|  Scott Regan

Last week, we conducted a poll on the eight most common brand platforms for hospitals, and 135 of you responded. The results: 60% of respondents listed “customer service” as their hospital’s primary brand platform, followed by medical staff reputation (13%), clinical outcomes (13%), teaching and research (7%), and facilities (7%).

Those categories without a single mention: Technology (surprise!), physician relationships, and financial stewardship. So maybe the Big Eight is really the Big Five, although every category with the exception of teaching and research was considered to be a secondary brand platform by at least six hospitals.

Quite a few hospitals also provided their own secondary brand platforms that were not on the list of eight. Among those that were included were compassion, affordability, accessibility, trust, and world-class. The question is, are these really brand platforms? Or are they brand values?

Dictionary.com lists the sociological definition of values as is “the ideals, customs, institutions, etc., of a society toward which the people of the group have an affective regard. These values may be positive, as cleanliness, freedom, or education, or negative, as cruelty, crime, or blasphemy.”

If you are searching for a home, the home itself has a certain brand platform: wealthy, poor, urban, rural, etc., depending on where the home is. And depending on the location of the home and how it is constructed, it can also carry specific values: clean, cost-efficient, warm, drafty, and secure, to name just a few. But these are attributes of the home that help convey the home’s brand. They are not the brand platform itself.

You can purchase a home in a down-trodden neighborhood whose brand platform is under-class by virtue of the neighborhood that surrounds it, and elevate the brand platform by adding a Florida room, re-landscaping the yard, and adding exterior lights. By focusing on the brand’s values, you can strengthen, weaken, or even change the brand platform.

A hospital I worked with a few years back focused on clinical outcomes as its primary brand platform and customer service as its secondary brand platform. It had a single brand value it wanted to own in the marketplace, that value being “trust.” The hospital felt that unless the community really trusted the hospital, it would never fully develop their brand platforms.

That single value of “trust” was imbedded in every internal and external communication. Hospital executives obsessed on this value. The external marketing communications conveyed images of trust and had the word unobstrusively included in every message that was released into the marketplace. Within five years, the percent of people who mentioned this hospital by name when asked what hospital they trusted the most went from 32% to 74%.

And market share went from from 37% to 51% during this same time.

All by understanding their brand platforms, brand values, and interweaving them together.