Heart and Vascular Brand Building Campaign
Background:
SOMC was in the process of coming fully on-line with their heart and vascular services. While they did not offer open heart, they did offer many other services. Robbie Kemper helped them decide to focus on what services were available. The stories were told through the experiences of patients who had positive outcomes. Doctors were involved in the story telling as well to help introduce them to the community.
Challenge:
How to market and advertise a service line that was evolving and adding services each quarter.
SOMC had a great story to tell in terms of patients’ successes. However, the full story of open heart was a full year away. So the decision was made to take the high road and not announce whatwas yet to come, but instead to focus on successes and the positive outcomes the patient volunteers had at SOMC.
KemperConnection:
After Robbie assessed the situation, a plan was developed to tell the story. He chose to film in the working medical environment. A spare cath lab became the sound studio for conducting interviews. Robbie worked closely with his key crew and staff to film in the testing lab, rehab and the emergency department.
KemperConnect Recommendation:
Several volunteers were identified by the front line caregivers. The volunteers had interacted with heart and vascular services in a variety of ways including: testing, rehab, emergency room, stents and vascular surgery. Robbie was able to pre-interview some patients ahead of the filming. Several patients were not available so Robbie met them “on set”. Because of the skill he had developed interviewing patients, the interviews went very well.
To differentiate the Heart campaign from the Cancer campaign, at a quick glance Robbie developed the “my heart belongs to SOMC” tag line as well as the paper cut out heart that the volunteers held up a the end of the commercials.
Results:
The campaign proved to be well received. The testimonial approach was well tested in the Cancer Campaigns.
Through focus groups subsequent to the campaign, we discovered that the choice of patients and their unique stories resonated with the target consumers. Several participants commented on knowing people in the SOMC commercials and vouched for their honesty. Other participants defended the people in the commercials and their stories and chose the creative approach Robbie invented the competition’s use of high-tech “scary looking” visuals.
Beth