Kendra Schuchard
Senior Consultant
Heart+Mind Strategies
kschuchard@heartandmindstrategies.com
How do you keep the brand engine running smoothly?
The engine in your car will run for about 15 minutes without oil before the resulting friction causes extensive damage. In the world of branding, trust is the oil or lubricant that facilitates the engine of branding. When we believe a brand aligns with our values and meets our needs, we’re more likely to buy, repurchase and give the brand permission to extend itself.
Yet trust is becoming an increasingly rare commodity. Organizations like Pew Research and Gallup have tracked levels of trust over time and have noted the steady erosion of this valuable lubricant.
One of the industries that is experiencing the greatest erosion of trust is health care. This is a true crisis, because while we can simply stop buying or using most brands we don’t trust, not trusting our health care can have a dire impact on the quality of our life – it can stop our engine cold. Recognizing this challenge of low trust, how can health care brands create a trusting emotional link with consumers?
We’ve researched and consulted with health care systems in the growing integrated delivery network (IDN) movement. From a branding perspective, IDNs make a particularly fascinating laboratory. Their basic premise involves moving beyond the old role of “sick care” to a comprehensive system – one that promotes wellness and community health. The evolution requires radical community trust.
This means reframing the way people think about the role of health care providers beyond sick care and extending into areas like community nutritional education, sponsorships of food markets, affordable housing, employment and creation of walkable communities.
It also means interfacing with new stakeholder groups like local governments and community organizers, with a growing number of competing interests and needs. An increasingly complicated engine with lots of new moving parts. Trust is the basic lubricant to ensuring this new engine performs well.
With a complex set of stakeholders, it’s important to start with mapping the lay of the land. The model of human decision-making we use explores the deepest motivations that drive each stakeholder group’s primary concerns. Understanding and mapping these concerns provides a firm foundation for strategy development.
For both the existing brand and the future IDN brand, we map equities and disequities. Among those different stakeholder groups, who is all-in? Who are the holdouts and why? Where are the points of friction in this complex engine?
Creating a master map is essential to developing effective strategies, particularly given the interconnectedness of the stakeholder groups. Where are the barriers and facilitators that will either impede or ease the process of reframing perceptions and extending into new areas? This map helps chart a clear path to achieving strategic outcomes.
In our interconnected world, engendering trust in a brand requires an increasingly systemic approach. The lessons we’ve learned while creating strategies for very complex IDN brands apply to brands across all industries.