Expanding Branding

We could have called it “Manifest Destiny,” I suppose: This upcoming AMA-Houston Healthcare Special Interest Group seminar. We could have stressed the potential value of brand expansion with a title like, “The Promised Land of Brand Expansion.”

Still, here’s your chance to register early for the SIG’s 26 September seminar which is really called, Community Marketing: Expanding your “brand” outside your backyard. (Think of the railroaders and teamsters in this mural as role models – political correctness aside – taking your healthcare brand out into the wider world.)

Look at this from our SIG programmers’ POV.

Healthcare marketers can’t expect patients to come to a central location any more. We’re moving beyond the need for marketers to think outside the Texas Medical Center, to move providers and facilities outside that geographic box. In fact, even “early expanders” are losing patients to sister facilities newly established in farther suburbs, according to gossip heard among professionals in one of the suburban hospitals.

We believe your brand has to be effectively transported as well. The more stakeholders you involve deeply in your brand the better, whether it’s a local, a regional, or even a worldwide effort. Your hard-won brand facets help carry your value propositions beyond your original facility’s doors.

So we’re willing to put our seminar where our thoughts are. A panel of “expansion experts” from three different healthcare practice areas to discuss the marketing value of expanding your brand outside of your own backyard.

Come that Friday morning at The Health Museum (the SIG’s fortunate home base), you can hear from Edgar Vesga, International Attaché at Texas Children's Hospital; Les Mann, US Oncology Vice President of Marketing; and Suzanne Jarvis, Executive Vice President of healing sciences organization Esocen.

Each professional has a different brand; each has a different set of challenges expanding outside their core markets. You’ll have the opportunity to see how each story applies to your own challenges – and how to measure the success of your brand extension efforts, too. Sharon Lore of UTMDACC (which knows a thing or two about branding) will moderate.

Here’s a few good guides to help get you to where you need to go brand-wise…without a lot of mishaps. We aim to help show you the way come 26 September. So sign up now and avoid the rush, because this past year the Healthcare SIG’s managed to pack the trains for every trip. And O Pioneers! There’ll be a light breakfast for you, too.

State Capitol Mural by Charles Banks Wilson. Photo By David Fitzgerald with thanks.