographies at launch vs. in the future?
This information helps to ground the team tackle the project like a snowflake - one of its kind.
"We don't come to the table for a client with any preconceived notion - like this needs to be much more straightforward or let's get really creative and create something that is totally untethered from the context of the brand"
Who is suited to be a superstar namer? Scott shares that there is no one type of person but creativity is certainly a core element
“I don't think there's any one kind of plain and simple or best fit background…I think you can come at it from a variety of different angles, and that's actually what we look for when we're bringing new folks onto the team.
Different perspectives throughout life: language and culture. We all share kind of a love of writing to some degree. Some are more creative writers, others are linguists. People who just have a strategic kind of view with a creative bend to it. People who can think laterally, they're comfortable being uncomfortable”
Conclusion
Naming is really important, but as a brand strategist, my advice is that the work is not done once you have a name. It’s what you make it, it’s the experiences you create that makes the name, the brand memorable and remarkable.
Learn more about Scott:
- Tanj
Resources
- Chat Namer an AI tool for naming powered by OpenAI by Tanj
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
Becoming the Most Wanted: Outcomes, A Bag of Tricks & The Red Phone with Josh Ingram
EP. 18 | Josh Ingram
Read time: 3 min
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How does a brand become the most wanted? The most wanted company, marketer, or brand strategist? What are the key elements to make that happen?
In this episode of the Healthy Brand Podcast, I sat down with Josh Ingram, founder and principal of The Most Wanted Company, a strategic growth consultancy at the intersection of brand, innovation, and performance. He shared the latest in the world of brand and performance marketing, as well as some tips and tricks to be prepared for any occasion as an indispensable strategist.
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
Leverage both brand and performance marketing – “a match made in heaven”
Build your brand by focusing on the outcomes you want
Have a bag of tricks ready for any occasion
Be open to ideas from anyone and anywhere
See brand as an asset, not a media type
Curiosity is the biggest C amongst category, company, and customer
KEY LESSONS
Leverage both brand and performance marketing – “a match made in heaven”
“Brand marketing is creating fandom before they walk through the door”
When Airbnb’s CFO announced late in 2022 that focusing on brand marketing efforts brought them higher returns, many brand marketers were quick to hail that as proof to double down on brand marketing and forgo performance marketing.
But Josh had a different take.
He was quick to point out that every company and brand is in its own lifecycle and it is unfair to take Airbnb’s situation and apply to everyone. Instead, see it for what it is - both is needed to win.
“Purpose and performance are a match made in heaven. When you can have them working together, you get a better return, you get a lowered cost per acquisition, you get a higher recall, you get more conversions…what's happening is these functions are operating in silos when they need to be working together.
Brand marketers need to have the the business case that they can bring forward to justify investment. And so they need to work with performance marketers. Performance marketers wanna have more efficient spend. They wanna have long-term relationships. They want to increase the value of the customer. They need brand marketers for that.
And as business operators, we need to look at the whole entire thing as a conversation about investment and asset value and long-term growth”
Build your brand by focusing on the outcomes you want
Stephen R. Covey’s second habit of highly effective people is to “Begin with the end in mind”. This is not only a fantastic principle for individuals, it is a great one for brands.
What is an outcome that’s important to the business?
Josh lists a few as examples:
Intent to purchase
Repeat purchase rate
Clinical outcomes of patients
Percent beds filled at a hospital
With two that cuts across different industries
“As brand builders and as operators, we need to focus on those outcomes and make sure that we are using brand to influence those outcomes as much as possible.
One thing that we've been building out at Most Wanted that we do see as a through line across many industries are two areas of focus for outcomes: lifetime value of the customer, that's something that brand can impact very clearly. And then employee engagement”
By putting together a dashboard of different metrics, you can keep the eye on the outcomes your brand needs to influence, with one metric being the “Magic Metric”
“Find that one metric that can lift other metrics. Oftentimes trial is a really effective magic metric because once you try a product, you're more likely to pay more for it, you're more likely to seek it out”
Have a bag of tricks ready for any occasion
Everyone of us have been in situations where we were caught off guard, whether it’s in a meeting or suddenly being called on to present on a topic. In order for us to win the day no matter the situation, we all need to have a bag of tricks ready. From a story at our fingertips, to a workshop exercise!
In the podcast episode, Josh recalls an incident when he thought it was going to be a meet and greet at the client site, but it turned out he was going to be leading a workshop for 20+ people right there, being put in the hot seat.
Instinctively, he bought himself time by asking everyone to write down what success looks like and quickly grabbed a whiteboard. Everyone needs to have their own bag of tricks, and this is a damn good trick to have just in case…
"It’s this classic sort of consulting tactic, of just defining success. But if you're ever in a situation where you're put on the spot, the first thing you can do to help yourself is to just define success and read the room."
Another one is to have some sort of analogy for what you do. It can help create an instant connection to your craft and your work. Josh gives several examples in the episode, but here is one
"I'm your red phone. When you have a problem. When you have a disaster, pick it up. I'll be on the other line. We’re here to help. So that was a way of talking about the phone calls I would get from agencies as an independent consultant.”
Conclusion
Becoming the most wanted is not an overnight endeavor. It’s crafting a brand strategy and executing against it day-in and day-out. Josh dropped a ton of lessons and insights throughout this episode, so if you are building brands, or just interested in how to become the most wanted product, company, or individual, give it a listen!
Learn more about Josh:
Resources
- Creative Confidence by Tom and David Kelley
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
How Companies Can Embrace Equity & Inclusion Today & Into The Future with Dr. Félix Manuel Chinea
EP. 17 | Félix Manuel Chinea, MD
Read time: 3 min
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Company purpose still has a place in the world of brand. And it can be very powerful if you want it to be. Think about Patagonia and how its follow through on purpose has made it one of the most successful and iconic brands on the planet.
But the biggest problem for companies is that these efforts are often seen as expenses and when times get tough, they get cut. We've all seen how Chief DE&I officers are hired and fired, and the recent tech layoffs involved many people who were doing equity and inclusion work.
So when I talked with Felix, the head of health equity and inclusion of Doximity, a digital health company (think LinkedIn for physicians) I really wanted to understand how he has made it work there and how it's being embedded into the company.
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
The definition of DE&I and health equity
Value exchange for long-term impact
The curb cut effect
Culture change is inherent
Consistent actions to bolster the brand
What to look for when hiring for DEI & Health Equity roles
KEY LESSONS
The definition of DE&I and Health equity
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are three values that organizations strive to embody for fair treatment and full participation of all people in the workplace.
Health equity on the other hand applies to health care companies applying the principles of DE&I to the communities they serve.
“In the broadest sense health equity is giving everyone the opportunity to live their healthiest life. There's opportunity to be more specific about it, especially in the space of digital health. What does health equity mean in terms of the sphere of influence that you have as an organization? What is the mission, what are the types of products that you build and how do you make that more equitable?”
Value exchange for long-term impact
One of the most critical challenges for organizations is ensuring that this work doesn't get cut when bad economic times come along. You should not be able to switch values on and off based on external conditions, but that's what you see in some companies.
The reason? It's not a value, it's a program. Worse, it's a fluffy communication tactic. And when media covers all the "failures", we get confusion.
"I had a recent LinkedIn post that asked the question of whether advancing health equity is too fluffy of a term. People losing sense of what does health equity actually mean and what are we actually doing."
When talking Felix, he offers up a unique strategy so the organization doesn't see these efforts as a resource drain, instead, the organization gets value from it. He talks about an example in Doximity where they offer a free service to clinics offering free care and in return, they get very specific feedback about their product.
"A lot of times when we think about a free clinic program, many people will think about this as a charity program. But instead, if you think about this as an exchange of value that really shapes our product in a meaningful way, then it creates a more sustainable process moving forward. "
The curb cut effect
Another challenge we see is the push back in organizations when developing special programs that help one specific group of people. Felix saw some of this at Doximity, but he offers a model that can help address this fear.
He brings up the curb cut effect from the work of Annie Jean Batiste, the head of product inclusion at Google.
"The curb cut effect is this: when we cross the street, the sidewalks have that cut at the curb. And that was actually designed initially for folks in wheelchairs. But then you reflect and you think about who all benefits from that cut in the curb. Folks pushing strollers, folks pushing grocery carts, folks on bikes, folks roller skates or roller blades.. A lot of people benefit from that design even though that design was centered on folks in wheelchairs."
"So the same concept can apply to product design"
So when this is applied to their free telehealth service, the unique perspective and feedback from their free clinic customers allow them to develop features that other users can enjoy and benefit from.
Conclusion
DE&I and healthy equity work is not easy, especially embedding it into the culture of the company. But it is an opportunity to bring energy and vitality into the brand. The opportunity is that most organizations don't do this well, so if your brand can embody these values and make tangible impact, you can truly elevate your brand, not to mention help all those disenfranchised feel a sense of belonging.
There were a ton more lessons and Felix gets pretty deep on the topic: Listen to the whole episode on Apple Podcasts
Learn more about Félix:
Resources
- Michelle Mijung Kim – Book: The Wake Up
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
Surviving the Unthinkable, Building Resilience, & the Alignment of Purpose with Geralyn Ritter
EP. 16 | Geralyn Ritter
Read time: 4.5 min
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How do you build resilience when a catastrophic accident upends your life? What does personal resilience have to do with company purpose and sustainability?
In this episode of the healthy brand podcast, I sat down with Geralyn Ritter and we had an honest conversation that connects the dots between brand, reputation, and pain. Geralyn survived near-fatal injuries in the derailment of Amtrak 188 outside Philadelphia where eight passengers were killed and over 150 injured in 2015. She is an author and Executive Vice President of External Affairs and ESG at Organon, a health care company focused on women’s health.
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
Resilience is skill anyone and any company can build
What pain can teach us about perceptions and brand reputation
How to build a personal brand while being an employee
Authenticity is easier when you focus on others and not yourself
Aligning your personal purpose with your company’s purpose
Shaping a company culture of inclusivity and belonging
KEY LESSONS
Resilience is a skill anyone and any company can build
Credit: GeralynRitter.com
One of the amazing things about Geralyn is that she can find the humor and silver lining in just about anything. But she also talks about resilience being a skill that can be built over time. She talks about the power of reframing.
“I was sitting there feeling sorry for myself when it was about three o'clock, and the boys came home from school. Something just clicked. Here I was six months in with who knows how long in front of me, and I was gonna be home every single day when they got home from school. And I thought, you know, I need to treasure that. I called 'em in and they jumped in bed with me. And we watched a movie that afternoon, and I said to myself, you know, when, when have I ever curled up at 3:30 in the afternoon for no reason? It just kind of hit me that I needed to reframe.”
It's a deliberate practice that can help us go through the toughest times.
“Reframing is the heart of resilience, but it doesn't come easy. Like I said, sort of deliberately trying to reframe this enforced slowness and look for the good part of it. I think it's really healthy. It really helped me. But it was hard work”
If our identity is one of resilience, or if we are trying to build resilience into our identity, every time we reframe something bad that is happening, we are essentially making a vote for that type of person.
Every reframe becomes a vote for your resilience.
For companies, resiliency is a brand competence. When the market and the external factors are not in your favor, how can a brand continue to deliver on its promise? And part of the answer is to take a longer-term view.
“ESG is resiliency for companies over the long term. Long-term resiliency to the shocks that are gonna come. Whether it's climate related, social related, change in long-term macroeconomic trends. Preparing now, investing now in programs around equity, around reducing admissions, good governance that considers the perspectives of all your stakeholders. Fundamentally, that's how you build a resilient company over the long-term”
A healthy brand is a resilient brand, and when you start asking some important questions, you will know where to focus
“What are the issues that matter? Where can you make a difference? Where can your company actually have an impact? Or what are those issues that would actually affect your company? That's where you focus.”
What pain can teach us about perceptions and brand reputation
Geralyn had to go through pain. A lot of pain. And the more she dealt with it, the more she learned that pain is perceived very differently by those who are experiencing it and those who see it experienced.
“Fundamentally, pain cannot be measured, you know, in, in some ways it is subjective. And what I mean by that is it's the brain responding to whether the body is in danger. And it may be a signal of tissue damage, or it may not be, you know, many people have heard of phantom limb pain. There are lots of examples where the body is injured and the brain doesn't actually feel pain or the body is not injured, but the brain does feel pain”
“How our brain interprets pain is very complicated, and it is a matter of perception. It's the same thing as we talk about telling our story…perception is reality”
The lesson here is that, like pain, brand and reputation is also a matter of perception, where there is not really a universal truth about pain or reputation. It only makes sense from the perspective of the individual, or a group of homogenous individuals – aka audience segment.
“When you think about reputation, people say, oh, well they have a good reputation. My question is always with who? With who? Does this company have a good reputation? Well, with who? Does the man on the street know them? Maybe, maybe not, but maybe their customers love them and would never go anywhere else. Yes. Maybe they're the darling of Wall Street, but yet, you know a lot of activists or social groups think that they're horrible. What does it mean to have a good reputation? You've gotta go deeper”
Geralyn emphasizes that broad quantitative metrics about reputation is not useful.
“You try to reduce it to a number who has the best reputation. That's kind of meaningless to me”
How to build a personal brand while being an employee
One of the most asked questions about personal brands is how one balances between their company brand and their own personal brand. Geralyn talks about how it needs to be separate.
“When I have purely leaned into trying to get word out about my book, I hired a separate publicist on my own dime…I do try to keep a, a certain separation of church and state but, but keep the two sides informed enough that, that we don't step on each other.”
But at the same time, look for opportunities to leverage her personal story to talk about the company purpose, both internally and externally, because her experience is her identity, and it doesn’t make sense to hide it.
“I am fortunate that part of my job is to talk about our company's purpose internally and externally. And it is very genuine. And the fact that it does connect to a personal sense of purpose, that's not kind of a stretch or strained…So I don't hesitate to draw on that personal narrative as I am talking about the need for more research, for example into women's pain”
In fact, she feels that not acknowledging her experience and disability is disrespectful.
“I don't wanna be train wreck girl, but it's always front and center in my mind, but it in a way that it shapes my perspective, not that it needs to come into every conversation. But at the same time, if you ignore it, if you just never talk to me about it, if you pretend that it didn't happen, you dishonor me that way”
Conclusion
Resilience is an important skill personally and for company brands. Geralyn’s story of not only surviving, but thriving after her devastating accident is inspiring. Listen to the full episode, hear Geralyn talk about her story on your favorite podcast player.
Learn more about Geralyn:
Resources
Bone by Bone by Geralyn Ritter (100% of proceeds go to non-profit organizations that support trauma professionals and trauma survivors)
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
Dominate the B2B Industry with Brand: A Raw & Unfiltered Conversation with Jason Vana
EP. 15 | Jason Vana
Read time: 4.5 min
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Why do some B2B companies thrive while others struggle? How should leaders think about branding vs. performance marketing efforts? Jason has real answers for us.
Jason Vana is the founder of Shft, a Brand and content strategy agency focused on B2B companies – helping them become the only choice for their customers. He is also an established thought leader in the world of B2B, with over 50K followers on LinkedIn.
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
The most controversial topic in the world of marketing and branding
The irony of ironies in the B2B world
The powerful strategy of being different, not better
The fallacy of MQLs (marketing qualified leads)
The three most important things to learn as a marketer
The real Jason Vana, please stand up
KEY LESSONS
Branding is not a marketing function; it cuts across everything
As controversial as it may seem, I subscribe to the same idea. If brand is the feeling and perception someone has about your company, product, or service and branding is the execution of every touch point to create that feeling, how can it be a marketing function?
“Branding has just been confined or just tossed into marketing because marketing is promotional, branding is just this way to promote ourselves. But I think you and I would both agree that if I call into a company and I talk to a receptionist who's rude, that impacts the perception I have of the company.
“And so when it comes to brand, it is far more than just a marketing aspect. It really is built also by sales, by marketing, by operations, by production, by customer service, by your product, by every aspect, every point of contact”
The problem with branding being held in the marketing department is that they don’t have power over the entire organization.
“I don't know any marketers, any CMOs that have that authority. Most CMOs are like, oh that's the COO's job, not my job. That’s the disconnect in B2B…they don't understand what a brand truly is.”
“And it can’t just be the CEO either, because most CEOs are not brand people, they are product people. You need a Chief Brand Officer that sits between the CEO and the other functions.”
When Jason shared this online, it was the most controversial org chart in history, shooting it to virality status.
LinkedIn Post HERE
“The CEO should not be the owner of the brand cuz they don't even know what a brand is or how to build a brand. So if that's the case, then you should have a CBO that everyone reports to because the product and operations are just as much part of brand as marketing is. That's a conversation that a lot of people don't wanna have yet because in most org charts, brand sits under marketing, you've got a CMO, and then you've got like the chief brand marketer and, that is basically a glorified policeman making sure that everything is on brand.”
There are no impulse buys in B2B, branding is the only way to generate sustained demand
The ironies of ironies is that while the world of B2C is admitting that branding efforts have a higher ROI than performance marketing, B2B businesses continue to bet on performance marketing. It should actually be reversed as there are impulse buys in the B2C world, making it a more viable performance marketing candidate than the B2B world, with long sales cycles and drawn out decision making processes.
“Airbnb, Adidas and ASOS, three B2C brands that in the last year, all of them have come out and said we have moved away from performance marketing into brand marketing.
Airbnb made that move in 2019, they dropped their performance marketing started doing brand campaigns. They have had their most successful quarter and their CFO has said it is because of our investment in brand.
Adidas. They thought the majority of their sales was coming from performance marketing. And when they sat down and looked at the data, they found out 60% of their sales actually comes from brand campaigns, not performance marketing.
ASOS spent a quarter I think it was last year, one of the quarters last year, they made 80% of their marketing budget was in performance marketing and sales dropped 105%”
According to Jason, performance marketing is demand capture and branding is demand generation. I tend to agree, it also explains why performance marketing efforts have high initial ROI, then diminishes over time – there is no more demand to capture, the top of the funnel has dried out. Whereas branding continues to fill the top of the funnel. It’s not “either or”, it’s “and”. You need both to win long term.
“Imagine if you, if you sell a hundred thousand dollars service and you have a queue of people waiting to work with you, that's never gonna happen with performance marketing. It doesn't build that kind of loyalty of like, screw everyone else. I'm willing to pay more to work with you. That's what brand does.”
“Different” always beat “better”: lean into what makes the brand unique
Jason states that for a brand to be healthy, it must understand why it is different and I couldn’t agree more. He recalled for us a story about his days in a B2B company:
“One of the first things I did was I created an account pretending that I was a food processor. I went on all the competition's websites and requested information and I just wanna see how they respond
Nine years later, I'm still waiting for a response from some of those companies. Even the ones that did respond, it was one or two days So I said we're gonna make it super easy for people to hear a response. We will have an answer to them in 30 minutes - That is how we're gonna win. We broke the standard and we stole opportunities away from these big companies because of that.”
By zigging while everybody is zaggin, they stood out with a real experience that addressed a pain, not a “promotional” message. It was a tangible fulfillment of their promise. When looking for something unique, you also have to make sure it’s a sustainable differentiator.
“I've heard this a lot. It's our team is what sets us apart. No, it's not <laugh> because your team will be completely different in 20 years. So if that's your differentiation in 20 years, you're done. You know, like what actually makes you different?”
Because if you are not, you just set off the biggest nuclear bomb in the market, driving it down, down, down.
“If your customers can get the same thing from all your competitors, you are no longer competing on something unique, you are just competing on price.”
Conclusion
Branding is demand generation and when done well with performance marketing, you can truly dominate in the world of B2B, because no one is really doing it that well. The same in true in the world of health care, build a brand and your customers will line up around the block to choose you. Listen to the episode on your favorite podcast player for all the truth bombs.
Learn more about Jason:
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
Stories That Shape the Trillion Dollar Biotech Industry with Dan Budwick
EP. 14 | Dan Budwick
Read time: 4 min
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How do Biotech companies raise millions of dollars just based on a concept? How do they convince physicians and patients to try an unproven treatment? Dan shares what it takes to build a successful brand based on hope.
Dan Budwick is the founder and CEO of 1AB, a communications agency focused on early stage Biotechs – helping them tell stories and build their brands. He cut his teeth in the world of media relations, working with the top journalists and brazen CEOs to bring the most important stories to the public.
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of tips and topics:
Weathering the failures of science with brand
Simplifying the scientific story
The compounding power of relationships
Social media as a vital channel for communications
Integrity and ethics in the world of biotech
How to build a company where people love to come to work
KEY LESSONS
Withstand inevitable failures by building a trusted brand
The world of Biotech is ridden with failures. It’s a natural outcome when the boundary of science is pushed to its limits, exploring, and uncovering potential cures and treatments that can conquer devastating diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s.
Dan has seen his fair share of hard times.
“I was with a company who had phase three clinical data failures and have had to make layoffs and go back to the drawing board. And it's tough. They’ve poured their heart and soul into it.”
Trust is built through the way data and evidence is announced. The keyword Dan said was “tempered optimism”, you never want to come across as chest beating, because you never know when things can go south.
“Sometimes it's just about the way that you make an announcement…sometimes you just have to state things straight and walk away and keep your head down and keep going. I was talking to a client this morning about an interview that they were doing, and this is what we talked about, just play it straight, state the facts. The data looked great but just don't make too much of it. Tempered optimism is a good way to approach things.”
“You're playing ultimately a very long game. And so your reputation with those guys as being a straight shooter when things are great, but things are not so great, I think goes a long way towards really solidifying those relationships and, you know, being seen as those people that those reporters need to call”
And a big learning from Dan was that companies need to start building trust and cultivating ambassadors before they need them. Don’t wait until there is some big announcement to reach out to journalists and reporters.
“We have clients that have invested a lot of time over the years ahead of those milestones to establish and cultivate those relationships. They look at media, the way they, they look at investor relations. It's a process. And those are the ones I think that have ultimately benefited the most.”
Simplify the scientific story to reach a broader audience
In the world of biotechnology, the science can get really complicated and it might seem counter intuitive, but some founders are worried that a simple message can come across as simplistic. Dan was adamant that if the science is too complex, no one will know their story and they will miss out on reaching a broader audience and gaining that momentum.
“Honestly, some of the content was so dense that you would read it and pass out like three sentences in… find ways to grade it up or grade it down depending on the level of technicality of the audience”
“The use of a great on point analogy is powerful. We've also had clients that totally bombed on analogies and it's actually been really embarrassing…having the right one can really bring things to life in a way everybody can understand”
As a communications and brand professional in the health care world, you don’t have to know everything about the science, but it does require that you know enough to be able to explain it. Dan talks about his approach.
“Take me through this like I'm a dog <laugh>, like I'm a small animal. These people that we work with day in and day out are some of the most brilliant people within their line of specialty. But you still have to put it on a website. You still have to put it in a press release. You have to be able to see it in an article and have it make sense. So it does require you to break things down.”
Invest in the compounding power of relationships
When Dan started his company, 1AB Media, he immediately had a few clients. How? He had developed amazing relationships over decades of working with in the Biotech industry.
“Oh man. I am not here without my relationships… my time at Pure, the relationships that I built within that Cambridge ecosystem and what that did for me”
He recalled when it all began and how the importance of relationships was ingrained in him by his first boss.
“In 1999, my first boss gave me the best piece of advice I've ever gotten. We want to move you into health care. And he took an envelope and he slid it across the table at me. I opened it up and I saw a green Amex with my name on it. And he said, I want you to go out and I want you to form relationships with every reporter that covers health care. I want you to get to know everything there is to know about them. I wanna know what they like, what they don't like, what their editors expect of them. I wanna know if they're married or single. I wanna know what sports teams they like. I wanna know what gum they chew.”
Building relationships is often not a priority for those early in their careers and that’s a missed opportunity. If you start investing in it early, it will pay dividends over time.
“You can be the most junior member on a team. It doesn't mean that you can't develop relationships because the person that you have a relationship with within that company who may also be young is gonna grow up and is gonna go somewhere and is gonna be somebody.”
Conclusion
The power of stories and communications is palpable and it’s especially evident in the world of Biotech where investments are made when there are no products and requiring many years for a treatment to get to market. The flow of billions of dollars - all based on how well the stories get told.
Learn more about Dan:
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
How to Propel Your Brand Forward Using The Power of Your Culture with Mark Miller
EP. 13 | Mark Miller
Read time: 5.5 min
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Why is it that some organizations build the most amazing brands, but some fail to create anything compelling? Mark has an answer for us.
Mark Miller is a co-founder of Historic Agency and leads product strategy, marketing transformation and brand. He has rebranded nearly 100 organizations and specializes in all things strategy including brand, product and marketing. He is also the co-author of the Amazon bestseller “Culture Built My Brand."
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of tips and topics:
What led to the writing of “Culture built my brand.”
The six elements of building a thriving internal culture
Most prolific examples of cultural elements seen in the wild
Culture can be built no matter the size of the organization
The untapped opportunity in health care
The agile approach to branding
KEY LESSONS
Culture is the main reason behind brand success or brand failure
When Mark and team asked themselves the question “why is it that some clients would take off after our rebrand, while some would go back to the old brand or not even launch at all?” They had a hunch.
“There was a pattern that we started to see with clients that were struggling to be successful in their own brand and owning their own brand - that was all cultural issues.”
A brand is typically thought of as the way others feel and say about you, but Mark helps us make the link between the external and the internal.
“There is something deeper to your brand and how you operate as an organization or a company. We found that really culture has more to do with your brand, then just what other people think. Because how you hire, how you fire, what you, what you prioritize in your budget, what decisions you make, what values drive, all of that ultimately trickles down to the customer experience and your product which is what people think about you”
And culture shows up not during the good times, but when things get rocky. Mark shares a personal story about Historic when the COVID-19 pandemic first hit.
“Almost 40% of our revenue was gone in two weeks. the first two weeks of covid, people just said, we're gonna cancel, and it doesn't matter the fees, some members of the management team didn't resonate with the values that we had as a company and the expectation on leadership and those kind of things. And so we were forced to make some decisions. We had to let some people go.”
And how prioritizing culture played a key part of their growth in a trying time.
“We wanted to refocus our culture…align to the things that were important. And it was amazing to see people step up. And people will perform better when they're in a culture that they connect with that makes sense to them… and they will step up for organizations because they love where they work.”
Culture is not just posters on the wall – there are six elements to building a thriving culture
Often, when you bring up culture, companies will point to the values they embody, often on their website or on the walls of the office. That’s certainly a starting point, but certainly not the end. Mark talks about the six different elements they’ve found in their research that organizations can use to create an environment for culture to thrive.
1. Principles
“Everyone has values, but principles are behaviors. They teach your team how to actually work. Like how to behave, how do they treat each other? How do they treat customers?”
2. Architecture
“That's the organizational systems process. If anyone's had a submit a expense report that spends more time doing that than it does actually making the charges on your expense expenses that's a problem, right? What are the systems, the things behind the walls that you don't actually see, like plumbing and electricity.”
3. Lore
“Those are the unspoken or sometimes spoken stories that the organization tells about itself. And sometimes that is intentional, right? From leadership or from marketing or communications. Sometimes it's water cooler talk that senior leaders and executives don't know. What we found was organizations (who had thriving cultures) were really intentional about shaping and influencing that”
4. Rituals
“The things that we do as an organization that highlights or embodies the brand. So an example in the book we give is NASA's pumpkin carving contest. It's grassroots, it's not paid by government taxes, you know, tax dollars. It's all subsidized by the employees. Their pumpkins are really crazy, some of 'em actually lift off and explode”
5. Vocabulary
“Vocabulary is the being intentional about the language you use. So Netflix is really famous for this. They have a bunch of internal words they use, like “sunshining”, which is when you share a failure so that the rest of your team can learn from it. Or the “keeper test”, which is for managers. If you have an employee whom you would fight to keep, if they were gonna leave, then they should be on your team.”
6. Artifacts
“Infusionsoft, which is now Keap, has a football field like AstroTurf in their office, and that's for one of their values – “leaving in it all on the field” And so they have staff meetings on this AstroTurf as a reminder for people to leave it all on the field. So that would be an artifact.”
Design experiences and processes that reflect the company’s values
When culture and brand is reflected in the experiences and the processes of the company, it can be so powerful. The same can be said when nothing is reflected – powerfully terrible.
“No one really thinks about organizational systems as part of their brand, right? But if your expectation is you want a nurse to have great bedside manner and be efficient and super smart and be like an operator, a Navy seal essentially…Yet every interaction with the software and HR and parking is a nightmare, that is gonna bleed out into the way they interact with doctors and with the way they interact with the patients and what information they put into systems and which ones they don't.”
This is also especially true for younger generations, who are more and more part of the workforce.
“Generation Z and millennials have have really good BS meters, right? Whereas older generations, it was duty, tradition. And so there's this cultural shift that's happening right now. And so we gotta be transparent. We have to have a brand that isn't just, you know, paint on the outside of our building, but is something that actually is an expression of who we are and how we operate”
Mark also reminds us that it’s not just the big organizations who can walk the talk, aligning values to action.
“The barbershop that I referenced in, in my book Nico’s barber shop, is they, they take I think once a month time to do haircuts for those in need, right? So sometimes it's a like a, a boy's home, sometimes it's a homeless shelter. Sometimes it's low income people who are, are getting interviews like, or sometimes it's teaching kids how to do barbershop haircuts and all that kind of stuff. That has generated rapid, rapid growth - from a haircare product line to multiple stores.”
Indeed, purpose driven branding, a core idea from David Aaker remains very relevant for organizations big and small.
Conclusion
You can’t rip culture apart from the brand. By addressing the cultural challenges head-on, you give the brand a boost in authenticity, laying the foundation for a brand that’s going to fulfill its promise every single day.
Learn more about Mark:
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
SPECIAL EPISODE: Biggest Ahas from 11 Healthy Brand Builders
EP. 12 | SPECIAL EPISODE
Read time: 15 min
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This is a special episode to wrap up the year. So instead of bringing a guest where I grill them and uncover the value bombs and the gems, I share my four biggest ahas from the 11 previous guests that I brought to the show.
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THE FOUR BIGGEST AHAs
#1 Silos are comfortable, but dangerous
When what you do can change the way the enterprise does business, it can't be left to a function. Branding can't just be left to brand experts. Communications can't just be left to communicators. And it's the same with marketing and DE&I.
“You think the battle's over… I just had this epiphany just a few months ago, you know, disruptive innovation, branding is left in the sideline, you know, and to a large extent, social programs and combating society's scary issues and problems. Branding is not where it should be at all. You've got all these people running around with grants, volunteers, energy goals, nothing is branded. It's all aimless. Without brands you not only don't have something that can guide, that can inspire, but can communicate. It's impossible to communicate all that stuff without branding. So you disappear into a cloud of sameness, and as a result, people are saying, you know, maybe we should cut back on these grants and volunteering because it's costing a lot of money and we're in tough times. We gotta survive as a company. So, you know, then you think, oh, we really there yet?”
“Brand relevance, relationships, trust, should not be left to marketers and communicators and brand experts. That should be the core of any leadership team, right? That, I mean, look at, look, I was watching something the other night, it was a documentary on Boeing, and it was about the 737 Max where they had those, you know, really, really tragic accidents. Hundreds of people passed away unfortunately, and the company was denying it up till the end. They kept saying, our mission is safety. And people were dying. I mean because the brand, the purpose, the efficacy was nothing more than a word. It was a statement nobody was relating it to, to the reality, right? I'm not blaming anybody in this regard. I'm just saying that it can get lost quickly when you leave branding to the brand people or the marketers, right? Purpose can get lost quickly. When you leave it to just the communications people, right? Communications people, brand experts, marketing people. Our job is to infiltrate those things into the company. I tell them all the time, we're not here to communicate for the company. We're here to help the company communicate.”
“You know, I, I went from, like I said, consumer product goods companies, which is all marketing. Everyone is thinking marketing from the CEO down of what is the value proposition for this, this opportunity. Who are our customers? Who are our biggest customers? What are they, how are they going to respond to these, you know, products and offerings? And constantly listening and creating a feedback loop and improving and just having your finger on the pulse of insights, community insights, your company insights. There's a loop of communication within those consumer brands that is unlike anything I've ever seen. So everyone is lockstep together, moving forward to produce products that will make people's lives better or more efficient. When I went into healthcare and what I saw from all over the world, traveling to some conferences and hearing this from other individuals, healthcare as an overall, what I saw was they really look at marketing as a tactical kind of resource group”
“To tactically implement a handful of completely disconnected items into the marketplace. There doesn't seem to be a strategic understanding of marketing at the table in order to identify and share insights back and forth with all of your cross-functional teams and a part of engaging the entire leadership team to create strategies. So there really isn't it, and I've seen multiple healthcare strategies. Marketing is a part of every single one of them, but I don't necessarily understand or think that leadership understands that, that, so, so the, the biggest issue I saw is that healthcare leaders leave marketing to just marketing. It's almost carved out. It's a separate thing. You go to them when you need something creative or a new flyer posted or, you know, you wanna create some employee engagement and have a picnic. And that is the least of what marketing is. In fact, that's not marketing whatsoever.”
#2 Action beats everything
Whether you are working on bringing the purpose of an organization to life or faced with a tough decision, the most important thing is to take action and start learning. Because every moment we don't is a missed opportunity to get better.
“There's just so many things that, that you learned by just, by just doing. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I'm a huge believer in that learning by doing Trump's trump's learning by kind of reading or seeing all day long, right? You just don't, there's so many sort of unknowns whether known or not, right? That you just don't, you don't, you won't really fully appreciate until you start actually doing. And so it's so that, that's another kind of thing that I'm a, I'm a huge believer in now even at like, even even with decisions that we're making at like fast wave and Crossfire, is that if you're, if you're 80% sure about that, right? We, we all work with enough smart people that have given us a lot of thought. If we're 80% sure, we just like, action trumps everything, right? We need to see momentum and action versus, you know, getting caught in a death spiral of, of, of paralysis by analysis”
“Community health workers on a motorcycle going hut to hut to hut giving people the drugs they needed. And when you see that happen, I mean that, that kind of, of innovation and willingness to think creatively and, and all funded by the US and we turned, we and other countries eventually participated too. But there's no question the US led the effort. We turned HIV in these places where it was always fatal into a chronic condition. It was transformative. But for me, standing there and seeing that, seeing what we were able to do in one of the poorest places on earth, we built the infrastructure, delivered the drugs, transformed healthcare. Cuz once you built the clinic, right, you didn't just treat h hiv, you could treat child mat, you know, children's health and maternal health, right?”
“It's infrastructure. All of a sudden, you, you transformed healthcare. So I'm standing there in the middle of nowhere, Uganda <laugh>, one of the poorest places on earth. And I, I remember just saying to myself, if we could do this here, there is no reason why we can't have a healthcare system that works in America. We've got the wealthiest country in the history of mankind. We, we have resources that are just, it, it, it's, it's hard to even count the zeroes behind how much we can spend. And yet we're d yet our healthcare system doesn't work for everybody. That's not acceptable. That can't we, we just can't let that go on. And I, and then I say to myself, ABNA, you can talk about this. You can, you can moan about it and, and talk about it or you can do something about it. Here's your choice. Moan and <laugh> and, and, and, and vetch about it or do something about it. And that's when I decided that I was gonna start what has become same Sky health. Cause I said I can't, it's not enough to talk about it. That, that we need to do better. We, we need to actually do better, right? So I want to be part of, of doing better and that's what I'm trying to do with SameSky Health.”
“There's someone, there was someone who once told me the nannies come from Trinidad. So don't tell people you're from Trinidad. Just tell them you went to school in Canada, cuz that sounds better. It's like amazing the thing, the microaggressions that like you see in it here. But I mean, I kept on trucking because my mother famously said to me before she died, when I experienced something terrible at work at the time, she was like, one of these days, your haters will be your waiters. Just keep that in the back of your mind. And so that's one of the things that has just also kept me going. You know, I also truly believe in leaving a legacy for those who are also coming up behind me, right? Because I was like, if I fail, what does that say and mean for the people who are more junior to me?”
#3 Your brand is not about you
It's what the audience wants. It's who the customers want to become. When you focus outwardly on those you serve and wish to influence, your stories will start to matter and your brand will start to gain true fans.
“And so when you study the science of influence, you realize that you have to communicate a couple things really well. One, what you make, absolutely what do you make? How is it better? What are the functional facts, features, benefits. But you also gotta communicate what you make happen. And what you make happen is a feeling. And for so long as strategists and as creatives you'd see on the creative brief, we want people to feel confident, we want them to feel empowered. We want them to feel peace of mind. And to execute against that was, you know, these are like bankrupt words that we see every brand. Chances are every healthcare brand wants their target audience to feel empowered, peace of mind in control. And so what we did was we dug deeper and we realized who really knows how to influence people, role models, role models, know how to influence people. And when you know how to role model something, then people don't just wanna buy you, they wanna be you. That's the goal. So then we said, okay, well how do we role model? We have to go a step further. What do you make? Yes. What do you make happen? Yes. What are you gonna role model is based on your target audiences fantasy self.”
“You know, the challenge is your goal from a company point of view is to have your story and your wording and phrasing used by the journalist. And journalists don't want that. You know? As a journalist when I was at Bloomberg, you know, I, we had, I had four screens in my desk with headlines constantly streaming up. And my goals were at a story or a headline. So amazing that you stopped your tracks and clicked on that story and shared it with your friends. And so a journalist wants a story that hasn't been written before, or an angle or a perspective that hasn't been told. Because, you know, it's like, say you pitch a story to your editor and they just google the topic and there's like a hundred their stories or the exact same thing. It's not really interesting, right? So they're gonna say, well come up with something different.”
“So the challenge is for, for companies is how do you, you know, give journalists something unique and special at at when they're interested in it? And again, you know, as a journalist, I was kind of loathed to do profiles of companies cuz it felt like we were fawning over them. You didn't wanna wanna be seen as in the tank for a company or, you know, wanting to support a company. You wanna be neutral. So the other kind of thing challenge I see is from a comms point of view versus a journalist's point of view. This, a lot of times the journalist, I'd write a story that thought was really balanced and a showcase a company, but it talked about that quote unquote to be sure paragraph. We always had a Bloomberg where, you know, this sounds awesome to be sure. Some people say it sucks, you know, or it won't ne it'll never happen to give balance. And a lot of companies at pr, people I was friends with coming after go, we thought it wasn't worth doing the story because of this to be sure paragraph. So I think, you know, it's important to set expectations like, look, you know, you can get a story in a media, but it may not come out like you want, or it may have, you know, your opposite or or competitor mentioned. So if you're, you know, not fine with that, you have to rethink your approach”
“When they've gotta go out and raise 20 million or they need to attract employees or they need to sign on to vendors who don't have space for them, but they need their capacity in order to get their work done. Even in the early stage, even before patients, before you have, you're in humans. And then don't even talk about like, then you're recruiting investigators and you're recruiting patients and the families of patients to wanna come on and put and i I and take a pill that no human has ever taken and you're already sick. Like, just think about that, right? Like, what does it take to be willing to do that? So I think there are, and, and of all those people, of the investors and the employees and the potential investigators and the patients and the vendor partners, all of those stakeholders, sure there may be some that are just laser focused on tell me about the atoms and molecules and tell me exactly about how this science works.”
“And I will with a completely cold heart determine whether that science appeals to me or not. I'm sure there are people in that system that I just described that don't need to have a feeling, but I would argue that most of those people need to have some level of trust to give us their money, give us their bodies to test things on, give us their capacity and space, which has an opportunity cost for other clients that these vendors could have give us their livelihoods as an employees. That is not nothing. And it is very rarely completely on the like front part of your brain that you make those decisions. There's a do I fundamentally trust these people? Do I feel good about being attached to these people? How will I think, how will people see me if I'm in, you know, standing in the same room as, as this group of people? Well then how are, how is everybody seeing this group so I know what kind of halo effect I will or will not have as I'm connected? I mean, I think that's just human nature.”
#4 Take the opportunity before you and ask what if
We have a tendency to wait, wait for the right role, the right problem, the right opportunity, then we will really do what it takes. But time and time again, learning from my guests, one thing is certain, don't wait. Use the opportunity in front of you and make it what you will. The limits we artificially place on ourselves are the limits of the opportunity in front of us.
“Wow. You know you, you, you move your family there to launch a product which is, which everybody was super excited about. And then the FDA doesn't, you know, doesn't accept the file. So that that forced our team to figure out, you know, how do we survive? You know, how does the business survive? How are we gonna keep our employees? How are we gonna keep our customers? What, what are we gonna do? We're just gonna lose market share. That's a whole nother, that was a whole nother experience that wasn't a lot of fun when it first happened, but probably wow, probably the most probably one of the most valuable lessons I've learned by, by having gone through it. And it was about a five to six year technology gap.”
“When I started out, I was making no money. I had an entry level job wire cable company, a thousand people upstate New York get in there and I, they, there's a four page newsletter and they say, Gary, you know, this is, you gotta publish this every month. It was bowling scores and all this other stuff. And I started walking around the mill and I realized within, you know, two or three months, it's like nobody talks to each other. These people hate leadership. Leadership doesn't like them. There was a union involved. There was strikes every two years. And so I did two things which changed the company. I, I basically redesigned the newsletter to be. We, we sent it to the home instead of just distributing it. We became 12 pages. I talked about the business, I talked about competition, talked about the marketplace, how we priced products.”
“I gave profiles to people. I took pictures. I mean, we, we were, we were producing 3,000 copies for a 1,000 person workforce because people wanted extra. And then the other thing I did is I got a grant from the federal mediation and conciliation service to, to form a labor management committee. I was 22 years old and the Labor Management Committee was, was every month we sat down outside of the contract, 12 union people, 12 management people on each side of the table. And we talked about everything but the contract, safety, communications, you know, not, you know, all the things outside quality. And within what maybe 18 months they signed their first six year contract. They, there was no more this side was labor. They, they were actually intermingling. They were, we had holiday parties together. We broke the barrier because we discovered each other. I was only 22. I'm not saying I'm smart, I'm just saying all, all I'm saying is communications can, can do that.”
“It's a lesson I'd learned later, but I think, I wish I had known it earlier. And that is that every person that comes into your life has something to give you. And you've gotta be humble enough and open enough to acknowledge that and to receive it and to, to see people as sort of opportunities to learn and to grow that they have something to give you. And if you haven't figured it out, that's on you. You need to keep, you need to figure it out. I think I missed a lot of opportunities and didn't take advantage of them in the way they should because I didn't understand just the importance of people in your life and that they have something to give.”
“Businesses are in a position where they can help regardless of industry. And it's just as long as it's aligned with your values, it's aligned with what your employees believe in, what your CEO, what your executives believe in, it can be beneficial. You say we're not Patagonia, why can't we be Patagonia? Yeah, you're right. We're not Patagonia, we we don't make clothing, we make medicines, but that doesn't mean that we can't go beyond what we're doing from a medicine standpoint, as you rightly pointed out. Why not? Why can't you? And I think it's just, it's broadening the thinking and really digging in to think about what your brand is, not only internally, but what it means externally and what you're putting out there. And I think that saying we're not is obviously an obstacle. And I'm always asking people why, why, why can't we do that? Who else do we need to involve? Why, why can't we have these crazy ideas?”
Conclusion
It’s been incredible to interview leaders in marketing, communications, branding in the world of healthcare and learn from their experiences. I hope you've enjoyed this special episode and took away something that can help you build your brands and your career.
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
Unleashing the Power of Consumer Marketing & Branding in Health Care with Carrie Lewis
EP. 11 | Carrie Lewis
Read time: 5.5 min
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What happens when a consumer marketing veteran gets into health care? Expect drama, sparks, and transformation.
Carrie Lewis is a lifelong marketer in the consumer space, leading marketing for global brands like Sherwin Williams and Stanley Black and Decker. Most recently she pivoted and became a CMO at Metro Health System in Cleveland. Today, she works as a fractional CMO as part of Chief Outsiders. In our conversation a few weeks ago, we get real about what it was like to take her marketing chops into health care and her counter intuitive strategies she uses to turn around and generate $2 Bn in revenue for a struggling community hospital system.
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of tips and topics:
As a new CMO, start with curiosity, humility, and share why you are there
Use the power of personal stories to give patients hope
Health care organizations typically have marketing carved out - that needs to change
Show the executive team what is marketing, never tell them
Be a cheerleader for the CEO and help them reach their goals
Close the great divide in provider organizations through marketing and watch the culture improve
Take the first 100 days to digest all research and learn everything you can
KEY LESSONS
Embed marketing and branding into the entire organization, bringing together the “great divide”
Marketing is typically seen as a peripheral function. Especially for health care organizations, and companies, whose leadership are typically clinically trained or grew up in finance and operations. Carrie contrasted that to her experience in consumer brands.
“Everyone is thinking marketing from the CEO down about value proposition for this opportunity. Who are our biggest customers? They are constantly listening and have their finger on the pulse on the company, the community, and their customers.”
When Carrie arrived at Metro Health System, she observed an issue which was front and center “Health care leaders leave marketing to just marketing. It's a separate thing. You go to them when you need something creative or a new flyer posted, and that is the least of what marketing is.” My perspective is that this doesn’t only exist in health care providers, it’s pervasive within the health care industry.
The other important observation is the “great divide” between clinicians and leadership, where the power struggle between groups lead to contempt and an extremely misaligned organization, which is almost always felt by the employees, the community, and the patients. Carrie found a way to bring them together by heavily highlighting the physicians as the individuals and the service leaders that they were. It created trust and bolstered employee culture, which started to bring the two groups together. Moving from a world of “what can you do for me” to “what can we do together”.
Personal stories are incredibly powerful, they bring hope to patients and can rally an organization
Carrie Lewis and late husband Andrew in a cab going from New York to Columbia for chemo.
Carrie’s story about why she entered the health care industry as a marketing executive is extremely personal. “I was with Sherwin Williams as Vice President of marketing for their consumer brands channel, and he had passed away when I was there. When you lose your husband at 40, you need a moment. A moment to reflect. A moment to digest that. I took a year off… I did anything physical I could to have silent moments of just pure reflection - where did I go wrong? What could I have done better? Like divine intervention, I got a call from a local hospital… they said, help, we need a real marketer.”
And when she started, she was incredibly humble, curious, and shared her story with physicians and leaders of the health system, “I'm here because I want people that were in my situation to be able to know exactly what this team can deliver them, and they don't”
When asked what was THE thing that health care organizations are missing out on in terms of branding and marketing, Carrie didn’t hesitate – hopeful patient stories.
“I really truly believe that my job as a caregiver to Andrew and what got him from two years to 10 years was his endless idea that there was hope. I needed him to have a placebo of hope wrapped around him. Stories shed light on very specific human experiences that the healthcare enterprise has with patients… Those are stories and messages of hope that individuals, caregivers, and patients that are ill cling to.”
She also acknowledges how hard it is, but that’s why these stories are special.
“Writing those stories, having that amount of content to constantly generate and produce, get them into the right platforms so that people can find them. That's a marketer's nightmare. But that's what needs to be done and that's why it's not being done”
Gain trust from the executive team and get more budget for marketing by showing, not telling
As a new CMO to a team that doesn’t get marketing and branding, you don’t start educating folks.
“Show them. Don't tell them a thing. I'm a huge advocate of pay by the drink funding. You carve out a little bit of funding, you do something, you show incredible return… After a while, your CEO comes to you and says, how much money do you need to make this incredible return even more incredible?”
And a secret strategy Carrie use is to make sure she allocates a percentage of her priorities to achieving the goals of the CEO.
“Your number one job is to be the CEO’s cheerleader. So what I secretly do is to divide myself by maybe 80/20 making sure the CEO’s goals are being delivered, that’s my 20%”
If she is faced with big negative voices, Carrie runs toward them, instead of avoiding them, an effective but counter intuitive tactic.
“A squeaky wheel that hates marketing? You're my first guy. Because when you flip that guy and he goes, oh my God, marketing generated 30% new patient prospects for me. That guy starts to tell your story, and every single department chair comes to you”
There is no marketing hack – results require a stringent process and an ecosystem of tactics
When talking to Carrie, I asked her about her process and what she tends to do first in every engagement. And while she feels that every project is different, she follows a familiar approach. It all starts with data and insights.
“In my first free 100 days before they can fire me…is insights, complete saturation of insights, customer insights, every single patient insight. I want data, I wanna understand the competitors. I wanna understand every single thing that they're bringing to market. Anything that they've talked about bringing to the market. Their ups and downs, their weaknesses, their specialties. I wanna understand our company. So I meet with every single senior leader executive to try to understand their purpose"
Next, she dives into strategy development, understanding the market place and the opportunities for growth before them. After that, it’s getting into positioning and all the foundational branding elements right. The last step is activating on the tactics, and this is where Carrie offered up a story as a green marketer putting her all her eggs in one tactic, thinking it would be the unlock to revenue growth, but alas, a costly mistake.
“It was a very expensive, I mean, this would be a year to create all of this data and content… it’s horrible, I think it was like $380,000 of iPads”
Conclusion
If you want to get the behind the scenes look at how a consumer marketer sees health care and the strategies and stories of how she helped generate a whopping $2Bn in revenue for a struggling health system, download and listen!
Learn more about Carrie:
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand
The Untold Truths in Strategic Communications & Business Transformation with Gary Grates
EP. 10 | Gary Grates
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What comes to mind when you hear the word communications? When people hear “communications”, they might think PR or they might think of it as a non-critical function. But they could not be more wrong…
In this interview with Gary Grates, a globally renown strategic communications expert and C-suite whisperer who has worked with the world’s biggest brands from Pfizer to United Airlines, we uncover the hidden truths in the world of comms and business transformation. This episode will change the way you build company brands forever.
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
Communications is not just about communications, it’s everything
Business transformation often fails, start with the brand in mind, not the business
Forget your title to determine what is the real problem to solve
Never let your job description stop you from doing what the business needs
When working with the c-suite, stop selling and start listening
Careers are not a vertical progression, careers are for learning
Develop a point of view or be replaceable
KEY LESSONS
Communications will fail if it’s just about communications
Everything communicates. This is something that stuck in my head after talking with Gary. If you want something to be successful, you need to communicate well.
“Communications touches everything. You could have the cure for cancer. You could be the smartest dude on the planet. If you can't connect and communicate and convey and listen and interact and collaborate. It doesn't matter. All that stuff doesn't matter. We (communicators) are the oxygen that keeps life moving.”
Gary tells a story in the podcast episode about his first job as a communicator, in charge of an internal newsletter. Instead of just being a newsletter editor, he used that as a vehicle to bring manufacturing and management together, changing the way business was conducted and the atmosphere of the company. Think about that for a second – from owning a newsletter, to changing the entire culture of the company. That’s communications.
To perform this type of miracle, Gary was adamant that you can’t stay in the lane of communications, you need to understand the entire company.
“A lot of communications people feel, oh I don't belong there. I was in manufacturing meetings, design meetings, brand meetings… I wanted to be in every freaking meeting. You’ve got to finagle your way into the conversation. That’s the only way you’re gonna make a difference.”
He also talks about how if communication is left to just communicators, it will all fall apart. It should really be the core of any leadership team.
“Purpose can get lost quickly when you leave it to just the communications people. We're not here to communicate for the company. We're here to help the company communicate.”
Start business transformation with the brand in mind, not the business
Gary has helped many businesses transform and his advice? Start with the brand. How is the transformation going to impact the purpose, identity, and the people? Then align the business against that.
“We have always looked at business transformation, again, through the lens of the business side, the financial side, the operational side, the structural side. And 70% of business transformations fail. And they fail because we start there. But if you start with the brand identity, which nobody does in business transformation. Here's who we and what we are. Here's our relevance, here's our reputation, here's our promise, here's our identity. Here are the things that we've done with all our key stakeholders over the years to establish our personality. Now let's talk about what do we have to do as a business to ensure that that's still gonna happen, that's still relevant. Then the transformation becomes much clearer.”
It's counter-intuitive because most of the executives in charge of transforming the business aren’t trained in communications or brand. This is the exact conversation I had with David Aaker in Episode 8 where branding is usually never mentioned in disruptive innovation or social program discussions, because executives aren’t trained in these disciplines. They are usually operations or finance trained. Gary laments:
“I think it comes down to sheer ignorance. And I don't mean that people aren't smart. That's not what I mean. These people are very smart. I'm talking about ignorance about communication. I sent an email, I communicated. I put a poster up, I communicated, I created a logo, I branded my company. I created a theme, I gave my company some type of personality”
And so our job is to insert ourselves into transformation meetings to positively alter the trajectory.
Forget your job description to figure out the problem to solve
If you approach your work as a communicator, as a branding person, you’re going to miss the boat. Because if all you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail. You might be focusing on something that is not helpful to the business. Gary shares his experience in his first company:
“We were focusing on the numbers, and we weren't focusing on how to get the numbers. How to get the numbers was the people, how to get the numbers was the process, how to get the numbers was the priority. That's how you got the numbers. But we focused on the numbers. We were up, we were down, we were sideways.”
Often, when communicators are brought to the table, leaders may think it’s a communications problem, but if we approach it as a neutral participant, we might start to realize it’s anything but.
“Start with what are you trying to solve? That's number one. Cause that's basically altruistic, that doesn't take sides. That doesn't go after it as a brand issue or communications issue. Is it a communications problem? If everything's a communications problem, you're chasing symptoms. I see this in politics. It's a communications problem, no, no, no, the policy sucks. The communications people should be working with leadership to figure out how they need to reconstruct the policy or the decision”
His personal experience is a very powerful reminder that if you’re looking out for your company, you can be sure your job will never be limited and you will be valued.
“I never looked at a job description in my life. Never did. Even at GM. My goal was to figure out what we were, what the company needed and any company that I worked with, it was never about - you're only supposed to do these things, you report to that person. I never let that get in the way.”
When working with the C-suite, stop selling and start listening
As a C-suite whisperer, I couldn’t forego the opportunity to ask Gary how he approached the highest levels in an organization. He has two specific pieces of advice for folks like me:
Number One: Listen intently
“One is - always listen intently. Cause you're trying to figure out what they're saying, but also what they're not saying. You're trying to look for the shadow behind the person.”
Number Two: Never go in with an answer
“Never go in with an answer. Always go in with a set of questions. Everybody wants to be a hero with the CEO. Everybody wants to go in and say - I think we should do this. I've never done that. I've always gone in, as I said before ask, how smart and engaged do you want your people to be? Where do you see the organization? You guys have been changing so much over the last five years. Can you tell me what business you're in? I mean, having provocative questions that stop the CEO in a way that says, Hey, this, this person's paying attention.”
And never sell them, instead have a conversation and see where it goes.
“CEOs hate salesmen. And yet so many people go in with a PowerPoint. I've yet to see a CEO react to a PowerPoint. It's always the discussion. You want to have a conversation and walk away where you can say, hey, there's a mind meld here, let's see what we can do.”
There is so much more to our conversation, and this is one of those episodes where there will be something new every time you listen to it. It’s jam packed with learnings from decades of experience in the field of strategic corporate communications. I really do hope you enjoy it and it changes the way you build your company brands, making them the healthiest brands on the planet.
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- Website
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How to Tell Brand Stories That Reporters Want, and Audiences Repeat with Ryan Flinn
EP. 9 | Ryan Flinn
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The term storytelling has been thrown around quite a bit over the last decade, but how do you actually get the stories you want in the media landscape?
In this interview with Ryan Flinn, a former Bloomberg journalist and now a communications leader at health care and biotech companies shares his lessons from the trenches so you can better tell your stories that reporters want and audiences can’t wait to repeat.
In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
It doesn’t matter how many people you reach, it only matters reaching the right ones
Communications is never done, especially after publication
The intrinsic conflict between what a company wants to say and what a reporter needs to write
Jargon and complexity are death in storytelling
The dramatic rise or falls lead to the best stories
Build relationships when starting your career, it pays dividends for life
KEY LESSONS
Always think about the audience first
It may seem obvious, but most brands forget that stories are meant for their audiences, not for them. A story that doesn’t get retold is a dead end, underleveraging the power story. Hence, we all need to follow our audiences and stop assuming what may work. Ryan reminds us that vanity goals like appearing on a top tier publication doesn’t mean a home run.
“Who is the audience we wanna reach? Is it patients? Is it physicians? Is it KOLs or people at universities? Maybe it is a New York Times story, but whatever it is, where are they spending their time reading and how can we reach them? I think generally found that, not everyone reads the top papers.”
When thinking about the audience, it’s also an important realization that there is no silver bullet in communications – a comprehensive approach is needed.
“The top papers don't necessarily drive conversation as much as owned media does. So understanding that you can put out your own social media posts that can get to your audience better than pitching a journalist who may not cover you or may not write the story you wanna write is important. I do think it's important to have a comprehensive approach to everything.”
When talking about audiences, Ryan pointed out that most companies want to keep silent when there is bad news, but audiences want and need information, especially during these situations. Companies need to prepare for crisis by having a playbook of what information to provide instead of following their natural instincts to keep quiet and let the critics drive the story and perception of the brand.
“I think companies always get in trouble when they didn't address a really bad situation. They would do no comment or we're not gonna talk about it. Like in life, it's hard to accept failure and acknowledge failure. But as a company, I think being able to acknowledge failure, and yes we're gonna look at it and try to find out a solution. It allows you to at least seem kind of human versus, you know, kind of a stone cold, no comment. Cause then the loudest critics are the ones that are always the ones that are driving the story”
Always ask the question – what do my audiences need to hear?
Communications doesn’t stop after the story is out
It’s natural to stop once the story is out, assume the published story will speak for itself and the work is done. But in today’s media landscape and aligning with the expectations of the public, putting something out there is only the beginning.
“Nowadays reporters are more successful when they do end up as a PR person and promoting their own story. Continue the conversation gets more engagement.”
Ryan reminds us that audiences have their own agenda and even if you are delivering bad news, it may be attracting a group of people who have no other options. He recounted a story when he was the head of communications, addressing a bad situation and he expected the end in the process after publication of the release, but he was wrong.
“We put out a press release talking about these patient deaths, I get a call from a mom who saw the release, saw my name on it, and said, hey, my kid has this disease, how do I get into the trial? Because again, they're so desperate. There's no other treatment or cure, you know? Um, so I, I think understanding that there'll be different motivations for the audience is important”
Find the intersection between what the journalist needs and what your company wants
There is an intrinsic conflict between what the company wants to communicate about the brand and what journalists needs in a story. Ryan shares his perspective during his time as a journalist.
“The challenge is that your goal from a company point of view is to have your story and your wording and phrasing used by the journalist. And journalists don't want that. When I was at Bloomberg, I had four screens in my desk with headlines constantly screaming up. And my goal to write a story or headline, so amazing that you stop your tracks and click on that story and share it with your friends. And so a journalist wants a story or an angle or a perspective that hasn't been told.”
What you need to do is develop a relationship with the journalist and really understand the type of stories and angles they are interested in, while aligning it to a broader trend that’s hot. Not something easy to do, but that’s why media relations and PR is as much an art as it is science.
“It's important to set expectations that you can get a story in the media, but it may not come out like you want or it may have a competitor mention. So if you're not fine with that, you have to rethink your approach. But how do we get journalists interested in stories? The key is understanding who they are as a person. Uh, I always tell people to think of it as a relationship and not a transaction. If you only go to a journalist with a press release and say, I want coverage, that's not gonna work, right?”
Ryan shares an example of bringing up a brand and what they are up to in a different and fresh way.
“I was on this feature beat at Bloomberg where everyone covered Apple and Google. I was trying to find stories that they wouldn’t pass and at the same time be a good feature. And so when Apple put its phone out every year, the Apple reporter will cover the Apple iphone and the event. For me, I got a story once about what happens to these old phones that are being thrown away. And so we did a whole story about the companies that were buying the used phones from consumers and reselling them. And it, it wasn't like a big known thing back then. So again, that's like a unique angle to the Apple phone release”
Tell stories that are simple and have the biggest rise or fall
Our discussion around stories had us laughing about how jargon is used so much in healthcare – “end-to-end solutions”, “first in class treatment”, “innovative products”… the list goes on. And while stories are about relaying a message, Ryan was clear that a story’s job is to make the audience emotionally attached and be retold. He also helped me visualize the key to a good story.
“The key thing to all stories is change over time. So if you think about an XY graph and change is one axis, and time is the other axis. A story is the biggest delta between two points. So typically you think about what was the most change I got to success and what was the moment when I thought I was going to fail?”
A practical way he used to test his stories are by telling it to his kids and try to maintain their attention. It’s a high bar, but it works to see if the story is attention grabbing, easy to understand, and simply shareable.
“Wired has this thing - six conversations. They take a topic like black holes, they have an expert explain black holes to a kindergartner, a middle schooler, a high schooler, a college student, and then another expert. And you can see the lenses they put on in the conversation. How do you explain a complex topic to someone who's not in the space? And this where I practice on my kids. When I'm story mining, I'll sometimes present to my children who are in middle school and if they can understand, if I keep their interest, which is hard. I know they're doing a good job explaining a complex topic.”
Communications and storytelling in the world of healthcare is not easy, but done well can really help to build an audience who is emotionally invested in the brand.
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Purpose-Driven Branding: A Strategy to Do Well While Doing Good with David Aaker
EP. 8 | David Aaker
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Social and community programs are often kept at arm’s length from the business, taking a defensive checklist approach rather than a brand building endeavor. In his latest book, The Future of Purpose-Driven Branding, David Aaker, hailed the father of modern branding and currently serves as the Vice Chairman of Prophet shares a strategy that challenges convention.
In this interview with David, we chat about why there is still so much work to be done espousing branding, why purpose-driven branding is crucial for society and business and his journey in the world of brand. David Aaker has written 18 books in the area of brand and branding, has sold well over a million copies around the world and an inductee of the American Marketing Association Hall of Fame, among other prestigious awards.
In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
Branding as an indispensable path to successful disruptive innovation
Branding allows social programs to positively impact the business and avoid being dispensable
Look beyond the business and to core values to inform a signature social program
Brand strategy is not a “fill in the box” exercise
Follow your interests when building a career
BONUS:
The Future of Purpose-Driven Branding free e-book download
Resources and mentions:
The Future of Purpose-Driven Branding by David Aaker - buy HERE
Owning Game-Changing Subcategories by David Aaker - buy HERE
Blue Ocean Strategy by Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim - buy HERE
The Innovators Dilemma by Clay Christensen - buy HERE
Competitive Advantage by Michael E. Porter - buy HERE
Affiliate links – zero cost to you and a little something goes to support the Healthy Brands podcast 🙏🏽
KEY LESSONS
Branding is indispensable to successful disruptive innovation
Branding is often left out of books regarding innovation and growth, and Dave feels that it is an unfortunate oversight. And I vehemently agree. Dave laments “I look at all these books, there are dozens and dozens of important books, written by influential people like Michael Porter, Clayton Christen, The Blue Ocean Group. And there's no mention of branding in those books. None at all. The word brand is not even mentioned.”
Dave doesn’t see a world where branding is not needed when disrupting a marketplace with innovation that is sustainable.
“To become an absolute exemplar for the new subcategory, you've gotta position the subcategory, which is very much like positioning in a brand, but at the same time, quite different. You've gotta scale the subcategory, not necessarily the brand, the whole sub-category. You've gotta make sure it wins out in the marketplace. And, and then you gotta build barriers so that you are the most relevant brand within that subcategory. And those are all, enabled by branding. Without branding, you can't do any of those things”
Branding allows social programs to positively impact the business and avoid being dispensable
As we started to talk about the need for social programs, no matter the size of the organization, Dave feels that “doing good” is no longer a “nice-to-have” – society needs it, and employees are starting to demand it.
But the problem is branding is not being brought into these endeavors, ESG programs and volunteer projects are run without any branding expertise, resulting in a failure to leverage it for the good of the business.
“I think that's one of the reasons that branding is underleveraged in this context. The way you add business value is by enhancing the business brand, by enhancing its visibility and energy, by giving it an image lift, by giving it engagement opportunities. I've seen nobody do that”
An extremely important but often disregarded point is that branding is not just for marketing, it’s the basis of communication, and Dave drives the point home. “Everybody understands how important communication is, but you cannot communicate something without a brand. A brand is almost indispensable for communication, otherwise you've got a million facts and descriptions.”
And when social programs are not branded, they are not only underleveraged, they are at risk of being cut.
“So you disappear into a cloud of sameness, and as a result, people are saying, you know, maybe we should cut back on these grants and volunteering because it's costing a lot of money, and we are in tough times. We gotta survive as a company.”
Look beyond the business and to core values to inform a signature social program
Organizations might find difficulty finding a social program that’s directly relevant to their business. But if you look at the core values of the company, you may find a way to stand up programs that are deeply authentic.
See episode on How a Biotech Brand Can Live Its Purpose Beyond Medicines for more inspiration.
Dave offers a B2B example “Thrivent, for example, is a financial services firm that's adopted Habitat for Humanity as their signature program. My goodness, it gives their employees and their 2 million customers a chance to engage…They've delivered 6.2 million hours of volunteering. Just think of the engagement that those customers and employees have that have gone through that experience. Just think what a brand community that's generated. You can't do that talking about financial services.”
How did they land on this program? It might not seem like a natural fit, but it aligns with their values. “There's no connection between financial services and building homes. None whatsoever. But if you look back at the heritage values of Thrivent, they were formed over a century ago to provide insurance to Lutheran congregations in the Midwest. And they were all about giving back. Now Fortune 500 company, they’ve retained that and continue to give back”
Brand strategy is not a “fill in the box” exercise
What has always been apparent to me was David Aaker’s approach to brand strategy. It doesn’t dictate exactly what was needed in a brand strategy document, instead providing a framework to think about how to establish one.
When we discussed it, he was immediately impassioned “They would have these fill in the box models. What is your brand personality? What are your benefits? What are your attributes? What is your audience? And they would give everybody, no matter what industry, no matter what stage they were in the brand building process, you had to fill in these boxes. And so I <laugh> didn't want any fill in the boxes. My take was, you ask yourself, what do you want your brand to stand for? And don't worry about boxes. You create your own boxes for your own brand.”
There you have it, don’t worry about boxes, as long you understand the principles of building a brand, you can create the foundation required to support it.
Follow your interests when building a career
David has had a broad career, and looking back, he realized that it’s only because he was learning and working across so many disciplines that he was able to do what he does. “One of the interesting things about my career is that I was so all over the map…if I wouldn't have spent those 10 to 15 years going in all directions I would not have been able to do what I did in branding.”
He recounted a story to illustrate his point “Charlie Draper who spent, I don't know, 10, 8 years as an undergraduate. He took every engineering course there was at MIT and people laughed at him. He was just a perpetual student. He would never mount to anything. And he invented inertia guidance, without which we couldn't have airplanes. And he did that by pulling together stuff from all these different disciplines - he's a poster child for being broad.”
Follow your curiosity and interests, he says and I very much agree.
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How Humanities Can Unlock Creativity and Impact in Biotech with Lisa Bowers
EP. 7 | Lisa Bowers
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In the world of Biotech, we often obsess about the science and the technology, but fundamentally, health care companies are made by humans for humans. The impact on humanity can be tremendous, think about how COVID-19 vaccines have made an impact on not just our health, but our wellbeing, our relationships, our humanity.
In this interview with Lisa Bowers, she brings a perspective often lacking in Biotech – the arts. What’s fascinating about the discussion is the irony of that, but also a way to use our everyday experiences with the arts and humanities to improve our leadership and the brands we are trying to build.
Lisa was most recently the Chief Commercial Officer for Day One, Biopharma. Prior to that, she was the CEO, founder and board member of Rhia Ventures, a social impact investment organization focused on reproductive health. She was also the COO of Tara Health during that time. She had spent almost 17 years at Genentech and Roche, holding numerous leadership roles across marketing, sales, supply chain, and strategy
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
Opening for Bon Jovi in Las Vegas
The concept of “Controlled Recklessness”
Bring humanities into the fold through questions
Rodin’s hands and the patient experience
Brand matters in Biotech
Resources and mentions:
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a book by Patrick Lencioni
Ursula K, Le Guin, author and poet
Seasons of Love – Rent, the musical
KEY LESSONS
Enable “controlled recklessness” in your business
Biotech is a heavily regulated industry. Sometimes the mere mention of words like “reckless” and “whatever it takes” can get your hand slapped by the ever present legal and regulatory department. Lisa contends that there should be a space where creativity should be allowed, much more than that, it should be fostered.
“We do not mess with what is legally important, what is regulatorily required. We do not mess with things that require ethics and integrity. We're not reckless with the lives of patients, with the lives of our employees. There's so much that needs to be tightly controlled in a highly regulated, high stakes business like Biotech. But can't we, in our cultures, create the opportunity to fail associated with decisions that are not that high stakes?”
Hence the idea of “controlled recklessness”. It’s about building a safe space where disagreements can freely emerge, resulting in conflict that brings about new and different thinking. Here, Lisa offers a peek into how she thinks, as she brings up a documentary about pianos: Miracle in a Box: A Piano Reborn
“There's a great documentary about a shop that only refurbish Steinway pianos. And there was a quote in it where they were talking about how a piano actually works. You press this thing, and then there's a hammer that strikes this thing, and then there's a string. And the quote that someone said that I actually wrote down was, only a free collision can make music.”
That’s powerful. “Only a free collision can make music”. This phrase from the documentary about pianos offer such vivid and amazing insight into what you need for innovation and new ideas – a team that trusts each other, shoulder to shoulder “with no light between you and the next person” where colliding ideas can freely flow.
Use the power of the arts to become a better leader
Lisa helps us understand the job of an executive and leader.
“Build a cohesive leadership team, create clarity about what that team should be doing and over-communicate that clarity. Make sure that incentives and structures in a company are aligned with what you say you're about”
And becoming a leader in health care, she was struck by how much of humanity is not a part of the day-to-day discussions.
“I was struck by how much of humanity is sometimes left behind in our business in Biotechnology. I mean, we're so focused on extrinsic factors associated with customers and regulators, and we think much more about science and the data. But these businesses are in fact created entirely by humans.”
She offers a tangible way for any of us to bring arts into our practice of leadership. And it doesn’t involve becoming an artist or a classical pianist like Lisa. It’s asking ourselves what we enjoy about the arts and simply being pointed about how that experience relates to our work.
“How do we bring the value of the arts into the biotech community in general? I think, I think you don't have to make art to have art in your life. What's your favorite band? Seasons of Love, which is in the musical rent, it just happens to be a song that I relate to. And it's not just the words but in fact it's the way that the instruments pile on each other and then kind of drift away. That made me start to think about, how it relates to how we think about what gets loud and what gets soft in our company.”
Medicine as the entry point to impact the patient experience
Lisa’s background in public health and as an artist, she see medicines as merely an entry point to impact the entire human experience.
“I'm interested in the long-term population impacts outside of the pill. Which was what brought me to this industry because the pill is the entry point. It's the ticket to get you involved in these challenging therapeutic areas with these amazing patients and their families and these amazing physicians.”
And when we are talking about the patient experience, she brought up the sculptor Rodin and how amazing he was able to capture the person’s life through their hands. So much so that physicians were able to diagnose the condition of his subjects a hundred years later…
“It turns out that a surgeon at Stanford discovered that many of these hands appear to have specific conditions. If you're a hand surgeon, you can look at how a particular hand's musculature is shaped and say that person has arthritis, or that person has, genetic disease X. Rodin’s ability to truly understand what someone with a particular disease in their hands is feeling and only represent it from the hand is amazing.”
This realization and feeling about a patient’s experience through their hands made it viscerally important for Lisa how a Biotech company needs to understand the patient’s pain to design medicines that can relieve that pain. In addition, there is the potential opportunity for such a company to improve that experience beyond a pill.
“Why is that related to what we are up to in Biotech? The science is certainly an important part of whether the drug is gonna work or not. But how do we know what pain we're trying to relieve unless we understand not just what's happening clinically within the patients, but also the patient's experience of it.”
A Biotech brand matters anytime it needs to influence anyone to do anything
One of the reasons I relate so much to what Lisa is talking about is the fact that branding is both art and science. And its importance is so much more than the visible artifacts like the logo, the colors, the campaign… It’s the process of getting to a brand strategy that helps any business articulate clearly their WHO, WHY, HOW, and WHAT.
“If you can't articulate your brand, can you articulate your business? And if you can't articulate your business, how is your organization going to deliver efficiently and effectively on what your promise is? And how will investors or customers or anybody around you know how to engage with you?”
She was also very clear that unless you don’t need anything from anyone, you need to build a brand.
“Brand matters no matter the size of the Biotech. Unless it is fully in a silo and requires nothing of anyone. Five guys in a garage and they have all of their materials they need and they're testing it on themselves… but when they've gotta go out and raise $20 million or they need to attract employees, or they need to sign onto vendors who don't have space for them, you're recruiting investigators and you're recruiting patients and the families of patients to take a pill that no human has ever taken…Branding can sound like a small thing, but it's actually a big thing. And it's important whether you're spending a million dollars on it or twenty grand”
Where you can find Lisa
Ways I can help you
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Why Role Model Brands Matter Today in Healthcare and How to Build Them with Stephanie Ouyoumjian
EP. 6 | Stephanie Ouyoumjian
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Your brand is not what you say you are, it’s who your audiences want you to be. We often build brands to our likeness, but the most important part of branding is to reflect the fantasy story of your target audiences.
In this interview with Stephanie Ouyoumijuan, she shares how we need to build role model brands, tapping into innate human behavior and leveraging influence science. She also shares her amazing story of how she serendipitously ended up in the healthcare space and ended up starting an agency from a farm.
Stephanie is the CEO of Revel8, previously known as Strategy Farm. Before that, she held senior strategy positions at world class agencies like DDB, Publicis and MullenLowe.
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
What is a role model brand and how to build one
How to better leverage your agency
Creating the right environment for strategists and creatives to thrive
The importance of brand architecture
The scariest moment and pivot in Stephanie’s career journey
KEY LESSONS
Become a role model brand
In the world of healthcare, you first need to get the functional facts, features, and benefits right. That’s the table-stakes when marketing and communicating about a treatment or procedure. When we get to the expression of the brand, that’s when things start to go awry.
“We want people to feel confident. We want them to feel empowered. We want them to feel peace of mind. These are like bankrupt words that we see in every brand. Chances are every healthcare brand wants their target audience to feel empowered, peace of mind, and in control.”
What brands need to do is to become a role model. “This is where people don’t just want to buy you, they wanna be you” Stephanie points out to us that a brand is really the reflection of the audience’s fantasy self. It’s story. It’s fantasy. Role models are ideals we strive to become and so that idea of a brand being a role model is such an important one.
“So when we say we turn brands into role models, what we mean is that we’re turning them into your target’s fantasy self”
That’s where the magic happens. And if brands do that well, you’ll find that customers will want you to deliver products and services not available today. They will instantly understand what that will be like. For example, if Apple were to open a hotel, you’ll have a pretty good idea what that experience will be like.
Let your audience pick your personality
As brand managers, we like to think the brand is what we shape it to be. In some sense that is true, but when it comes to expressing the brand, it really lies in the hands of our audiences. We don’t get to tell our audiences who we are, we need to show up as who they want to be.
That’s also one of the reasons why research through the lens of story and fantasy is so important. Often, the research that has been done do not uncover that aspect of the target audience, and their beliefs and motivations might be surprising.
“I've been in so many rooms where clients are like, I don't even know why we need to do research. This is a no brainer. And I'm like, There's no such thing as a no brainer.”
Look at all the brands, not just the product brand
Having a defined brand architecture is important. In today’s landscape, it’s no longer feasible for companies to hide behind their products with a pure House of Brands model. In fact, it’s an opportunity to build equity in the Corporate brand.
“We definitely in healthcare do need to pay more attention to the corporate brand because our audiences do…when we launched Amgen Oncology, it gave a halo to all the drugs they have. So most often the Corporate level branding is really important”
While brand architectures are different in the world of Medical Devices and Pharma, what’s most important is to look at how the audiences and the category is buying and accessing your companies products and services.
Create a safe space for strategists and creatives to collaborate and thrive
A lightbulb moment went on for me when Stephanie talked about what would be a thriving team of strategists and creatives look like:
“Let's say you walk into a room with strategist and creatives and you walk into the meeting halfway through. You should not be able to tell who's the strategist and who's the creative, you know, then you have a good team”
And if there is an environment where strategists give up on writing a creative brief because no creatives care about it, it becomes a toxic environment where no one is driven to do the best work. One interesting exercise Stephanie talked about was Brief Storming.
“The first 10 minutes is the briefing, and then after that is brief storming. And we had exercises like My Bad Ad where everyone would go around the room and say, okay, well based on what you just said about the strategy, here's my bad ad. And there was no pressure. Everyone had to, account service, account coordinator. Everyone has to do their bad ad. And that helps the strategist go, oh my god, they're not understanding the strategy. I didn't get it right.”
I PROMISE YOU: There is a treasure trove of gems! Be sure to listen to the entire episode wherever you get your podcasts.
Where you can find Stephanie
Ways I can help you
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
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How a Biotech Brand Can Live Its Purpose Beyond Making Medicines with Geoff Curtis
EP. 5 | Geoff Curtis
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“Purposeful Brands” is not a new idea, but few brands have a purpose bigger than themselves and actually live it. In the world of health care, companies struggle with what more do they do outside of the treatments they deliver? In this episode we take a deep dive on what that looks like in action.
In this episode I interview Geoff Curtis. We chat about the rebrand and brand journey of Horizon Therapeutics and talk about his own personal journey.
Geoff is the Executive Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Chief Communications Officer for Horizon Therapeutics. He has more than two decades of global healthcare communications experience before joining Horizon. Jeff worked at senior communications roles at premier agencies like Edelman, Real Chemistry GCI. He also spent time at AbbVie being a public affairs manager. In addition, he serves on the board of directors for the Child Restoration Outreach and Support Organization and is a member of the Lake Forest College board of trustees, as well as the trustee for the Institute for Public Relations.
In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
The importance of cross-functional involvement in brand building
The excitement and emotions that comes from a compelling brand identity
How to live a biotech’s purpose beyond medicines
The elements of influence at the C-level
The importance of embracing failure when building a bold brand
Key learnings throughout his career in the agency world
KEY LESSONS
Branding is about coming together
When creating the foundation of a brand, cross-functional co-creation is critical.
“Everybody had a piece in the process… people could point to pieces where they say hey, I wrote that on the wall, I used those words…I see myself in that (brand narrative and guidelines). And that’s important in creating advocates across the board.”
Branding is every touchpoint and so including multiple functions to create that foundation sets the path to aligning on a brand promise to be delivered across the organization. That is powerful.
And when an organizational structure supports that kind of alignment, the sky’s the limit.
“I oversee corporate affairs. So that includes not only internal and external comms, but patient advocacy and all of brand comms, R&D comms, government affairs and CSR. And so if you look at it from that standpoint, we are the stewards of the reputation for Horizon period.”
Create a visual identity you want to show off and a brand story you can’t wait to tell
“I just had somebody on our leadership team tell me the other day that they think it's one of the best brands that they've ever come across in the industry. And they've been in the industry for 25 plus years, and that's saying a lot.”
When you aim for creative that evokes emotion, you can’t go wrong. So often logo design only serves a practical purpose “Hey I need a logo for the website”, but it can be so much more when the logo is memorable AND a representation of the brand story.
Geoff was referring to Horizon’s logo “Those four bars: patients, caregivers, physicians, community, and the hidden H that unites everything together. I mean, it still gives me chills. It really does”
Follow your purpose beyond the products you deliver
Healthcare companies sometimes feel that they are already living their purpose by developing medicines and treatments, but what Geoff has taught me is that when companies see themselves differently, they can start to do things differently from others in the industry. You start to zig, while others zag.
“I tell everybody we're just a company that happens to be in biotech. We don't make clothing, we make medicines. But that doesn't mean that we can't go beyond what we're doing from a medicine standpoint. Why not? Why can't you? And I think it's broadening the thinking and really digging in about what your brand is. Not only internally, but what it means externally… We try to show up again differently and unexpectedly from a company standpoint”
Horizon partners heavily in the sporting world – Chicago Cubs, Chicago Bulls, Chicago Sky and a six-year title sponsorship in Ireland for the Irish Open, the Horizon Irish Open. Their partnerships and sponsorships are also beyond just slapping a logo on the event. Take for example the partnership with the Cubs. Two years in a row, they’ve conducted with them a city-wide STEAM fair, where students come and show their science projects. In that show, they brought in another organization called the Science of Sport and had a demonstration around the science behind baseball at Wrigley field. This program educates kids on how science can lead to a career in sports.
When you live your purpose as “just a company” and not a biotech company, you open new possibilities to impact those in your community.
“How are you going to impact a community that is going to make a difference and not necessarily a difference where it's only beneficial for Horizon, but beneficial for everybody around us?”
Embrace the possibility of failure - You can’t fix what you haven’t tried
Don’t be afraid to take swings and face the potential of failure. Geoff recounts being the first employee in the Chicago office for Real Chemistry and if he hadn’t taken that opportunity, he would have missed the opportunity to grow an office.
“I still talk about things that gimme a little bit of PTSD. I still remember I was sitting there with a FedEx box. In it my laptop and Blackberry with basically no instructions, other than, okay, first day, get going, go get some clients, Geoff!”
It’s also about creating an atmosphere and culture where failure is acceptable. That’s how a brand can soar and take a bold position. There is no boldness without courage, and there can be no courage without the fear of failure.
“I fell my junior staff - be unbridled in your thinking and your creativity. It's okay to fail because I have your back. I'm ultimately accountable…we don't know what we don't know if we don't try it”
There is so much more in our conversation that it would be a miss if you didn’t listen to it all!
Where you can find Geoff
Ways I can help you
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand