In recent years most health systems have invested in building a brand. Many have succeeding in creating a stronger corporate identity. Fewer have truly built brands that stir an emotional response with customers. Only a handful has activated a brand strategy to turn those emotions into measurable advantage when competing for patients, talent and resources.

This gap between investments in a brand and realized market return is a source of frustration for senior executives. It is not a gap that can be closed with advertising; nor, can it be resolved simply by improving customer service and clinical quality scores. The industry is rife with health systems with big advertising budgets and rising satisfaction and quality scores that have delivered only incremental market growth.

Today, the field is crowded with consultants offering to help reorganize structure; re-engineer process, re-train people, and redesign facilities. Clinicians have paid handsomely for counsel on “doing better”, prompted by the promise of pay for performance and scorecards that make service and quality seemingly more transparent

In our view, though, it’s not simply about doing better. It’s about doing better by being different. Closing the brand equity gap requires a strategy to align operational inputs – structure, process, people, and facilities – to create an experience that is meaningfully different for customers.

What makes The Strategy Group different is that we align brand strategy and operations not as competing uses of scarce resources but as the inter-dependent means to a common end – activating a core competitive position for market advantage.

If successful, health system executives should be able to report to their boards that “because of our brand strength… we negotiate better contract terms; recruit better talent at a lower cost; and, have patients and employers willing to pay a premium to access our care.”

Imagine that conversation....imagine health systems delivering real value in the form of new products and processes and services that go beyond the clinical expertise provided by the doctors and nurses....in that kind of world maybe there would be fewer poor performers surviving in the market and more value in the services that we receive for an ever growing out of pocket expense.