Branding isn’t just about marketing; it’s about consistency. A strong brand is built on a well-defined message platform—a strategic foundation that ensures every interaction, from marketing to HR to clinical care, reinforces your brand identity.

More Than Marketing: A Brand’s Strategic Backbone

Branding is often misunderstood. It’s not just a logo, a tagline or an ad campaign. It’s the DNA of your organization—the essence of who you are and what you stand for. A message platform provides the framework for this truth. It defines key messaging pillars, tone and positioning, ensuring every department communicates a unified story. Without it, you risk creating fragmented messaging that confuses your audience and weakens your brand.

Aligning Messaging Across Departments

Your message platform isn’t just for the marketing team. It should guide communication across HR, patient billing, clinical teams and leadership. Every touchpoint shapes your brand perception, from a patient’s first call to a financial-assistance discussion to a follow-up appointment

While different service lines may have unique messaging nuances, they should all be consistent with the overarching brand narrative. Whether speaking to pediatric patients or orthopedic surgery candidates, the messaging should feel cohesive, intentional and aligned with your brand promise.

The Bottom Line

Without a well-defined message platform, your brand risks being diluted or misunderstood. A clear, strategic messaging framework ensures every communication reinforces your brand identity and resonates with your audience.

Is your brand messaging aligned? If not, let’s build a platform that ensures consistency, clarity and impact.

Healthcare consumers are savvier than ever. They’re not just patients; they’re customers shopping for care with the same scrutiny they apply to major purchases. This shift means healthcare leaders must think beyond operations and patient outcomes—they must think like marketers.

But a killer marketing strategy isn’t just about the external message; it’s also about the internal culture. Your employees—the people who interact with patients every day—are the face of your brand. That makes internal communications a crucial partner in your branding efforts.

Competition Is Driving the Evolution of Healthcare Marketing

Healthcare competition isn’t just coming from other hospitals or clinics. Retail giants like CVS and Walgreens, along with tech powerhouses like Apple and Amazon, are disrupting the market. Patients are weighing their options, factoring in convenience and cost—and most importantly, experience. In this landscape, it’s not enough to have a great ad campaign. You need a team that delivers a brand experience that keeps patients coming back. This starts with HR and a clearly defined employment brand, and it carries through to marketing and communications that embody your brand values.

 The Secret Weapon: Your People

Your marketing can promise exceptional care, but it’s your team that delivers it. Prioritizing patient-focused hiring ensures that every touchpoint—from the front desk to the operating room—reinforces your brand’s reputation. Beyond that, leaders, physicians and staff should be positioned as brand ambassadors in the community. Their integrity, expertise and compassion aren’t just assets in patient care—they’re your best marketing tool.

Do you have a clearly defined employment brand? Does your organization have a brand ambassador program?

Hospitals and Sporting Events: A Winning Partnership

Healthcare marketing is evolving. As patients become more informed and discerning, healthcare organizations must rethink their approach to brand visibility and engagement. Enter sports sponsorship. It’s a strategic move that positions healthcare brands in front of passionate, engaged audiences, especially when high-profile FIFA and MLB events are headed our way.

The Shift to Healthcare Consumerism

The traditional patient-provider dynamic has changed. Today, consumers expect more from their healthcare experience, weighing quality, cost and convenience like any other major purchase. Rising deductibles and out-of-pocket costs are driving consumers to make more deliberate choices about their care. Healthcare organizations must compete for attention and trust—and sports sponsorships offer a powerful way to do just that.

Why Sports Sponsorships Make Sense

For decades, beverage brands, fast-food chains and tech companies have capitalized on sports sponsorships. Now hospitals and insurance companies are catching up. The connection is natural: Sports embody physical health, wellness and peak performance—values that align seamlessly with healthcare.

In 2023, NewYork-Presbyterian became the first health system to put its logo on an MLB uniform, through a partnership with the New York Mets. Currently, there are healthcare organizations that are patch partners with the MLB, WNBA, NBA, MLS and National Women’s Soccer League. The NBA patch deals are estimated to be worth $7 million to $10 million annually, according to The Athletic. Health systems are using varying levels of partnership to promote initiatives like Breast Cancer Awareness Day and youth wellness programs, and to reinforce their commitment to community health. These partnerships go beyond logo placement; they engage audiences through meaningful activations that drive awareness, trust and even patient acquisition.

The Competitive Advantage

A well-executed sports sponsorship does more than boost brand recognition. It fosters community engagement, reinforces a commitment to wellness and differentiates your brand in a crowded market. As healthcare consumerism grows, strategic partnerships like these can enhance brand affinity and influence patient decisions.

Is your healthcare brand ready to step onto the field? Let’s talk about how the right sponsorship strategy can elevate your brand and create lasting impact.

Current COVID-19 trends indicate that we are on the other side of the peak in most places in the U.S. States have lifted stay-at-home orders, and we’re all starting to experience what our new normal looks like. This means that while critical care units and emergency departments are still treating COVID-19 patients every day, the numbers have decreased.Read full post...

Communicating that it is safe to get preventative care such as mammograms is essential to getting healthcare kick-started. With the advent of consumerism and the preponderance of healthcare information, we now have an “army” of informed healthcare consumers in our country. Where have they been during this pandemic? What happened to preventative medicine or annual medical procedures/treatments?Read full post...

All the best brand managers revise their messaging platforms to reflect changes in the market. They do this to remain relevant to their consumers and their markets.

Now is the time for healthcare marketers to look at their positioning and message platforms to determine if they need revisions. During this pandemic, two competing images of healthcare providers have emerged: With their position as defenders of the community’s health restored, and their willingness to risk their lives to help others, healthcare providers are seen as heroes and valuable community resources. But the fact that they were overwhelmed by the number, severity and supply needs of COVID-19 patients creates a different perception.Read full post...

Amid the current coronavirus situation, some organizations may be tempted to implement a “wait and see” approach to marcom. However, now is not the time to cut branding or market research efforts. For healthcare organizations there is an obvious need to focus short-term priorities on the Coronavirus pandemic and its day-to-day impact on human and financial resources, operations, patient care and safety. Read full post...

It’s in the news every day. This pandemic is crippling some hospitals’ resources, while others are ready and waiting. But all hospitals have stopped elective procedures and are experiencing that impact on their revenue. Some have even been forced to furlough employees and staff. But what can we as marketers do to help?

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We’ve heard a lot about the importance of thanking essential workers during this pandemic. At AB&C, we’d like to make this a little easier for you. We have designed a series of posters/ads that we will customize for you to use as a print ad or as a poster displayed in your hospitals.

We will personalize any of the designs with your logo and color palette—and even resize them—at no cost to you. It’s the least we can do to thank you and your employees for all that they’re doing for your community and our country.
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Healthcare organizations have become pretty marketing savvy over the past several years. They tend to excel in having a strong brand promise, backed up by people-focused missions, visions and values. People entering the industry—especially those in direct clinical care roles—tend to be extremely mission-driven. They want to help and serve others. And that’s what they do every day.
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Healthcare SEM in the midst of a pandemic.

One thing that we can depend on is change. It’s a constant. But the massive change we’ve experienced over the past two weeks has been unsettling. Marketers are beginning to second-guess all their marketing strategies. Many are fielding nervous questions from executive teams and wondering if they should put a hold on their advertising budgets—or scrap their digital marketing completely.

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While many healthcare providers have been late adopters of digital marketing (as compared to other industries), it is fair to say that, as of 2018 it is now a cornerstone of most healthcare marketing programs. And that prominence comes from success and lessons learned—some good, some not so good—about both general and digital marketing.

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Marketing dashboards are an essential deliverable for any marketing team. Senior leaders want to know what they are getting for their investment in marketing, and how marketing will advance their strategic plan. And for marketers, it is important to document how effective you were in achieving your stated goals. So, where to begin?

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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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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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