Elements of a Successful Brand

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow and I am your host. And I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited today to have our very own Madison Molho join us. She is the Director of Strategy here at Hedy & Hopp, and we’re going to talk about the importance of a brand today. So welcome, Madison.

Madison: Hi. I’m excited to be here.

Jenny: We’re excited to have you many folks that reach out to Hedy & Hopp really views as a performance marketing agency, which is a lot of the work that we do, but we’re full service. We do a lot of brand and strategy work. So I wanted to have you on today to kind of highlight our perspectives and our views when we’re working with an organization to either create a new brand or refine and clarify their brand.

And foundationally, there’s really a couple of key things an organization needs to know about itself for its brand to matter, right? You say all the time, and have some beautiful graphics. A brand needs to be authentic, relevant, and different. So, talk to us a little bit about that. What’s that process of defining those three things for an organization.

Madison: Yeah. So fundamentally brands are multifaceted. There’s a lot going on. I think we all know brands are more than just colors and logos. It’s what’s behind it and what drives not only the brand every day but the people behind it. And so what we like to do is look at three different areas. We talked about authenticity. Something has to be true to the brand.

We as consumers can sniff out inauthentic things pretty easily and like to connect with things that are authentic. So it’s important to establish that within a brand, as well as making sure that it’s different from its competitors. I think that’s probably the most well-known component of branding or brand positioning, because obviously you want to be separate from your competitors, so people reach out to you.

So that’s a second component. And then third is also relevant to the audience. You can be authentic and you can be different. But if you’re not connecting with the right people, who do you want to connect with? Who cares? And while all three of those aspects matter, what we really do is look for that intersection of the three.

So you think about a venn diagram, that perfect overlap of those three elements. And we call that substantively distinctive. And really what we aim for within a brand. So we make sure we were fine all of those areas of being authentic relevant and different and that substantively distinctive brand and that work carries through all the way from our brand positioning, work, messaging work through the creative that the audience would see.

Jenny: Absolutely. Talk to me a little bit about some examples of each of these, because I think for a lot of folks, these branding terms are thrown around a lot. But if you don’t have a background or experience in branding, you might not know what being authentic means. So I’d love some examples because we’ve done a couple of brand, either refinements or rebrands for organizations in the last six months.

And some of the findings, I think were really interesting. So without naming names, let’s talk about some examples. What are some examples, of where organizations are being authentic to the brand or maybe where they’re not?

Madison: Honestly, I think Hedy & Hopp is a great example. We rebranded, and I helped with that effort. And so what we look at is identifying a core value.

And that’s separate than the values that you would put on your website. You know that we talk about every day. I think some everybody probably listeners podcast knows joy, is one of our core values bringing the joy. But it’s really that core value of why do we get up every day? Why do you and I get up every day and work for this organization?

Why does this organization exist? And that’s something that’s intrinsic to the brand and something that has to be, I mean, identified. You can’t really manufacture that. And so that’s what we look to, carve out for brands again, making sure that it’s not, I guess manufactured that it is organic, it is true to who they are and just kind of helps coalesce the organization around that idea.

Jenny: That’s a great call out. And I agree, my favorite part is joy with Hedy & Hopp. I think one example of, when this doesn’t work is when organizations try to be aspirational with it. So for example, when they say, you know, putting the patient first is authentic to us, but then you look at their online views and the terrible patient experience, or their ratings are terrible, right?

So like you said, you can’t manufacture it. It can’t be aspirational. It’s gotta find, you know, what’s truly authentic. How about different? I think, you did as, your team did some work over the last couple of weeks and shared a couple of decks with me, kind of highlighting the difference of different organizations within a specific geography, which I thought was really interesting.

How you did an overlay of the words organizations used. Talk about that a little bit.
Madison: Yeah. So what we did was look at essentially a competitive audit across five different factors that brands and companies bring forth that start to round out how brands show up in the world, how people start to connect with the brand, interact with the brand and internalize that brand to show where our client is compared to their competitors and where their space and where they can actually own space and be different again, in a way that’s authentic to them.

That’s not something again, manufactured. So we looked at everything from who the organizations were at their core, their size, you know, if they had any sort of affiliations. We needed to be aware of, their positioning, their messaging, the services they offered, or SEO volume compared to our, client, their brand tones, photographic style, how all of those elements that come together to really start to coalesce around a brand.

We wanted to find where that space is. But I also think it’s important to understand, especially in healthcare, some things you just kind of have to say, even if your competitors say if they’re quote unquote, any stakes that we as patients need to make sure that companies have like validate, like, yes, I would like to work with you. So I will say there is some gray area when it comes to difference, but we do want to make sure that there’s enough space for the brand that we’re working with to own.

Jenny: Absolutely. And when you take that authentic a different piece together, then when you overlay the relevant component, that’s the why should we care? Right? So give us a little example of that.

Madison: Yeah. So it’s really important to understand the audience at their core, beyond just the superficial parts of the demographics where they live. Even I would say their objectives when it comes to their life or even whichever health care sector we’re working in, it’s really important to understand what their emotional motivators and what’s truly driving them at their core, that they might not even identify with you if you were to ask them.

But if you were to put it in front of those, say, yeah, that does really resonate with me. And it’s important for a brand to understand that, because you are trying to connect with them and provide them something that they can’t get somewhere else, and you want to meet them where they are. I realize that is a cliche at this point, it’s important to understand them so you can meet them there and bring them where you want to go.

But if you cannot connect with your audience, you know what’s the point?

Jenny: Absolutely. I think it’s interesting whenever we are brought into an organization and they’ve done some branding work, but they don’t yet have assets created that allow them to create campaigns that adhere to the work that they’ve created. Right? So it’s all conceptual, and it is not yet at the point where teams can execute against it.

Walk us through kind of at that 10,000ft. Like, what are the steps from taking it to that concept down to the tangible? Okay, here’s what you can give your designers and your copywriters to make sure that the actual creative execution rolls up correctly. Yeah. So of course, it’s always important that we’re always grounded in the fundamentals of the brand.

So something we do is called a brand framework that holds all of those essential elements of the brand. And that also lends itself to the development of what we call the messaging framework, which allows, the brand and everybody who works with the brand to speak cohesively and dial up and dial back different messages depending on who they’re talking to and where they’re talking to.

So you don’t sound robotic, but you sound like you’re coming from the same organization. And then, of course, depending on where we are in the process with whoever we’re working with, we would develop also brand guidelines that help to kind of blow out the visuals, what not to do, what to do. But also there’s a brand tone established in there, as well as a brand narrative that helps to bring this more from the conceptual foundational into the executional and those combined along with more deeper audience work like personas like looking at a journey and engagement framework to help to pull again the foundational conceptual pieces into executional.

Again, like I said earlier, meeting people where they are. But it’s important that each person gets, again, a relevant message that it’s authentic to the brand and depending on where that shows up. So it’s not just hanging out in the theoretical, it really does move from foundational core almost ran all the way through how that company and brand really engages in interacts with their patients or audiences.Jenny: Yeah, that is great. I saw, it was a great little LinkedIn post. Somebody in my network did this morning about how, you know, accountants and CPAs, people don’t think that they can do that job, but everybody thinks they can do marketing’s job because all they’re doing is thinking about that very last fun creative output and not all of these steps leading up to make sure there’s consistency and effectiveness in the content that is being created.

So, thank you for taking the time and walking us through all of that. And hopefully anybody who’s trying to better define their brand or even looking to rebrand this has provided you with a little bit of a roadmap of what that can look like and the different components that you should be thinking about developing to ensure that your new launch is successful.So thanks for joining us, Madison.

Madison: Oh, of course. Thanks.

Jenny: So thank you for tuning in today. Really appreciate the support. If you could give us a like and subscribe, it’d be really appreciated. We are so proud to produce and drop these episodes every Friday and really love hearing from our listeners. So if you have a topic idea you’d love for us to cover in the future, shoot us a note. Or if you have a branding or strategy project you’d like for us to lean in on, shoot us a note at jenny@hedyandhopp.com. Until next time, have a fabulous rest of your day and we’ll see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!