Add A Little Color To Your Organization

The next time your organization meets, look around the room. What do you notice? What kinds of clothing do you see? Is there a variety of color in everyone’s attire? Or is everyone clad in neutral shades and dark suits? How about the advertising collateral? What do you see? Is there variety? Are there bold splashes of color? Or do the materials convey the familiar roster of physicians, facility infrastructure, and medical equipment?

 

If the answer to the latter is yes, you should know that that’s o.k. It’s just the nature our industry. It’s reflective of what has made us comfortable. Healthcare is a serious business: we improve quality of life; we help people recover from illness; quite often, we save lives. This fact introduces a bit of a paradox: if we are saving lives, shouldn’t we celebrate? After all, in order to encourage people to get well, don’t we bring colorful flowers and balloons? Shouldn’t we be willing to introduce the same joyousness into our marketing materials? Perhaps it’s time to liven up.

 

In order to capture this sense of celebration, this feeling of hope, healthcare marketing doesn’t need to be wild, just a little bit different than it’s been in the past. It’s time to evolve the presentation of our communications—time to begin incorporating fresh ideas and compelling graphics. When a concept is well developed, when it conveys the core of a message with an unexpected image or an arresting turn of phrase, it becomes interesting, entertaining… memorable.

 

When you’ve identified a new initiative and need to develop a communication plan, take a step back; dig deeper; contemplate the key messaging anew; and determine what is most important to the audience. Why are we communicating this to them? How will they benefit from this initiative? Engaging in this type of critical thinking will provide a strong foundation for the creative development—it will give us the confidence to eschew the all-too-familiar image of a physician shaking hands with an executive in a blue suit. From there, we can begin to be more creative in our thinking. We can be bold enough to present our initiative by using everyday (non-medical) imagery that our audience will relate to. We can meld pictures and text in order to portray the initiative in an intuitive way—in a way that has sensory appeal, that immediately shows the audience how the initiative will benefit them. 

 

As always, it’s important to take stock of your spending and analyze where you’re allocating your marketing dollars so you can lay out a successful and effective marketing plan. For each communication initiative, determine an executable roadmap that you’ll deliver in a way your audience will appreciate. Then, your big idea will easily fit within the framework of the communications strategy and it won’t feel so wild.