Forming a new covenant

When two business entities decide to merge, of the many questions they must answer, one of the most important is: What the heck are we going to call ourselves? In the case of St. Luke’s Hospital and Saginaw General Hospital, two Saginaw, Mich., hospitals that merged earlier this year, the new name had to appease both those who wanted a name with religious overtones (St. Luke’s is a Lutheran hospital) and those with a more secular orientation (Saginaw General is a community hospital).

Out of marketing research, employee suggestions and the efforts of a name generation firm came one winning candidate: Covenant HealthCare. "A name that was too religious-sounding was not going to work and a name with no religious connotations was not going to work either," says Tom Dorle, Covenant HealthCare’s director of business development.

When the merger became official in July, thus was born a 709-bed hospital system that serves a population of about 600,000 in several counties around Saginaw from two primary facilities and a number of outpatient and satellite locations.

Focus groups were conducted between February and May on the new name, the new corporate identity, and advertising concepts, with the help of PTM Research, a division of Personal Touch Marketing, Ann Arbor, Mich. Groups were held with employees from both hospitals and also with a sample of the public, namely women 18-40 with children at home and women 18-40 without children at home. ("Women are most often the decision maker on health care issues, so it was very important that we test the new names with them," Dorle says.)

The focus groups of non-physician hospital employees consisted of workers randomly selected from the respective hospitals’ databases representing a cross-section of education, income, and job responsibility. The groups were segregated by hospital because the merger process was ongoing and turf issues (who’s going to work where, who’s taking over who, etc.) might have spilled over into the discussions.

"As we went through the groups we were able to gather more and more images for each of the prospective names," says Deb Babcock, president of PTM Research and moderator of the groups. "That was very helpful to the hospital board because they had their own internal favorites, but the research made it clear that if they used a certain name, there were some areas where confusion might arise and therefore it would be harder, from a marketing standpoint, to work with that name."

(One of the names that didn’t make the cut was Ascension. Too many people associated the word "death" with it - not the best link for a hospital!)

"The most important information we got from the research was that we were going to have to do a good job of explaining what the name meant," Dorle says. "A covenant is a promise, a commitment, and it also has some biblical connotations. I really thought there would be enough people who knew what a covenant was but we had some people who thought it was associated with witches - a coven - and nuns - a convent. So it got bizarre periodically."

Familiarize and educate

Hospital marketers had to familiarize people with the name change and then educate them on what Covenant would mean to the community. "Once we define what the word means, then we can move on to the services. Once they know who we are, by virtue of the services we provide they can form opinions," Dorle says.

In the corporate identity groups, one task was to figure out how to meld the two hospitals and their facilities, Babcock says. "They have so many different physical buildings that we weren’t real sure how we should identify them. Should they be called Covenant North, Covenant South, etc., or should St. Luke’s be called Covenant HealthCare St. Luke’s Hospital, for example."

With a new name selected, an ad agency developed some concepts for introducing and explaining it. One had to do with defining a covenant as a promise and then linking it to other promises that people make, such as marriage vows and an oath of office - two ideas which, because the groups were held around the time that the Clinton/Lewinsky affair was unfolding, quickly became undesirable associations for the hospital system.

"We had our ad agency develop three image concept campaigns and we also took those to focus groups in which we showed them creative concepts and asked for feedback. Based on that and other information we selected an initial rollout strategy for developing a corporate image campaign," Dorle says.

"The corporate logo that was developed for us incorporates a flame and a dove very attractively. The flame represents intelligence and leadership as well as religious significance and the dove represents peace and also has some religious overtones."

The advertising groups also examined media possibilities for creating awareness and introducing people to the new name and identity. "The respondents brought up competitive advertising and some of the themes that they recalled so I think the ad agency got a sense of how to catch people’s attention just based on what they recalled from other campaigns," Babcock says.

To familiarize people with the new name and where it came from, Covenant has run a jingle and also a 15-second spot in which the St. Luke’s logo dissolved into the Saginaw General logo which in turn dissolved into the new Covenant HealthCare logo. "We ran that in the month of May, getting people aware of the Covenant name and where it was coming from and since we became official in July we’ve never gone back and referenced anything prior to the merger," Dorle says.

"The board seemed comfortable with the name and the identity and again those were our goals: to select something that could sustain both mind-sets and graphically represent what the name meant," Dorle says. "Now all we had to do was drill it into the minds of half a million people!

Best way

For Covenant HealthCare’s purposes, Dorle feels focus groups were the best way to get the information the hospitals were after. "As long as you have a visual type of issue, you’re better off with a focus group. You also have a chance, by the way focus groups are designed, to probe on comments or suggestions. Deb is excellent at processing a focus group and turning over that one extra rock to get the information you want."

In conjunction with the focus groups, Covenant also did some community leader surveys to check reaction to the process (it was very favorable) and Dorle will continue fielding an ongoing annual phone survey to check awareness, experiences with the hospitals and also find out about health issues that are on people’s minds. In addition, Covenant will conduct a comprehensive phone survey in January to get a benchmark of top-of-mind awareness of the new organization.