What besides advertising could contribute to a children’s hospital brand experience? It could be a friendly bear, a playful dog, a rocky wolf, or a little girl with a perpetually broken leg. // By Peter Hochstein // There’s an enormous bear. And he’s just outside the front door of a children’s hospital. And with his Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // Here’s a powerful technique for building emotion into your advertising. If you dare to use it. Advertisers in almost any business — and the advertising agencies that service them — usually hate negativity. They look for emphasis on the upbeat. They like to portray, as the Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // How can a hospital facing lots of local competition successfully undo commonplace misperceptions in a fresh way? For Children’s Minnesota, it involved taking one approach in print advertising and another in TV. There was a good reason for the inconsistency. Sometime ago, Children’s Minnesota, a 381-bed Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // Sometimes, showing some “attitude” can sell your expertise better than simply presenting all the things you’re expert at. Here’s a case in point. What’s with the peculiar convictions some health care consumers have about teaching hospitals? They’ll seek out a top-tier school for their kids, and Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // In the testimonial-heavy world of hospital advertising, is there a fresh way of doing a testimonial campaign? How well can it perform for you? And what can you do to increase the impact of the advertising? Is there room in this world for yet another hospital Read More
An inspired name — and a bit of student high jinks — transmogrifies a mass vaccination program into an annual form of entertainment. Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // Quick, which would you rather do? Interrupt your daily routine, stand in a long line, and then get poked in the arm by Read More
This may not be what hospital communicators signed on to deal with, but it can — and did — happen. How would you handle the ensuing human and PR crisis? On September 12, 2017, a Rhode Island man drove up to Lebanon, New Hampshire, and entered the intensive care unit at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, where his mother was recovering from an aneurysm. According to news reports and indictments filed against him, the man asked for some time alone with his mother. Once they were alone, he allegedly pulled out a handgun and shot her four times, killing her.
How do you stand out in the crowd — especially when your #1 competitor is a world-famous brand? Pamela Maas, Gundersen’s chief business development and marketing officer, was able to overcome this challenge. “It seemed like so many systems in health care were looking and feeling exactly the same,” she says. “We recognized that brand positioning was really about building an emotional connection with consumers.” In Peter’s latest column, we’ll see how a new campaign triggered a deluge of fan mail — accolades from patients who had been touched by Gundersen staff members.
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // Last month, this column dealt with two advertising campaigns that you’d never guess were for hospitals — at least not until the last few seconds when a hospital logo appeared. In the interest of population health, one campaign demonstrated how to make a healthy and eye-appealing Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // For the 36 or so years I’ve been writing this column, hospital marketing managers and their agencies have been telling me they didn’t want their ads to look like “typical hospital advertising.” And much hospital advertising really has been atypical. I’ve seen senior citizens doing stand-up Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // For readers younger than 45 or so, this story requires a bit of history. In the 1960s, the “slice of life” TV commercial (or “slice” for short) dominated America’s TV screens. The formula, most often used to sell detergents, toothpaste, food products, and other packaged goods, Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // Until very recently, advertising aimed at combatting drug use has pretty much been within the purview of government and nonprofit anti-drug organizations. Partnership for a Drug Free America, for example, ran a famous TV spot during the 1980s showing an egg getting cracked into a hot Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // Any number of hospitals post videos on the internet featuring their doctors and other staff discussing their institutions and specialties. Too often, these standup “talking head” presentations feel unspontaneous and uncomfortable. Eyes shift nervously as speakers obviously read from cue cards. Language that looked good on Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // Sorry, family health care decision-making moms, ages 20-something to about 50. For once, you’re not the specific target of a hospital advertising campaign. But then, Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, with 618 licensed and leased beds and 1.4 million patient visits annually, has been running Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // Here’s a bright idea: Run some hospital advertising that flat out calls your potential patients nerds. Nah, come to think of it, that probably wouldn’t work, and might prompt some irate letters to your CEO. Well then, how about offering advice that sounds financial, and encourages Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // Before anything, Rachael Kagan, director of communications for the San Francisco Department of Public Health, wants you to know that the campaign her department launched is not an advertising campaign. It’s a branding campaign, she insists. “It wasn’t about drawing more people or business,” she explains. Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // Uh oh! Something isn’t quite right about the race car driver in a TV spot. He’s a bit too pudgy. He seems overly fidgety. Instead of wearing a race car driver’s fireproof suit, he’s sporting a short-sleeved polo shirt. And as he floors the gas pedal Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // Intuitively, you’d probably think that advertising for UCHealth should reflect nothing but gravitas. After all, it’s a 1,620-bed Colorado health care system with seven campuses (and three more under construction as of this writing), more than 2.5 million annual outpatient visits, and the University of Colorado’s Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // “Duluth, a four-season city with 11,000 acres of green space alongside the great Lake Superior, has miles of trails and over 100 parks, providing a suitable back drop for a multitude of recreation activities.” Wait! Don’t go away! You’re still reading Strategic Health Care Marketing. The Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // You know you’re in rural America when the front page of the local newspaper features a story about one of its delivery truck drivers finding his route blocked by a pair of obstinate moose. It happened in Gloversville, New York, population 15,315, and once the center Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // “Health care heresies?” No doubt about it. Since April of this year, a New York advertising agency called Brandfire has been committing the advertising equivalent of heresy on behalf of North Memorial Health, a respected Minneapolis-St. Paul area hospital system with two hospitals, some 650 beds, Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // If somebody ever produces a list of the best places in America to get sick, Cleveland will have to be high on the list. The 1.2 million people of Cleveland and surrounding Cuyahoga County have a choice of three teaching hospitals. One of them, Cleveland Clinic, Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // If you’ve been involved with hospital advertising for a while, you’ve probably seen it all. Touching testimonials from patients telling what a hospital’s doctors did for them. Doctors explaining how they collaborated on a medical breakthrough. Pictures galore of high-tech tools, people in surgical masks, MRI Read More
Notable Healthcare Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // In the Champlain Valley of upstate New York, where the nearest big city is Plattsburgh, population just short of 20,000, and the prevailing ethos is blue collar, 300-bed Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital had a problem. “ When you think of the kind of male who lives in Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // The little girl getting wheeled into surgery is about 11 years old—and not at all like any other little girl you’ve seen in TV spots about surgery. She’s a quick-thinking, fast-talking, smart mouth. But then, so is the pediatric surgeon who accompanies her. The girl asks, Read More