Inevitably at some point during your healthcare marketing career you will be faced with bringing a new brand to market. As you do, it is critical to stay focused on the strategic and business objectives of your organization, while also protecting the equity of your brand. The following scenarios describe bringing a new brand to a market, assuming you currently have standing or brand value. The goal in both cases is to leverage the equity of all the brands to enhance your brand, differentiate you from competitors and better serve your customers.

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David Brond, David C. McBride, Randy Farmer and Tom Trezise join Delaware’s only public media news service.

WILMINGTON, Del. (June 12, 2018) — Delaware Public Media (DPM) announced that David Brond, David C. McBride, Randy Farmer and Tom Trezise have been named to the organization’s board of directors. DPM, Delaware’s only public media news service, is dedicated to covering the unique issues, events, personalities and cultures of Delaware. As an NPR member station, DPM presents high-quality statewide news in a rich combination of audio, video and text.

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Over the past four-plus decades, AB&C has worked with some of the most premier healthcare systems across this country—large and small—and we greatly value those relationships. But great agency-client relationships just don’t happen; they take true commitment by both parties to be successful. And over the years, we have learned what makes a great working relationship and want to share that knowledge with you, because agencies, while a source of expense, are also an investment, and have a key impact on your organization and your ability to meet patient and provider needs, delivery quality care and build your brand.

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Every once in a while, a campaign comes along, and you know that it’s special. Maybe it’s a cause that you strongly believe in, a story that needs to be told or the creative is just really unique. I guess that’s how I felt from the very beginning about MedStar Georgetown Transplant Institute’s “Living Donor” campaign. For me, it was a combination of all three.

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Agency Takes Home Six Golds and Two Silvers at Awards Show Honoring Creative Excellence in Healthcare Marketing.

WILMINGTON, Del. (May 11, 2018) —Aloysius Butler & Clark (AB&C), one of the region’s largest full-service marketing communications agencies, was recognized by Healthcare Marketing Report with six golds, two silvers and five merit awards presented during its annual 2018 Healthcare Advertising Awards. Now in its 35^th year, the national competition is known as the oldest, largest and most widely respected healthcare advertising awards program. This year, AB&C received 13 recognitions for having the most outstanding work from a pool of 4,000 submissions. Collectively, the agency’s winning submissions demonstrate a diversity of strategic and creative executions.

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In my experience as a hospital chief marketing officer (CMO) and in working at AB&C with healthcare CMOs, I’ve found a number of attributes that serve a person well in this role. On Innovation Enterprise, which provides leading-edge ideas and information on a variety of key business channels, Rose Johnstone identifies a number of these attributes from the business world that apply to the healthcare industry.

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Healthcare organizations have always struggled with measuring return on marketing investment (ROMI), mostly because of multiple systems of data collection that don’t speak to one another. But with the advent of new “tools,” that challenge is getting easier — if you have the building blocks in place.

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We know a few things to be true about popular brands. They exist. They tend to offer a product or service. They have a physical space or online presence. They have identifiable brand attributes. And they are vetted over time through consumer experiences and perception.

Based on these truths, it seems safe to assume that in order for you to establish credibility and trust with your target audience, customers must have some exposure or real-world experience with your brand, right? Well, think again.

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Most health systems/hospitals have an affiliated and/or employed medical group. The exception is California, where the corporate practice of medicine prohibits employment of physicians by systems or hospitals.

Some medical groups are faculty models, while others are the result of groups that have merged under one umbrella, and can have primary care and specialty services as part of their cadre of physicians. What is true about all medical groups is that they are the front door to patients you want to attract to your system/hospital.

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Agency Takes Home Three Golds and Seven Silvers at Awards Show Honoring Creative Excellence in Advertising

PHILADELPHIA, PA (March 9, 2018) — Aloysius Butler & Clark (AB&C) was recently honored with 10 industry awards, including three golds and seven silvers, at the 2018 Philadelphia American Advertising Federation (AAF) Awards, also known as the ADDYs. The ADDYs, which honor excellence in advertising, recognized AB&C for work the agency created on behalf of two of their clients: Delaware Office of Highway Safety and Delaware Division of Public Health.

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If you followed a systematic approach to build a new brand (or refreshed an existing one), you started with discovery research. You then developed a brand mantra to inform how your brand would be articulated to internal audiences and the outside world. Finally, you created or refined the outward expressions, such as the name, mark and colors.

All of this hard work was done in preparation to share your brand with stakeholders and customers. This is when the rubber hits the road. It’s important to invest as much time, and as many resources, into properly socializing and managing your brand as it is to develop, create and refine it.

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In professional communications of any kind, proper punctuation is essential. But this is especially true for marketing communications, where the copy helps define a brand. Grammar and punctuation mistakes can result in a loss of credibility—for both the agency and its clients. Here are a few tips for avoiding common mistakes.

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As branding experts, we have developed our own vocabulary for what we do and how we help organizations define and present themselves to consumers. We use terminology like “brand architecture,” “platform,” “positioning,” “promise,” “proof point,” “personality,” “identity” and “tag line” to describe how we create, communicate and control the attributes of a brand. An important but often overlooked step in the process of building or revitalizing a brand is the development of a brand mantra.

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Every healthcare marketing and communications (MarCom) leader has heard this question from a service line or physician leader. Somehow, a newsletter is going to put their program on the map, drive volume, attract new referring physicians and make them profitable. But isn’t this the same fantasy thinking that supports billboards as business drivers?

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By Maria Antonelli, Andrea Ferrino, Elizabeth Gluck, Jennifer Harris, Lauren Bentley, Amanda Kalbrosky and Elizabeth Howarth

Earlier this month, the Philly Ad Club hosted its annual Women in Advertising event, where a panel of women in advertising and communications imparted their knowledge to a room of marketers (men and women). The panelists—each with a different personality and job description—shared how they successfully handled adversity throughout their careers and overcame self-doubt to achieve their goals.

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