Does Your Internal Culture Match Your External Messaging?

Stephanie Hungerford, Director of Healthcare Marketing, Core Creative

Does your hospital or health system really live up to the brand portrayed in the messages you send to your audience? Honestly, does it really?

If you’re like many health care groups around the nation, you may have a serious disconnect between how your internal culture operates and the image you try to convey to your target audience to represent your brand.

As a result of this lack of alignment, you could be losing some of your valuable market share without even realizing it, according to Stephanie Hungerford, Director of Healthcare Marketing for Core Creative.

To put this into concrete terms, Hungerford gives an example: Your marketing may position your hospital as being very accessible to the community. Yet patients can’t get an appointment for several weeks. A disconnect like that is likely to drive your coveted patients elsewhere for care.

That’s why about 10 years ago, the owners of Core Creative looked at one another and realized that many of their clients’ external campaigns weren’t working because they weren’t believed internally. This led the agency to take a major shift. “We decided to put more emphasis not on just saying it, but also living it as well,” she says.

So began the agency’s unique focus, summarized by the slogan, “Say it. Live it.”

For Core Creative’s health care clients, the approach has been key to their success in today’s challenging marketplace. Hungerford says she and her colleagues play an instrumental role in spurring clients to determine who they really are and who they want to be. This identity becomes the heart of their marketing campaigns. And the “campaigns” are plural, because organizations develop an internal campaign that is as essential as the external one, Hungerford adds. It’s actually the way these two campaigns build on each other that really helps organizations to differentiate themselves and create a solid brand presence.

How do you get to the true heart of what your organization stands for? For two in-depth case studies, as well as three key questions that help you drill down to the essential core of your identity, read our full article now: Match Play: Rework Your Internal Culture to Match Your External Marketing Messages to Score More Points in the Marketplace.

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President