BayCare Health: Delivering a Consumer-Driven Brand Experience [PODCAST]

Stewart Schaffer, CMO
BayCare Health

Stewart Schaffer, CMO
BayCare Health

[SHSMD14 Speaker Podcast Series] Stewart Schaffer, Chief Marketing Officer for BayCare Health System in the Tampa, FL area talks with Lonnie Hirsch, Co-Founder of Healthcare Success about Stewart’s presentation at the 2014 SHSMD Connections meeting this month titled: Designing a Consumer-Driven Brand Experience that Brings the Brand Promise to Life.

In hospital and healthcare marketing, what you say (your brand promise) is not always the same as what patients feel you deliver (your brand experience). As Stewart Schaffer points out in our podcast today, “You can have the brand promise, but if you’re not delivering on it, you don’t have a successful brand strategy.”

For BayCare Health System, a strong brand promise entices people to try their brand, while a strong brand experience gets people to stay. Some of the discussion points in our podcast conversation with Stewart Schaffer include:

• How do consumers/patients define quality;
• How does the health system clinical leadership define quality;
• A lot of the patient experience is feeling connected; and
• Working with physicians, staff and patients to deliver brand experience.

Designing a Consumer-Driven Brand Experience that Brings the Brand Promise to Life

SHSMD14 Podcast Healthcare Success Stewart Schaffer BayCare Health System

LONNIE HIRSCH: What is the BayCare brand promise today and has it evolved in the past five years?

STEWART SCHAFFER: It certainly has evolved. In 2013 we commissioned a quality and brand study because our organization had a sense that there was confusion in our industry about the concept of quality and the concept of branding. We broke down the survey results by care setting because people might define quality according to the care setting.

Operations and clinical leadership defined quality as things that tangible, such as outcomes or delivering results at a lower cost. And, on the other hand, consumers—regardless of the care setting—defined quality as the experience.

A lot of what makes people feel good in a healthcare setting is when they feel they are connected to information, or they are connected to their doctor, or that they have access to, or connected to, exceptional healthcare.

LH: What are some of the ways you use advertising, social media and community presence to communicate BayCare’s brand promise to consumers?

SS: We have quite a few tools in that tool kit today to cover all our bases. There are four distinct types of marketing, and you need a robust strategy for each.

• Traditional Marketing (newspaper, broadcast)
• Digital Marketing (online and internet; your own website with consumer personalization).
• Social Marketing (social media, targeted display ads on Facebook), and
• Cause Marketing (community presence and outreach events).

LH: What priorities do you have for 2015 to continue to improve your brand experience to support your brand promise? 

SS: We’re continuing the build out of new systems and infrastructure…getting the organizational culture used to these systems in advance…making a lot of training available…and taking these systems and similar ones from other industries – to dramatically improve the brand experience.

For our listeners who will be at the SHSMD 2014 conference, be sure to attend Stewart Schaffer’s presentation: Designing a Consumer-Driven Brand Experience that Brings the Brand Promise to Life on Tuesday, October 14th at 11AM.

This article and podcast are part of Healthcare Success Strategies’ continuing education series featuring speakers at the upcoming Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development, SHSMD CONNECTIONS 2014 conference in San Diego, October 12-15. Meet up with Lonnie Hirsch at the Healthcare Success Booth #904 in the exhibit hall.