It’s hard to imagine that there was a time when hospital marketing did not include broadcast media. In 1984, one of our first clients was Henry Ford Hospital. In repositioning their brand, we helped them be the first hospital in Michigan to use broadcast media. Henry Ford Hospital was a long-standing, well-known brand, but consumers had low awareness of all their facilities, specialties and capabilities. After extensive customer and physician research, we learned what female healthcare decision makers wanted when choosing a hospital and what physicians want when referring to a hospital. In response to the research, the hospital reconfigured its main campus to a collection of specialties (i.e. Henry Ford Heart & Vascular Institute, Henry Ford Bone & Joint Institute, etc.) Henry Ford also built a series of suburban medical centers to attract patients in new emerging growth markets.
The creative was based around the themeline: “More specialists make us more than a hospital.” And the name was changed from Henry Ford Hospital to Henry Ford Hospital and Specialty Centers. We created TV spots to build high awareness and we developed a unique fixed spot media approach during the Channel 4 “Health Report” on Channel 7 Local Evening News. We also leveraged regional editions of national publications to increase regional awareness.
The campaign ran from 1984-1990 and increased clinic visits and new patient volumes every year and closed the gap between Henry Ford and the competition. Our early work with Henry Ford, may have broken new ground in healthcare marketing as the first Michigan hospital to advertise on television, but it set Brogan on an innovative path of healthcare marketing that would win both awards and build the bottom line over the last three decades.
To see the rest of the 30 Best of Brogan, visit our original post in this series: Celebrating 30 years of creative advertising.
