Josh Dougherty is a brand strategist, speaker, and the founder and CEO of A Brave New, a Seattle-based branding agency that crafts bold and memorable healthcare brands. They have specific expertise in healthcare technology, hospitals and specialty care providers, and healthcare nonprofits. Josh has 15 years experience building new brands from scratch, refreshing existing brands and building strategies to bring those brands to life in the market.
Josh Dougherty:
Welcome to A Brave New Podcast. This is a show about branding and marketing in the healthcare space. But more than that, it's an exploration of what it takes to create brands that will be remembered and how marketing can be a catalyst for those brands' success. I'm Josh Dougherty, your host. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome back to another episode of A Brave New Podcast. I'm excited to have you along for another solocast, and today we're going to talk about something a little bit different. We have spent the last, I don't know, a couple of months exploring how different companies are building their brands, how they're telling their story, how they're living out their brand. And I want to have a little bit of a step back and talk about tools today and, specifically, tools to empower teams to live out your brand. Because at the end of the day, everyone gets pretty excited about a rebrand, right?
And maybe it's more correct to say that once people decide to do a rebrand, they get excited about it. And it's big, flashy, you're coming up with big ideas, you're coming up with cool things. But I think back to my conversation with Saige Carpenter earlier this year, that you do all the hard work to get your brand ready to launch, to roll it out. And then, you've got to do the hard work of living out the brand day in and day out. And a lot of times that effort can land solely on the backs of the marketing and the brand people within the organization, when really we need to empower our whole team to live out the brand for it to have emotional resonance. And what do I mean by emotional resonance? I mean something that's believable, true, authentic. And it's not going to be believable, true, and authentic if it's only something that's happening when you're interacting with a marketing or something related to brand.
It needs to be something that's deeply imbued inside the entire organization, imbued inside of every person and that's expressed by every person as they go through and do their day-to-day work. So I'm going to have a bit of a conversation about this next week too with my guest, Gail Findlay-Shirras, who works at Harrison Healthcare, who's based up in Vancouver, BC, but she talks a lot about how their focus and the key to their growth has been living out this consistent brand promise day in, day out to their patients and to their clients. And I want to give you some tools to help empower your teams to do that as well. So let's talk about what those tools are. Each of these tools, as I share them, are battle tested by me, my clients, by many people before me. They're things that I've picked up and learned from mentors over the years and that I've tried to put into practice because I know they work.
There are ways, simple ways, to get people engaged around the brand. And I use that simple word intentionally, because each of these tools that I'm going to share today is really intentionally simple and straightforward. I think we often like to make brand really complicated or more complicated than it needs to be. And you've heard me talk a lot about how a brand is really about a single idea, that essence at the center of the brand that leaves a core memory for people to hold onto. And so, just like we want the essence or the core memory of the brand to be simple, straightforward, understandable, we want the tools for people to express that essence to be simple and straightforward. Because after all, there are only a few people in the organization who focus full-time on playing out and living out the brand. There are a number of other people who, it isn't really their full-time job to live out the brand, or at least they don't think about it as being their full-time job.
And so, we need to give them some tools to make it easy for them to live out that brand. So the other thing I would say is that each of these tools can be put into use in your company across disciplines. So there's not really ... Obviously, I think most of you who are listening are in that healthcare space—either working in health tech, or maybe working at a health system, or in an organization like a specialty care clinic that does some type of care delivery. But if you're not, if you're in technology or in your summon area and your other area and you happen to be listening, these tools will work there as well. And so, let's talk about what the tools are. There are four that we're going to talk through.
The first is this idea of a brand filter. And a brand filter is really a tool that's a set of questions for you to give people to ask themselves to let them figure out if they're on brand in their decisions, in what they're talking about, and in how they go about their day. And so, it's a simple and straightforward tool for people to use.
The second tool is called branded behaviors and these are essentially predefined behaviors that we want people to live out with the brand. And they're thoughtful and they're designed to work with kind of the DNA and how your organization works, but they're also designed to be something that someone can do in two seconds—maybe as they're delivering a presentation or doing something along those lines.
The third piece is doing quarterly brand training. And I know many of us think, "Oh, training, that's going to be the worst." Or, "That's going to be hard to get people excited about." It might be, but we'll talk about some strategies to get people on board and then also why this can be super valuable for helping people understand how to live out the brand.
And then, finally, we'll talk about messaging themes. And this is the one tool I think that is more for marketing and communications teams, maybe for fundraising if you're in a nonprofit context as well, but these themes can really help link everything together. And should apply really up into a C-suite and to many other places. So we're going to talk about these in order of difficulty to implement.
So first we're going to dive in and talk about the brand filter. And as I said with the brand filter, it's important to define it first. So the brand filter is a set of five or six questions that anyone on your team can ask themselves as they make big decisions or small ones, actually, to ensure that they stay aligned with your brand. Now it really helps if you have some sort of brand platform mapped out, because I'm going to walk through how I construct the questions when we're building out a brand. But you can also think …if you at least have some core values behind your organization, if you haven't done a formal branding process, you could also build this based off of your core values.
But ideally, you'll have thought about what your brand essence is. You'll have some core attributes, your brand personality, and so you can construct your questions around that. So let's talk about that. How is this constructed? The first question really relates to brand essence, and this question should be designed to help people explore whether or not the decision initiative or effort they're going to pursue aligns with the brand essence. Does it make sense with the brand essence? The questions two to five relate to the core identity attributes. So those core ways that your organization lives out your brand essence, each question should be constructed to ensure that your team is thinking through how to infuse each core attribute into their work. And then, question six really relates to personality. It makes sure that your team is thinking about what the vibes of this brand or this initiative are, does it feel on brand?
And I think as we think about these, they aren't meant to be a yes/no type of thing. Oftentimes, an initiative's going to happen, but we want a tool that's going to be flexible enough to help people determine, "How do I morph this initiative or pursue this decision in such a way that it's on brand?" So ultimately, we want the questions to be open-ended enough, so that people can think through—not only are there no yes or no answers, but they can think through, "How could I change this potentially or change my initiative based on what I'm thinking about in this question to be on brand?"
So let's talk about an example and I'm going to share a filter that we've worked on with one of our clients. This is a cancer center and a few years back we developed a brand filter for them. So their brand was all about having a personal commitment to the work that they were doing to research cancer, to come up with cures, to provide the best care to people. So our first question with them was really simple. Is our deep personal commitment reflected in this decision? That's a simple question, but it also really helps you understand, Are we showing a personal commitment here? It helps get to the core of, Is the brand being lived out? Now the next six questions are related to their ... So they've got a few more questions that I mentioned earlier, but they're related to their core attributes. So they ask these questions. "How are we considering all the small details and not just big ideas?" One of their core attributes was making sure small details were taken care of. Question three is, “Are we considering the different needs of each community with this decision?”
So this cancer center, Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, spends a lot of time serving communities across the mountain, west, and in Utah. And so, they need to make sure that that's taken into consideration with any decision. The next question, question four is, “How are we pioneering the future with this decision?” One of their goals is always to be focused on the future and looking beyond what they already know, building a better future, where cancer is less lethal, is more like a chronic disease, and more people recover and go on to live long lives after they have cancer. Question five is, ”Are we being diligent? In what ways can we follow through on what we're doing?” Question six, ”Is this decision bold and is it right? Would we make a different decision if we stopped thinking simply about the pitfalls or the potential ways this decision could fail?” And then question seven, ”How does this decision embody a compassionate approach to treating and researching cancer?”
So you can see here, all these questions, if you ask all of them, they might lead to a tweak of approach. They might lead to saying, "You know what? We didn't think about that at all. We need to incorporate this in."
And ultimately, you're going to have, I don't know, maybe two or three of those questions be more applicable than others to the work that you're doing or the specific decision you're making. But as you can see this, we're forcing people to think through, I think in an interactive way and in a really valuable way, how something fits with the brand and how it might be changed or morphed to better reflect the brand and to better live out the brand. So ultimately, I think with the brand filter, there are three things to remember. Open-ended questions are best. You notice with a lot of those questions, we're not asking someone to do a yes or no answer. We're asking them to think through to an answer and have to really come up with something more in depth.
And then, be brief when possible. Short questions without caveats are more effective than long questions. So we want to make people think hard about the answers, not the questions. And then, I think the other thing to remember is that these questions are only questions. So you have to make sure that people ... If you want people to adopt the brand filter, you're going to have to remind them to use it or else it's just going to be discarded. So super helpful tool, this brand filter. Again, five to seven questions that really explore and help people as they make decisions, big or small, to ensure they stay aligned with the brand.
So that's the first tool that I recommend you think about if you're trying to empower your teams to live out the brand. The second tool is this concept of branded behaviors. And this sounds kind of weird, maybe—if you've never thought about it—but branded behaviors are really a set of behaviors that help people live out the brand. It's telling people these are some of the key behaviors we want to express to share the brand with folks. And the reason these are valuable is because, at most, people are likely to only remember the essence of your brand. People who aren't thinking about it every day within your company, I'm talking about your internal employees, so we need to give them some practical touchpoints that they can live out. And I want to talk through another example from a client, because I think it's more helpful to do that than anything else.
So for this client, we developed five branded behaviors. They're pretty simple and straightforward, but they were ways for people to immediately be able to start living out the brand without a ton of effort. The first one was called Who What Why. And Who What Why was really a simple reminder to folks that we had built for them these clear, succinct explanations of who the client was, what they did, and why they mattered. And so, we wanted them to always be remembering when someone asks who you are, who are you? Who is the client? They come back with a succinct answer. When someone asks what they do, everyone's saying the same thing back. When somebody asks, "Why does this even matter?" They're responding in the same way, because we know that it takes 7 to 10 times for someone to start even absorbing something when you're communicating it. And to repeat it back, it takes probably another 7, 10 times of hearing it the same way. So by sharing maybe one- or two-sentence answers to the questions of who are we, what do we do, and why do we matter? And then, giving it to everyone to use, maybe on a bookmark, maybe on something they're going to put next to their computer, it will give you the opportunity to start building that unaided recall. So that was the first branded behavior. Please just use our who, what, why answers when you're talking to folks. Pretty simple and straightforward, right?
The second branded behavior was designing meetings guided by the brand essence and promise. So this brand was focused on this idea of clarity. And so, as we were designing meetings, we asked people to ask three questions when they were putting together an agenda for their meeting.
Just three simple questions. How can I increase clarity with this meeting or presentation? Will people walk away from this experience with a greater sense of clarity about the topic or issue we're focusing on? And, What's the concrete next step that I will leave people with after this meeting? These are pretty good questions for any meeting, but they allow us to get focused on the essence and it allows a team member who doesn't think about the brand that often to get focused in on the essence and put it into action inside their meeting. And these folks were doing a ton of meetings across the company and with clients. And so, this was a great opportunity to get the brand in real life in people's experiences.
The third branded behavior was really this concept of integrating the brand promise into presentations. So we asked everyone to add the brand promise into every presentation in a natural way, at least one time, so that we're visually reminding people that the organization is about helping people find a clear path forward.
So the brand promise was a clear path forward and a complex and constant change, amid complex and constant change. So we asked them to add this into each presentation. Again, simple, straightforward, easy behavior to adopt, but something that they can put to life or put to work immediately.
The fourth behavior was called Aim to Help. This is providing practical advice even if it doesn't lead to a sale. So this is specifically for their sellers, for people who are consulting on things. And so, we said, "This is something that we're going to live out. Always be providing help, even if it doesn't lead to a sale. We're going to be serving, not selling. We're going to be all about problem solving. We're going to be relentlessly helpful regardless of the consequences."
Again, simple thing to do, but it's something that reflects the brand. And then finally, when we're thinking about clarity, emphasizing the outcomes and impact on real people, not about the technology that these people were implementing and selling. So we wanted to remind people that the organization is all about the people. The projects that we work on have real impact in real people's lives. And so, we want to take time to understand the human impact that will be an outcome of the project and refer back to it constantly through the life cycle of the implementation.
And so, really being focused on that human side, I think it's relevant now to most organizations as they're thinking about how they roll out an AI solution, et cetera, how do we focus on people and the outcomes for real people? So these five branded behaviors were really helpful for this organization to start living out their brand. They were who, what, why, right? Meeting with clarity, including their promise in every presentation, aiming to help, and really being focused on real people. This isn't rocket science. It's about creating consistency and easy kind of touch points for your team to be able to get inside of the brand and start living it out.
So far we've talked about a brand filter, and we've also talked about branded behaviors. Now, this third tool to empower people to live out the brand is pretty essential if you want people to use those branded behaviors and that brand filter, and that's doing ongoing brand training. And I really recommend that you do it quarterly and you provide people with food or something. If you're not in a remote context, if you're in a remote context, you have to think a little bit more creatively about how to get people in the door. But the fact of the matter is that repetition matters. So people will be very excited about the brand for the first few months. Then only the brand team, communications, MarCom will be thinking about it, and you need to create these intentional touchpoints for people to come back and think about the brand.
Maybe it's in all hands meetings, maybe it's in department meetings if your organization is large, or team meetings but thinking about what are those touch points. But then also, offering some kind of quarterly brand training, either to the full company—if you're a smaller company—or to teams if you're large. This is essential to remind people about the brand and spend time probably walking through the branded behaviors and the brand filter, but also doing a little exercise that I think is simple and straightforward, but helpful. So as you're thinking about your brand training, you want to think about how do we keep this an intimate enough experience that people are going to be willing to share? And this is why I mentioned either doing it with a company if you're smaller, but also probably for most people doing it in small teams. And so, it'll allow for some intimacy for people to talk to each other, et cetera.
And so, the first thing that I want you to do if you're going to do this brand training is to spend some time talking about the essence. Remind them about what your organization is all about, why it matters, how it builds differentiation for you in the market, the memory you're trying to curate whenever someone externally—whether they be a customer or a stakeholder or someone who just interacts with you, what is the memory you want to leave behind with them? And then I want you to have people break into groups for 15 minutes and talk about how they could live out the essence in their job and just brainstorm. Give them big sheets of white paper or big sheets of paper to write a bunch of ideas down, but have them talk about how do you make this essence work in your specific job? Because we want them to be thinking about, "How do I live out the essence with my coworkers? How do I live out the essence in my actual job description, the work I'm doing every day, and how do I live it out with customers if I'm interacting with customers, or with partners or with whoever it may be?"
And so, have them brainstorm, have them talk about how they can live out their essence. There's going to be aha moments of people as people think about, "I didn't know how this was applicable to me at all, but now I have a whole new way to interact with my coworkers."
And then, after you've done that for 15 minutes, maybe these groups are three to four people, have people come back and share with the group what they learned. And this is where that intimacy, intimate enough to share is important, because we want people to be able to talk freely, but I think people sharing their breakthroughs or their aha moments is contagious and gets people excited. And so, you're going to have people really excited. This is maybe 30 minutes into this meeting. This is why I think you can do it over lunch or do it over a short break. And then, I mean, I think you should ask people to commit to another person in that meeting, someone that they talk to each day about one thing that they'll do in the next week to live out the brand. And then, create a touch point in a week where people can share.
Maybe it isn't obligatory, but you could set up a forum where people could share what they did to live out the brand or people could report back what they saw others do living out the brand, so there can be a feedback loop. And then, leave them with some cool swag and people love that sort of stuff. So brand training doesn't have to be a ton of things. It needs to be intensely practical. So we're going to remind them about the branded behaviors. We're going to give them the brand filter and then we're going to ask them to think creatively about how can they live out the brand themselves. And come up with the ideas, because people are going to own the ideas much more if they come up with them.
So do this once, but then don't just do it once, do it quarterly, create a repetition, because people as they think about the brand more are going to think more deeply about how they can live it out. And then, also the new people who come in are going to need to be inculcated in the brand. This isn't something you can let up. So we've talked about the brand filter. We've talked about branded behaviors, quarterly brand training.
The final tool I want you to think about is messaging themes that map to the brand. This is probably the most difficult thing to pull off, and it's also the thing that may get siloed the most into marketing and communications, but I'm hoping it can be thought of kind of more broadly. So we focused almost fully on cultural items so far, but now let's talk about the storytelling aspects of the brand. It's tempting to think that we're going to be on brand all the time, but this isn't the case. It's hard to be on brand all the time without a ton of planning.
And it's tempting to be on brand when you're sharing a boring news update or something that is seemingly small or newsy, and you're like, "How does this really relate to the brand?"
So our solution is what I call messaging themes. If you're a marketing and communications person, you are used to this, but I am talking about it here just to remind us that for messaging themes, you should identify three to five themes for maybe a six-month period or for a year that are deeply connected to your brand. So for A Brave New, even though it's kind of cliché, one of our brand values is this concept of being brave. And so, a theme we might have is maybe linking back communications to how to be brave in healthcare branding, because we believe people should be willing to stand up and say something that matters. And so, we want to have that theme going on.
And then, we want to make sure that no matter what the communication effort, whether it's a big announcement, you're facilitating a workshop, maybe there's your CEOs giving a speech somewhere, or you're just doing something as simple as posting a blog or a social media post. We want to make sure that whatever that communication piece is, it could even be an internal training, right? Because I don't want it to be just siloed into marketing communications. We want to make sure each of these efforts maps to a theme. And this is going to require some time and effort. It's going to require some focus and probably some editorial planning, but kind of tying each thing that just seems like snippets of information into a theme and working and weaving the brand into that theme will boost recall over time.
And so, that's something that probably merits a whole podcast in and of itself. So I'm not going to go too much further in depth here, but if you want to talk about it with me more, I'm happy to chat and dive into this, because it is really important and really, I think, valuable. So as we close out here, I'm going to summarize a little bit of what we talked about. I hope you've found this helpful. I hope you've discovered some tools that you can use to empower your team. And if you want to talk more about any of these, not just the messaging themes or dig into how they can be useful for your brand, really reach out to me on LinkedIn. You can reach out to me via email, Josh@ABraveNew as well. I'd be happy to talk to you and discuss how you design something that empowers your specific team to live out your brand.
And really, I'm looking forward to having you join us again next week. I'm going to have a really rich discussion with Gail Findlay-Shirras of Harrison Healthcare, and we're going to be talking about healthcare kind of in the Canadian context. But I think the real message is less about how do you market a Canadian healthcare brand, and more about how you build a brand that has resonance, consistency, and really is tightly integrated into the operations of an organization, so people feel the brand from both the tip of the marketing spear all the way through to when someone walks into the clinic, to when they're getting their labs done, any of that sort of thing. Super fascinating conversation. I think you're going to really enjoy it. And so, with that, I'll say see you next week. I'm looking forward to having you along for the next episode. Thanks.
Thanks for listening to this episode of A Brave New Podcast. Go to abravenew.com for more resources and advice on all things brand. If you enjoyed this episode, show us some love by subscribing, rating, and reviewing A Brave New Podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts. A Brave New Podcast is created by A Brave New, a branding agency in Seattle, Washington, that crafts bold and memorable healthcare brands. Our producer is Rob Gregerson.