SCHWARTZ CROSSROADS

Branding for the Better

The brand and messages a company starts with usually don't last forever. Markets evolve and with them so do a company's strategy, product/service offerings, competitors, level of recognition and customer expectations. These days, it’s important to be flexible and to be able to adjust with forces within and external to the company.

We enjoy working with our clients to ensure their messaging resonates with the media. One client, Phytel, which provides physicians with technology to deliver timely, coordinated care to their patients, spent a couple of months on a branding exercise. The executive team put its assumptions aside and took a hard look at the following questions with a fresh set of eyes going into 2010.

What does Phytel do well?
What do our customers value?
What is the area of the market that we can own (or lead)?

These are questions that can help define Phytel’s brand or promise to its customers, while helping to position Phytel in the marketplace. After dozens of interviews with key clients, internal interviews and thought leaders in the industry, they analyzed the results and did more brainstorming. They realized the market is Population Health Management. The new tagline is:  Engaging Patients. Better Outcomes.

This is an excellent result for several reasons. First, it truly captures what Phytel does. Second, it’s not a seismic shift, but rather something the company can grab onto and take with it for many years. It won’t be a hard message to portray to its customers or the media. In fact, they tried it on for size at HIMSS last week. The VP of marketing told me journalists understood the message and reacted very favorably.

One aspect I liked about the approach Phytel took in its branding exercise was that it consulted with employees and customers. As Tony Roberts, a change management expert, suggests, “Employees mustn't feel like they are losing their identity for no reason. It can't be done by management dictates -- 'We are changing.' Anything to do with the brand needs consultation with employees and customers to let them have their say."

I might also point out that this new message isn’t a drastic change, but rather one that will better portray the company’s identity and direction going forward from both the sales and PR angles. Phytel understands its brand is evolving and improving with the times, but not changing the core identity drastically. 

Posted by Davida Dinerman on March 8, 2010 at 11:28 AM