At its core, brand-based marketing emphasizes the value of a specific brand, branded product or service. Brand marketing includes a range of terms and concepts, including brand awareness, brand recognition, brand image, brand equity, name awareness, name recognition, etc.
In the past, the primary goal of brand marketing was to create awareness and recall for the brand. The difference between awareness and recall can be best understood as awareness being the desired customer’s ability to remember having heard of the brand if the brand is identified, whereas recall is the ability of a desired customer to name your brand when the brand category (industry, niche, product, service) is identified generically.
Over recent decades, brand advertisers have increasingly realized that brand awareness and recall does not necessarily translate into sales and true brand equity. For that value to be established in the information age of the 21st Century, a brand must go beyond and deeper than awareness or recall. Today’s successful brands must resonate with their audiences. Brand resonance is the relationship and level of identification of the customer with a brand.
Healthcare practices tend to prefer this method of marketing because it focuses on the positive image and qualities of the practice and the practitioners. While brand-based marketing has obvious benefit and appeal, it also presents some limitations and challenges for most private practices.
Brand-based marketing challenges for private practices
Brand-based marketing requires massive amounts of exposure and repetition to establish and maintain awareness, recall and resonance with the desired audience. Those massive amounts of exposure and repetition usually translate into equally massive and consistent volume of marketing dollars in the practice marketing budgets.
Most private practices (like other small businesses) have limited budget resources for marketing – particularly by comparison to the large corporations that commonly use this method of marketing. This limitation represents a significant challenge to success in utilizing exclusively brand-based marketing methods.
The other major challenge is time required to develop brand equity through increased recognition, recall and resonance.
Consumers today are besieged and inundated with literally thousands of marketing and advertising messages every single day. In order to have any chance to break through the “clutter” of informational and promotional “noise” to achieve awareness, recall and resonance, the marketing effort must be consistent and constant. Even so, it takes time (and money) to achieve results, and it is difficult (if not impossible) to predict how much time it will take to get measurable results with exclusively brand-building strategies and tactics.
