Episode 97: Kicking off 2026

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.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

What’s ahead in 2026 including healthcare branding trends, emerging challenges, and a glimpse into the podcast topics we’ll dive into throughout the year.
A preview of the guests that will be joining the podcast on a weekly basis.
How healthcare branding and marketing intersect to create memorable, impactful organizations.
Strategies for building and maintaining trust with patients in a complex healthcare landscape.
Ways scrappy brands succeed with limited budgets while delivering exceptional brand experiences.
How to move beyond descriptive branding to inspirational storytelling that highlights what makes a brand unique.
The power of focused, engaged brand experiences that inspire audiences and create loyal brand advocates.

Additional resources:

Transcript

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, I want to welcome you to the launch of A Brave New Podcast for 2026. After a couple years of more infrequent publishing, we're jumping back into the podcast with renewed vigor this year, and I'm super excited to be delivering the weekly episodes to you.

Most episodes, we'll be interviewing guests, and sometimes I'll tackle a specific solo topic, but as I say in the intro every week, the focus of the podcast will be on branding in the healthcare space. And within each episode, we'll really be exploring what it means to craft bold memorable brands and, also, what it means to curate them because not everyone gets the chance to refresh their brand every year, nor should they take that chance. But everyone in an organization and, really, regardless of what role they're in, is working on building their brand each and every day.

And naturally, we'll also talk a lot about marketing, as well. Because I believe that—although branding is far more than marketing and it is a foundational DNA-type part of the organization that should influence everything within the organization—there are really natural intersections with and overlap to how a brand is positioned, in the way that it expresses itself in marketing. So, many of our conversations will be with directors of marketing and CMOs who are doing the hard work of figuring out, "How do we express our brand in a way that connects with the people that we need to talk to, our customers, the prospective customers, even people in the general public? How do we build something that's going to be remembered amongst all the competition that we're competing against?"

There are a number of themes that we'll be talking about over the course of the next year, but some of the main ones will really be what it takes to build trust in the healthcare space, how to differentiate in a crowded health tech space, what hospitals and specialty care providers can do to stand out against large competitors. And finally, we'll also feature recent rebrands of note, even if we didn't work on the project, like a conversation we're going to have with PointClickCare in a few weeks. Ultimately, my goal with the show is to expose our listeners, you, to the thinking of other smart people, elevate the conversation about healthcare branding, and, ultimately, build a community where everyone can sharpen their skills.

So, here's what you can expect each week. We'll have in-depth conversations with smart people working in the healthcare space to build their own brands, sometimes a CMO, sometimes a branding expert, or maybe even a smart consultant. There'll be some conversations with my team, who are deeply experienced in this work, as well. I'll do the occasional solocast. And then we'll also have related conversations about key things that are integral to maintaining trust in a strong brand, like my conversation with Hank Lander from HubSpot last year about how to leverage their sensitive data functionality and use software that's going to maintain trust with patients. Or, my upcoming conversation with Kevin Gemeroy about how to make sure your IT is set up to safeguard your customers' data, again, making sure that technology and process can aid in maintaining a strong brand and maintaining trust.

Now, today, I'm not going to do a full episode about a specific topic. I mostly was excited to share with you about what's upcoming and what you can expect, but I want to leave you with five things to think about. And these are key topics that I'll be keeping my eye on in the healthcare space in the coming year and also exploring with guests and maybe even a solocast on the pod.

The first thing is, really, the relationship between AI and trust in healthcare. I think we're really at an inflection point in the health tech space and the healthcare space, in general, where almost everyone is trying to add AI into their work, and patients and individuals are more and more wary of the impact that AI is having and of a machine making key decisions for them. So, this is something that's going to continue to bubble up over the coming year, continue to be involved in almost any conversation, and we're going to continue to explore it more deeply.

The second thing is, which healthcare brands are willing to move beyond description to inspiration in how they represent and position themselves? I think, oftentimes, we have people in the space who are really ... How do I say it? They describe who they are, but they aren't willing to go out on a limb and try to do something really special. I think the brands that will be willing to go out on a limb to move beyond just talking about what they're doing but really sharing their secret sauce, sharing what makes them special, and not being ashamed of but being proud of it are really going to stand out and be more effective than the others.

The third thing is how scrappy brands are succeeding. More and more, marketers, branders are being asked to do more things with less budget, and it's those who can think scrappy and do more with less that are going to be more effective. So, we want to spend time digging into, how do you be a scrappy brand that can get a ton done while also having a great product, having a great brand experience, a great brand expression? So, we'll dig into that more as we go.

The fourth thing is, which healthcare brands are trying to meet patients where they are, as premiums skyrocket? This is kind of connected to, I think, the relationship between AI and trust or maybe more just connected with the concept of trust, actually. That we have seen, recently, ACA subsidies expire. Hopefully, something will happen there, but as a result of that, people are paying a lot more for their healthcare than they have been in recent years or will be in the coming year. This, naturally, is going to make people, I think, even more wary about healthcare and, fairly or unfairly, about everyone involved in that field, even though it's really insurance companies and the federal government that are causing the increase in premiums. But we need to look at this and talk about, how do we build bridges to patients and meet them where they're at when their costs are really rising rapidly without any corollary rise in the amount of money that they have in their wallet?

And then, finally, the fifth theme that I'll be thinking about and we'll be talking about on the podcast is where focus and inspiration wins. The best brands in the healthcare space and any other space win by having a focused message, a message that inspires people, that invites them to become fans and engage, that invites them to become part of the brand experience. And we want to highlight those stories, those brands that are doing a great job of being focused, disciplined, and meeting their audiences exactly where they are and inviting them to become part of that experience.

And with that, I'm out. I'll see you next week with our first full episode of the year, featuring A Brave New senior designer, Adam Taylor, in a conversation about how branding helps healthcare startups fundraise, sell, and scale. Talk then.

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.