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.
Welcome back to the show. Today, we're going to spend some time exploring how a solid brand multiplies marketing potential for health tech brands. And to do that, I want to start out by telling a story that is seemingly unrelated, but I promise you it makes sense. And this one goes back to college. I walk into my freshman English class, and I see a chair on top of the teacher's desk. So at this point, I look around and I see that everyone's a bit confused and 10 minutes later, our 60-year-old professor hops onto the desk and jumps into the chair.
He begins to read. "His bushy mustache bounces along with the pros, and tears well up into his eyes." And something funny happens here. He captures our attention, and we can't take our eyes away. We can't stop listening. And he had made the Iliad come alive to a bunch of college freshmen. Now, Dr. Reinsma was a brilliant professor, but I had a lot of brilliant profs in college—just like I'm sure you may have had brilliant professors or brilliant teachers. So I always ask myself about him, why do I remember him so clearly? Dr. Reinsma is, at the end of the day, a great example of two things. First, the power of memory and second, the importance of memory.
Memory is transformative. And I think, at the end of the day, the way I connect this into a health tech brand is that it's something that each and every one of us who are in marketing or are leading a health tech brand need to think about for the company that we represent or lead—because each of these health tech brands is only as important as the memory it leaves in its customer's mind. Just like Dr. Reinsma left a cemented memory in my mind that I remember clearly 20 years later, we need to be working to create a similar memory in our customers’ minds for the brands that we lead.
And in my mind, when I think about brand, many of you have heard of the term brand essence or that central idea at the center of your brand. I believe it's all locked up in memory. Your brand essence is a memory you leave with people, and it multiplies the impact of everything that you do downstream of it. And how does this relate to multiplying marketing potential? Well, I think we often can conflate brand and marketing together, and the temptation when marketing isn't producing an adequate result, though, is to double down on optimization and work on incrementally increasing results. Or another temptation is to think maybe our tactic mix is wrong, and we need to adjust our tactic mix or maybe our frequency isn't correct, and we need to adjust our frequency and get in front of people more.
I want to offer you today an opportunity to do something different the next time you're seeing that your marketing efforts aren't producing the right results or the results that you need. I want to offer you a case or an argument or even just something to think about by saying that perhaps maybe it would make more sense rather than moving downstream and looking at tactics or frequency or optimization. Moving upstream and asking the bigger question: Is your brand evoking the right memory that's going to drive the results you need? And if not, if you aren't leaving the right memory in your customers' minds, how can you adjust it so that you are? So let's dive into that.
There's a specific client story that really started all this for me and that was with a client that was in the consulting business. They really wanted to put their business on autodrive, right? They wanted to make some money in their sleep per se, the dream that all of us have who are working in services. And this was probably, I don't know, about 10 years ago before I was fully niched and working full-time in the healthcare space, but they decided they were going to launch an online store with some products. Now these products are baked with brilliant strategy. They worked on making sure that the strategy that they brought to their consulting business was baked into the products. The products worked if you used them. There was nothing wrong with the product, but they launched this store. They worked with us to do that. We spent 90 days promoting it. The marketing was good. The marketing was excellent, but sales barely moved despite getting a ton of eyes on the store.
And we kept examining what was going on and talking through what was going on and ultimately came to a realization that people who knew them or thought of them as consultants, not as a place to buy a product. Their brand was strong, incredibly strong, strong enough to build a successful consulting business that goes on and lives on till this day. It just wasn't the right memory for the new thing being sold. Their brand only made them memorable as a consulting business because they were brilliant at selling the two principles and the value that they brought, but that didn't translate into products. No amount of checkout optimization was going to bridge that gap. No amount of adjusting the frequency or having new AI targeting was going to bridge that gap. They were going to need to step back and think about the brand before they could move into the new product space.
I've watched the same pattern play out with clients ever since and as we move fully into the healthcare space and in working with health tech and healthcare providers, the specifics change but the pattern doesn't. Without the strong brand foundation or the upstream brand framework, the downstream of marketing that's going to drive results can't come to be.
So you may be thinking at this point, and I think most of my listeners are savvy, but in case you haven't thought about this deeply before, what do I mean by brand versus marketing and why does this distinction matter? Let's do a quick definition of that before we dive into the bulk. It's really the important, I think, next point for the rest of the episode. And I'm going to talk about brand as being separate from marketing because at the end of the day it is. A brand is the essence or the memory that you're curating in your customers' minds. It's the thing they think about once they stop talking to you, when they walk out of the meeting room, when they finish up the interaction with you after they've read your emails, after they've interacted with you. It's that big upstream idea. It's kind of the core of what you're trying to sell.
Oftentimes I tell people: brand is what someone answers when you ask them what they're really selling, not their product, what's the idea that they're selling. That's what your brand is. It's upstream. It's kind of the core value behind what you're doing. Marketing is different. So I know it's tempting to conflate the two, but marketing is different. It's the set of tactics and strategies that you use to get in front of people to influence their actions. It's the vehicle that you use to convey the brand. It's a downstream thing. They aren't the same thing.
So while one is kind of that core idea, the core memory behind what you're selling, the other is the method for conveying that memory to people and ultimately driving them to take action. So treating them the same is how I think companies can end up trying to optimize their way out of a brand problem—because they think they've grown to a certain point with tactics and efforts, marketing efforts with a strong sales team. But sometimes they arrive at the point where the brand is really the issue.
And if we think about optimization, I think most people are familiar, but let's define it in case you aren't. We always have people that are learning here and that's an excellent thing, but optimization is the work of kind of incrementally improving results via testing and experimentation. It works. ABN uses it all the time with clients, but the reason why I say you can't optimize your way out of a brand problem is that optimization really operates on the marketing layer. It's about improving the performance of specific tactics and strategies. The brand layer sits above it and kind of determines how high marketing can go. If you have a strong brand, it's going to multiply the impact of your marketing efforts and have a high multiplier, a high impact. Every marketing dollar that you spend is going to be working towards disseminating and curating that strong brand and strong brand memory, which will compound to increase performance and increase conversions.
Well, if you have a weak brand or a lower multiplier, the same marketing dollar lands in a less effective way and ultimately drives lower results. So if we're talking about multiplier and brand, a strong brand being a high multiplier, let's talk about why in the health tech space a brand multiplier matters more, even though I think often brand isn't thought of as much. We're very product-focused in health tech, right? But I would make the argument that compared to B2C, brand matters a bit more in health tech than in other B2C areas.
So to talk about why this multiplier matters more in health tech and healthcare than other places,let's first think about maybe a really simple B2C product, maybe toothpaste. It's a low stakes bet, right? You don't need your brand to work really hard for someone to say, "I want to have good breath and I need to brush my teeth." And ultimately it doesn't work. You need to get brand recognition. I think of Crest when I close my eyes and think about toothpaste, or maybe I think about Tom's, that's the one I use every night. And I'm going to grab that because that's something I'm familiar with when I go to the grocery store or when I order it on Amazon or get it from Target wherever you get your toothpaste. But the risk isn't very high, right? If I don't like the toothpaste, if I think the specific flavor of spearmint isn't to my exact preference, I can go ahead and spend a few more dollars and get another tube of toothpaste. The stakes are pretty low.
But if we shift over to the health tech marketplace, a health system signing with a health tech vendor has a lot more on the line. They’ve got to think about clinical workflows and workflows throughout their organization. They have to think about compliance, HIPAA compliance. How are they going to keep patient data safe? They need to think about patient outcomes. They need to think about profit margin and that's from a company perspective. The individual buyers and a buying committee may be thinking about their own reputation or their standing within the organization. They may be thinking about: Does this purchase support or allow me to advance my career? So not about standing, but what does it even mean for my career going forward? Some people spend their whole career implementing healthcare technology in their organizations, which isn't a bad thing, but it means the stakes are incredibly high.
And so from that perspective, while brand is important for me to notice the tube of toothpaste that I like, my Tom's toothpaste and to grab it, for a health tech vendor, it's not enough to say this thing works. They need to believe in your brand to purchase it because there is a lot on the line that has to go right if they're going to make a decision and go with you. Or else there'll be consequences for their organization, consequences for them in their position, and even consequences for them in their career. And so all of a sudden we're seeing why this multiplier of a strong brand is important because you have to do a lot of work to convince someone to go with you versus the other. I think there are three reasons why the multiplier ... So you have a lot of, I think things hang in the balance in here. There's a reason why we have to have a strong brand, but at the same time, building a brand is especially hard in health tech.
And I think this is why many people have chosen to focus so hard on their product and not as much on their brand. And there are three main reasons I think building the brand multiplier, building the ability to accelerate and multiply the impact of your marketing efforts with a strong brand is difficult. First, your audience is sophisticated and skeptical. CMOs, operators, clinicians, compliance teams, risk teams, procurement teams, they have been pitched by everyone. They know the playbook. They're tired of being just pitched. And in each segment even, there's a standard playbook. So providers, you need to emphasize patient-centric care. Research institutes may be highly breakthroughs. But in health techs specifically like what we're talking about, we talk about how we're integrating AI. And it's, we're going to be agentic, and we're going to have a huge impact and drive savings and increase the value of the care that's provided, and help providers focus on the right things.
None of this is wrong. These are all great things, but they are not memorable. Everyone's saying them. I could look, pull up—I think I've done this in the past with Brad, our content director—pull up 200 sites and you could scroll through them, and they all say the same thing. They're all some sort of AI-integrated tool. They're all going to transform how we do some portion of health tech. They're going to give doctors more time with patients. They're going to save money. They're going to improve outcomes. There's not much memorable there.
And so going out with that same message that everyone else has, it's really straightforward. And then approaching pretty sophisticated operators, CMOs, clinicians, risk teams, compliance teams, procurement teams with that same message that everyone else has in an environment where we know from studies like the Edelman Trust Barometer, the trust is pretty low right now. It's going to be hard to win unless you have a really strong brand to multiply the impact of your marketing efforts. Because otherwise a skeptical audience can't be convinced via better frequency, via an easier form to fill out, or via even some different tactics telling the same story that they don't believe to begin with.
So let's focus first on maybe three ways that a weak brand can pull down the impact of your marketing. This is really, I mean, this section is more to help you diagnose what kind of challenge you might be facing so that you can then start thinking about how to build a more differentiated brand. We'll talk about how to strengthen the multiplication or the amplification effect of your brand a little bit further. So the first way that a brand can expose itself as weak and not matching the memory is when what you're selling doesn't match the memory people have of you. So I think a perfect example of this is like the consultant I just talked about with the online store, people that thought of them as consultants, they wanted to sell products. People said, "Nah, we want you. We purchase you when we decide to move forward." And ultimately, what they were selling didn't match the memory that their customers had and so that didn't work.
Another example of this is a healthcare SaaS client that we worked with a while back who had really one big product. Everyone knew them for this product, everyone loved them for this product, and everyone identified them as this product's brand. But all of a sudden, someone decided, "You know what? We need to build up a separate corporate brand and it needs to be ..." And it had already always existed but a little bit in the background, but all of a sudden they decided we need it to be prominent and we need that brand to be the one that we sell in a B2B space. We're going to go into hospitals and we're going to sell using this brand. And as you can probably guess, the well-known product brand, if they had run with it fully, which they have done since, thankfully, it would help them grow in leaps and bounds.
But when they went out and started selling, doing all the right things, decent marketing, strong messaging, an intelligent team, they couldn't get traction with their corporate name because no one knew who they were. They had a misplaced memory. People remembered them as something different and weren't ready to buy. We ultimately went over and over with them about how we need to optimize the funnel and do different things, but the fix wasn't to optimize their marketing. The fix was to step back and say, "You know what? We are fighting a battle we can't win. What if we switched the whole company identity to our product identity and then went to market with that?" And when they did that, success followed. So if what you're selling doesn't match a memory people have of you, it’s going to be hard to make traction and use marketing to drive success.
The next way that a weak brand fails to help you multiply the impact of your marketing is when your brand isn't trusted enough to multiply. So this one has really had some serious teeth since, I don't know, since 2016, 2018. But Edelman, who tracks trust every year with their Edelman Trust Barometer, talks about how healthcare specifically is where ambient mistrust runs highest.
There are patients who won't follow the care plan because they don't trust the system that has designed this care plan. A provider maybe won't switch EHR vendors because the new one hasn't earned the trust to be, I think, able to own something that is so core to how they provide care. Maybe there's a payer who slow walks a health tech contract, not because the product is wrong, but because the brand hasn't done the work to feel like they have to have it. And in all three of these cases, marketing can deliver a message to these different buyers, to the patient, to the provider, to the payer who's slow walking the contract. But if the brand isn't strong enough to build trust and be believable and be authentic and have something that someone trusts, it's not going to drive action. No amount of optimization is going to close that gap.
The trust has to be earned by a brand having a clear memory, a clear essence that they're conveying and leaving behind with customers and a clear promise that they're making and keeping with every interaction and that is different from the rest of their competition. And this has to be done over time for trust to be earned. And then you're going to be able to see the impact of your marketing efforts based on the trust that you've earned with brand consistency. The third way your brand, a weak brand typically, can limit the ability of your marketing to multiply impact—or limit your ability to multiply the impact of your marketingto see an exponential growth through marketing is your brand just has an awareness problem. Maybe you have some rabid fans, but there's just not enough of them. The most common situation in which this happens is early to mid-stage health tech.
You have a real product, customers love it, you have significant TAM, but three years in, nobody outside the existing customer base has heard of them. And that's because marketing dollars are spent, but efforts just land and drive no results because no one spent time thinking about how is our product different? Why do our customers love us, and how is that different from everyone else in the market? And how do we tell a story that's differentiated so that when our marketing dollars are spent, when we're introducing ourselves, people say, "Ooh, these guys are different"? That's the thing that's holding up growth, not the demo form not being optimized correctly. I'm being a bit facetious here, but you get the point. The brand has to be built. The story has to be refined, the differentiation defined, baked in, and consistently told. The memory implanted in the market so that people can say, "Oh yeah, you're the health tech company who does X. I can't wait to work with you."
And at that point you're able to unleash your marketing and drive success through optimization, through frequency, through all the great tactics that come with marketing. So in summary, a weak brand fails to multiply the impact of marketing or limits the ceiling of your marketing when you're selling something that doesn't match the memory people have of you, when your brand isn't trusted enough to multiply that impact or when your brand isn't known well enough to multiply the impact of your marketing. So if we think about brand as a multiplier, the next logical question is to ask, what do we actually do to strengthen that multiplier?
A couple of things I'm going to kind of repeat, but it's the inverse of what we just talked about. You need to align what you're selling with the memory you built. So you need to think about, okay, we built a brand, it's built around this specific memory. So that was for the SaaS client I talked about previously, the answer was to kind of resolve back to the brand identity that people knew and loved and to sell that. So they resolved back to their product brand and sold that for maybe another health tech or couple of health techs that have integrated together. You need to think about what do our existing customers think of the both of us? And when they view the two of us together, how do they view our unique value and how do they think about us already so that we can be successful selling both of our products?
Oftentimes this is stepping back and maybe doing a little bit of brand strategy to ask questions about how do people already think about us and love us and then let's find more of those people. The next thing that you can do to strengthen your brand multiplier and multiply the impact of your marketing is to build trust and notoriety with consistent communication to the right people. To start doing this, I often think about two questions. I think about where do you already have a brand presence that you can grow without starting from scratch? So perhaps you want to build trust with people, let's think about where you have some existing brand precedence that you can use and build and grow upon. Choose that and work on it first and then also choose where one place is that your potential customers are that you aren't. And then consistently focus there and spend time and be present and be that trusted resource, that one who's always got the smart answer.
And in healthcare and health tech, I probably ask another category, which is where are the people that you're selling to—or the people who need to buy your product or benefit from your product—gathering? What associations, conferences, publications, communities? Are you visible in those channels and are you committed to doing the work of telling your differentiated brand story over and over and over again in those channels? It takes 9 to 10 times to convey a message and have it be repeated back to you or actually remembered and that's if you're doing it well. So make sure that you know the story you want to tell and that you're being consistent in those channels over and over again. And note from our experience and from what the trust barometer tells us again, referring back to that, we can include a link to my podcast earlier this year on this year's study, authenticity is the rate limiting factor here.
So people are really expecting dishonesty today so it's incumbent on you to overcome that expectation of honesty and be authentic. So that as you're showing up over and over again in the channels and in the places where your category or the people you're selling to are gathering, you are able to overcome their skepticism with authenticity. Flashy campaigns that don't match the actual experience get sniffed out fast. A brand has to be that core idea, that core memory. It needs to be baked into everything in your brand so that people recognize you, believe you, and ultimately trust you as they get to know you. So this is hard work. This is about consistency and spending time where the people you're selling to are gathering and consistently showing up, telling your story, and ultimately being relentlessly helpful while you're doing that, not just shouting out what you do from the rooftops.
And the third thing you probably need to do is you may need to think about what makes you unique. What is the actual memory at the core of your brand, that essence, that will multiply the impact? So I kind of went backwards here because I said you need to align what you're selling with the memory you've built to strengthen the multiplification effect of your brand. You need to build trust and notoriety by consistently conveying your brand. But if you don't know what your brand is, you don't know what makes you unique, you need to take a step back and do that first. And I'll give you a hint here that your service offerings don't have to be different from your competition for your brand to be strong.
You need to have a unique idea, essence, memory that you're conveying that is some unique approach that you have or the unique lens you take and look at the world from and that you use to design your products and your services. That impacts how your client remembers you and how you deliver your product to the world. Defining this essence is what makes the multiplier work. So without it, the previous two approaches or strategies we talked about won't work and, ultimately, your brand won't work. So I encourage you to start out by asking a couple questions. One is what makes us unique? Another is what are we really selling here? What's the core idea that we're selling? A third is about emotional resonance and that's a question of how will someone look at themselves differently when they purchase from us?
And then you can think about how's your product different from anyone else's product? What is the philosophy that undergirds our product that makes it different? Not the feature, not the functionality. So I think if you can define that memory, that essence, if you can convey it with trust, with authenticity, and consistency to the right people, and if you can align what you're selling to that brand essence or that brand memory, that's how you're going to multiply the impact of your marketing. Because once you've done that hard work, your marketing's going to land with the right people and it's going to drive results. Then things like optimization, frequency, using the right tactics matter because you have a story to tell that's going to actually have an impact.
Now, I think the hard question here is that people are saying, "Yeah, that's all well and good. What you're talking about makes sense. I know we need to work on our brand, but how do I get my leadership on board?" And I'm hoping some people from leadership are thinking about listening to this and nodding their heads. But my honest observation from doing this a lot is it can be difficult to build buy-in for introspective work like brand strategy when leadership is thinking about scaling and revenue, because slowing down isn't the first instinct. I think it's especially hard because the multiplication effect of brand is invisible until it's working. It's easy for me to say, "Stop and think about your branding. You’ll see exponential results down the road," but they can't see it until we get to the exponential results.
Marketing can produce dashboards that tell me if something's up and down, but brand produces something that's hard to measure until you can suddenly close deals faster, charge more, and have sales conversations that start with, "We've heard about you and we love your product and we love what you're all about." So three things that I would recommend that I've seen people do with success to build buy-in is first demonstrating how brand could facilitate consistency at scale, because I think people can understand the importance of consistency. I think also showing how a solidified brand could result in long-term value and increasing the long-term value of current customers. And then you could show also how maybe planned work won't slow down efforts that are already underway. So talk about how you can do the introspective work and keep running the marketing engine.
The really practical reality here, though, is that you're going to have to figure out what works for your leadership to build buy-in. Because, ultimately, the temptation to go into that working on the upstream brand work without the buy-in of your leadership isn't smart to do either. Because they need to be on board because they're going to set the tone for the whole organization. So as we close out this episode and as you hopefully are seeing eye to eye with me on the fact that sometimes there's a brand challenge not a marketing challenge and we need to step back and think about the brand. And if you're thinking, maybe this is something that even my company needs to be think about, I'd encourage you to ask yourself three questions.
One, what is the memory your company leaves in the minds of its customers? Two, if you asked your team what your company does, how many answers would you get? How many different answers would you get? And then three, are you confident your company could succeed even if your leading talent left? If you can answer the first one and your answers to the other two are satisfactory, then your multiplier is probably strong. You should spend time really trying to do the best marketing possible, optimizing, accelerating, figuring out where to spend your dollar the smartest. But if you can't answer the first question about what memory you leave or the team gives 10 different answers to the second question about what your company does, your marketing is probably actually being hindered by your brand. It's not multiplying the impact. It's multiplying by a fraction, making the impact worse.
Optimization, the best marketing strategy, is not going to work here. You've got to step back and think about your brand. So that's a simple diagnostic. Sit with it this week. Think about whether your organization has an upstream brand problem that's going to be the key to unlocking future growth for your marketing or if it's a downstream marketing problem. And then go forth and make changes. Be bold. So excited to see where you end up.
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.