How brand-building made Mercy Health a preferred healthcare provider

When Trinity Health, one of the nation’s largest healthcare networks, wanted to bring together seven hospital systems in Michigan to form a single brand, they partnered with Movéo. The two teams knew there would be challenges to the project both internally and externally. The new brand would need to be consistently conveyed to over 8,000 employees. It would be competing with a another major hospital system in the same region that already had an established brand presence.

The success of the project despite these odds shows the power of brand-building in the healthcare space. Here’s how Movéo and Trinity Health worked together to form the Mercy Health brand.

The process

As in all marketing efforts, healthcare marketing must be grounded in robust qualitative and quantitative research. In Movéo’s work with Mercy Health, that included competitive and category audits of the brand’s industry environment and an ethnographic study. This research was used to inform the branding work that came next.

To differentiate Mercy Health from its closest competitor, Movéo worked with the team to develop a brand that positioned individual facilities’ clinical expertise and advanced service offerings as the natural outgrowth of a focus on personalized, relationship-based and inclusive healthcare. This work led to the development of a brand strategy, architecture, voice and visual identity as well as audience personas. These values were conveyed through print advertising, newspaper inserts and more, which were aimed to engage the identified audiences directly. Internal branding efforts engaged employees throughout the system, allowing the new brand to be more thoroughly expressed.

These brand-building efforts were fruitful. A year after the new brand’s unveiling, brand awareness reached 77 percent. At the same time, Mercy Health was rated the preferred provider of cardiac services and a close second to their main competitor in oncology services.

Lessons from Mercy Health’s success

What can other healthcare marketers and brands draw from Mercy Health’s success? We believe these are key takeaways:

• that healthcare messaging must be built on a foundation of strong and thorough research
• that in this competitive marketplace, addressing people who have enormous emotional and physical stakes in the services they seek, crafting a differentiated, compelling brand is key
• that a healthcare brand needs to be conveyed through top-notch, targeted creative
• that you must track results to analyze the outcomes of your work

To see examples of some of the collateral Movéo produced for Mercy Health, view our case study.

Read case study