A Strong Hospital Brand Finds That It Needs to Rebrand – and Then Reaps Positive Results
by Peter Hochstein
As hospitals continue to merge or in some cases drop their partners, marketers for those institutions find themselves challenged to explain what’s new and what’s the same about their organizations – even to their own constituencies.
It was just such a need that led The Christ Hospital Health Network in Cincinnati to a major rebranding effort, even though Christ Hospital had a 124-year history and a strong local brand image.
As Patty Thelen, director of public relations and marketing at The Christ Hospital Health Network tells it, in 2007 the organization began talking about a rebranding campaign with Ten Adams, its advertising agency in Evansville, IN, four years before the campaign actually launched.
In 2007, what was then simply called The Christ Hospital separated from its parent organization and became a stand-alone hospital with just a handful of outpatient locations. A short time afterward, it grew to a hospital with an employed physician network and many more outpatient locations.
“We really needed a name to more accurately reflect the broad scope of services across the network, which is how we arrived at the name The Christ Hospital Health Network,” Thelen says.