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A variety of factors – the rise of healthcare consumerism, healthcare reform and all its implications, and an increasingly informed public – are combining to force healthcare providers to take a hard look at something they once may have taken for granted: their “customers,” by which we mean their patients.

The healthcare interaction model was traditionally defined by the patient-doctor relationship, with the physician “brand” the source of decision-making, short- and long-term care planning, and also the foundation for patient loyalty. Patients went to the hospital that their physician recommended, whereas healthcare systems relied on hard facts to help physicians and patients make decisions. They weren’t actively managing their brands.

The Future of Pharma Profitability Lies in Building Corporate Brands

Corporate board members have a long list of responsibilities and concerns: succession planning, executive compensation, regulatory compliance and business growth strategies -- not to mention shareholder interests and value.

One topic that gets less attention is brand, often because many senior marketers have not mastered the art of turning marketing-speak into the financial language that resonates with directors. If brand value and the benefits of brand-building investments are not translated into the language of numbers, marketing will always be at a disadvantage in winning over the board.

It’s no secret that brands are constantly in search of ways to build connections and loyalty with their customers. However many brands are tackling this challenge by blasting meaningless messages into the ether, hoping to gain a committed following. It's a sure-fire way to turn people off and eventually leave your messages falling on deaf ears. Strong brands engage consumers with authentic and consistent material that reflects an understanding of their interests and gets the dialogue going.These days, great content makes for great brands.

On October 1, the digital doors of the health insurance exchanges open for business; and, the individual mandate will leave the entrance overflowing. No matter the depth of meticulous planning and preparation, nor the painstaking journey through security clearance, most health insurers are in a mad dash to the boarding gate.

Unless your brand is one of the exceptions, it needs energy. a brand that has insu? cient energy has two potential liabilities. first, it will lack visibility and it will no longer be among those that come to mind when customers consider a purchase. it will be lost in the noise of the environment and will no longer be relevant. Second, and perhaps worse, it can see declines in key image items such as perceived quality and trust. in addition, it could see the degradation of its ability to drive diff erentiation and loyalty.

From Prophet Vice Chairman David Aaker comes Three Threats to Brand Relevance. In it, Aaker reveals that the key to an organization’s sustained growth is to learn what it takes to bring “big” innovation to market and create barriers to competitors. Building on his full-length book Brand Relevance, Aaker offers a guide for confronting the three threats if they emerge and shows how to put in place the strategies that will keep the threats at bay.  

Growing a business and brand is never easy – especially when consumers are fickle and the economy uncertain. But look on the bright side: while consumer and business spending are tenuous, major confidence indices are at a five-year high and still climbing. We’re at an economic inflection point that historically has created tension for marketers: Should they tightly manage spending, riding out weaker economic times, or invest more to help drive growth in new areas?

The “human library” has its roots in the city library in Malmö, Sweden, which allows curious visitors to check out living people for a 45-minute conversation. Th e experience is designed to confront prejudices and promote understanding. Th e people available to be “checked out” at one point included a gypsy, a transvestite, a blind man, a journalist and an animal rights activist. The conversations are intended to allow people to learn about the life and beliefs of an individual who has been misunderstood, stereotyped and often avoided.

Positioning your brand represents the short-term communication objectives, what it is you want to communicate, enhance or reinforce about your current brand. It is about your brand and how it differs from and is better than other brands. Jaguar isdifferentiated, in part, around design. Dove provides moisturizing. 3M offers innovation. Whole Foods Market has sustainable seafood. Framing has a bigger agenda.

A serious threat facing most brands in dynamic markets is the loss of relevance because the category or subcategory that they are serving is declining. Customers are no longer buying what the brand is perceived to be making. New categories or subcategories are emerging as competitors’ innovations create “must haves.” Remarkably, this dynamic can happen even if the brand is strong, customers are loyal and the offering has never been better, thanks, in part, to incremental innovations.

When thousands of people lost their jobs during the Great Depression, many of them started riding the rails across the country in search of work and food. Hobos, as they were called, had been hopping trains since the 1870s, working as migrant laborers wherever they could find a job. They often traveled by themselves, leading to the inevitable problem of knowing what to expect when arriving in an unfamiliar place. Some cities might be welcoming while others might be less hospitable. A farmer might feed those who worked his fields while others might turn you into the police. A secret language of signs was developed that informed hobos about what awaited them. To the casual observer, the signs were gibberish or graffiti; but to the hobo, they could mean the difference between a hot meal and a night in jail. And therein lies a key question for today’s companies to ask themselves:

For some time now, marketers have talked about methods to measure the economic effectiveness of their programs and have looked for financial metrics suitable to report their activities to the board. A recent survey by the Columbus Business School indicates their success has been limited. Only 30% of the CMOs interviewed use financial metrics for reporting, and 57% of CMOs use no measure of Return on Marketing Investment to evaluate their achievements.

When marketers map customer experience, we start by defining a beginning and an end. To improve the experience for a particular brand, we typically look at the customer’s touchpoints with the brand on that continuum, not acknowledging that our customers live in an ecosystem, transcending any single brand.

Look at any product category and the answer is the same. All of the meaningful changes in market position and sales of individual brands occur only when the brand creates a “must have” for which competitors lack visibility and credibility to be considered. However, most fi rms seldom foster such innovation and bring it to market—and in most cases, it is not because there is a lack of resources. Firms that are profi table and successful are actually less likely to fund market-changing innovation than fi rms that are struggling or in crisis. Why? One answer is the curse of success, which can take several forms.

The only way to grow, with rare exceptions, is to engage in substantial or transformational innovation that will be a game changer, that will create new categories or subcategories defined by qualities that customers deem “must haves” and protected by actively managed competitive barriers. Healthy organizations often have plenty of ideas that potentially qualify but get killed off before reaching the market. As a result, an opportunity to create a platform for real growth is lost.

Nestlé's Nespresso brand dominates the fiercely competitive Swiss market for coffee capsules. But Migros is successfully challenging its powerful competitor with its own brand, Delizio –thanks to a new brand identity and a strong positioning. Success spawns imitators, and Nespresso’s success quickly led to the appearance of numerous competitors: Today nearly a dozen players compete in the portioned coffee market – a market that has seen double-digit growth for the past several years.

For a few years now, the shiniest new toy in the digital marketplace has been the mobile app.

The proliferation has been amazing: The 1-millionth app went live as 2011 came to a close, and the pace has continued through 2012. The trend, Mobilewalla told theNew York Times, has been 15,000 mobile app releases per week.

Everyone wants to get a piece of this pie. And why not? The thing is that for all the really cool, highly successful apps there are hundreds, (thousands?) of others that are dumb, useless, or a joke.

In many companies marketing and accounting follow totally separate paths. Accounting is the process of managing income, expenses, assets and liabilities. Marketing is the customer-focused function. This separation is artificial because the two functions in reality are indivisible.