mommyjenlin

Your price information is out there. Your outcomes information is out as well. And you already have developed by word-of-mouth either a positive or negative patient experience reputation. Whether you like it or not, the horses are out of the barn and it’s too late to corral, get them back into the barn, and pretend like it never happened. As the hospital segment of the healthcare industry evolves to a more consumer centric model along the three dimensions of price, outcome, and experience, will you use that publicly available data to differentiate yourself to potentially establish market dominance along those brand dimensions that you excel? This is not a frivolous marketing question. This is about how you are going to be competing in the near future. The healthcare brands of hospitals and health systems will come to be defined by these attributes. And don’t think that the industry is so unified that no one will make that first attempt to define their market vies a vie their competitor...

Here at the CMO Advisory Service, we recently closed up our 2013 Barometer Study which includes data from senior level marketers working at some of the largest Tech companies in the world. While there are a lot of great insights from this study, these senior level marketers made it very clear that their highest priority is "Proving Marketing's Value", or in other words, that always elusive marketing ROI. While this quest(ion) is nothing new to marketers, as our industry continues its transformation, marketing ROI is becoming an even more pressing topic. We see this truth in our surveys, we hear it from clients, and it is actively being discussed at industry events. This year we launched our   Chief Marketing Officer ROI Matrix  (see the image to the right) in an effort to give participants a look into their own return on investment from marketing and continue the conversation. There is no easy answer here (otherwise my days would not be quite as busy), but I have 3 steps...

WSMSGraduation from almaklein on Vimeo . It's the end of an era. After six straight years with a child enrolled at WSMS (including 2 during which I served as board co-president), we're leaving this amazing community. At the Graduation picnic, Ada and her fellow kindergarteners sang (see the snippet above) before getting their white "Graduate" t-shirts and handing out slices of cake (all school traditions). Ada and her teacher for the past 3 years, Ms Orfei Ada upon entering preschool We've made our best friends among the parents at WSMS, so moving on is definitely bittersweet. But Ada's looking forward to summer camp and then first grade, and she'll be at the same school as her big sister for two whole years before they're on completely different schedules again.

With the rapid progression of healthcare evolving into a consumer-centric market, how much more effective would your marketing, experience and outcomes campaigns be if your messaging in your Public Relations (PR) campaigns carried your brand messaging with the value, experience and outcomes it brings to the healthcare consumer? Simple really. More effective. More meaningful. More engagement. And if you aren't, than guess what? That is a missed opportunity. As healthcare organizations, we are expected by our audiences to advertise, write white papers, create case studies, write impactful sales materials, partner with leading market research organizations to present "groundbreaking" topical surveys and results, as well as other materials. That is a given. But what is the value of these same messages being crafted in such a way through PR to your organization? The more people say they don't believe what they read and see, the more that they believe what they read and see...

As you continue to invest and execute in your Social Marketing, step back for just a moment to think about how "Social" fits in your overall marketing-mix. It is helpful to first look at the overall marketing function. There are two major rivers of information that flow into and out of the marketing organization. The first is the flow of data that informs the "in-bound" product management process, wherein customer requirements are continuously gathered and prioritized. The second is the flow of "out-bound" product marketing work-effort, wherein products and services are presented to the marketplace. Social marketing is the process of applying social listening and social communicating as a new and value-adding element to those in-bound and out-bound information flows. For example the in-bound product management process has been traditionally informed by customer councils or user groups; where new product ideation would happen one idea at a time, and one cus...

Seriously, this is not just a sarcastic attempt to get your attention. It's an honest question about what hospitals and health systems do not get regarding the importance of the patient and healthcare consumer experience from first touch-point to last. The experience story for the patient or searching healthcare consumer isn't just about the patient care or the test. It is for all practical purposes the entire experiential encounter. Let me relay a story of an encounter with a health system hospital. By the way it's about my recent experience, so no HIPPA is involved here and it's not hearsay. It wasn't bad, but sure did not met my healthcare consumerist expectations. My personal physician orders a test and faxes it to the hospital central scheduling department. Central scheduling calls during the day when I am work so I call back the next day. Now, if they had really had been on top of the experience and technology, when I called back it would have gone straight to...

My mom and dad The longer I mother my two girls, the more I appreciate my own mother. So, in honor of Mother's Day, here's a list of things I'd like to thank her for. I'm not my mother's spitting image and our personalities, career paths and lifestyles are pretty different, but there are quite a few ways I'm doing my best to follow her example. Thank you, Mom for... 1. Cooking from scratch and expecting everyone to show up for dinner. 2. Never once mentioning your weight or dieting. 3. Teaching me how to write. And rewrite. 4. Reading to me long past when I could read to myself. 5. Enrolling me in piano lessons and renting me a cello despite my utter lack of musical talent. 6. Making sure I was capable of cooking, laundry and checkbook balancing before I left home. 7. Attending almost all my high school plays and yet skipping 90% of my athletic games, and refusing to feel guilty about it. 8. Talking about how much you enjoyed your job. 9. Exposing me to the arts...