Fundamentals of brand building

Dr T K Parthasarathy

A small hospital set-up that caters to the needs of the local community may not feel the need to create a brand. For them, local identity through word of mouth is sufficient. However, brand plays a vital role in the growth of ambitious healthcare service providers like corporate hospitals.

A brand should have some exclusivity and must be built around the vision that the hospital stands for. Brands should convey this upfront, otherwise it is futile spending on brand building.

Marketing or brand building may not be a conscious attempt. For instance, institutions like CMC Vellore have created a strong brand for themselves through their decades of dedicated service. Though hospital management is aware of the fact that people go for brand in healthcare too, in my opinion, in most cases brands are over-played and spoilt.

A few corporate hospitals, which had built a reliable brand in certain areas, overstretched it by extending the same brand to position some of their diversifications. As they were unable to provide the same quality of service that their original brand stood for in their new ventures, there were adverse impacts. Their stories clearly indicate that brand building should match with the way they do business.

A good example is McDonalds’s way of doing business - wherever you go, you get the same type of product at same quality, cost, etc. It is important that hospitals that build chains ensure the same kind of standardisation.

I was surprised when I noticed a unit of a reputed lab chain not functioning on a holiday. This lab has been advertising that it functions all 24 hours and 365 days.

Advertising

While advertising, hospitals do need to tread with caution so as to ensure that they adhere to the ethical marketing practices. At SRMC, we do not advertise about the prices and fees as this amounts to soliciting the customers. Most hospitals have doctors behind the advertising campaigns. Doctors are aware about the guidelines set by the Medical Council of India regarding advertising. As SRMC is attached to medical college, we have additional responsibility in adhering to ethical marketing and advertising than any free-standing hospital. We need to set a model in this regard for our students, who would be running their own clinics and hospitals in the future. The competition whatsoever among the hospitals/clinics should be only on technical basis and certainly not on the business aspect.

The writer is pro-chancellor, Sri Ramachandra Medical College and Research Institute, Chennai