At the recent Healthcare Marketing & Physicians Strategies Summit (HMPS17) in Austin, Kathy Divis, President & Co-Founder of Greystone.Net, along with Chaka Jordan, Vice President Marketing & Strategic Planning at Blessing Health System; Rob Klein, Founder & CEO at Klein & Partners; and Brian Whitman, President at Corrigan Consulting, collaborated to present “Integrating Business, Brand and Marketing Strategies to Drive Growth.” This presentation was a case study of three groups of consultants coming together to work with Blessing Health System to help the organization achieve its marketing and strategic goals.

In 2016, Blessing was about to sign on with a single vendor for “one-stop shopping” services to be provided for development of a brand strategy, website development and service line marketing plans. After the arrival of a new vice president for marketing and strategic planning, the decision was made to look at different vendors with established expertise in the separate areas needing work.

Briefly, the process went like this:

• Brand
  • Instead of focusing on its brand identity, which would have been more tactically focused, Blessing wanted to establish a solid brand strategy.
  • Wanted a solid research foundation upon which to build its entire brand strategy.
  • This led to Blessing’s relationship with Klein & Partners.
• Digital
  • Instead of focusing on building a new website and focusing on the appearance, Blessing wanted to take a broader analysis of its digital assets and marketing needs and develop a solid digital strategy before focusing on the tactic of a website rebuild.
  • This led to Blessing’s relationship with Greystone.Net.
• Service Line Marketing Plans
  • Instead of obtaining tactical recommendations, Blessing wanted to develop strategic marketing plans for key service lines that included a situational, SWOT and competitive analysis that could all be used to drive plan development.
  • This led to Blessing’s relationship with Corrigan Consulting.

The work plan consisted of:

• Creating the brand: brand promise and brand architecture was developed by Klein & Partners, based on brand research, which is a specialty of this firm.
• Activating the brand: Blessing developed brand engagement guidelines and a strategy for staff engagement, while Klein & Partners worked on brand experience.
• Communicating the brand: this piece involved close collaboration among Blessing and all three consulting partners. Building on the brand work done by Klein & Partners, Corrigan Consulting and Greystone.Net developed and implemented the service line strategic plans and digital plans, respectively.

A big advantage of this collaboration among consultants was being able to get the best thinking from three different firms in addition to what Blessing brought to the table. The consultants – all on top of their game and specialists in healthcare – were ideal for brainstorming ideas together to arrive at an optimal solution for Blessing.