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November 2008

Branding for DCs

According to the American Marketing Association, branding is “a name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers.”

How is branding useful to DCs?

In most markets, DCs compete for many of the same patients, and many use the same advertising themes. In order to grow your practice, you have to stand out amongst the competition. Creating a unique and unified brand is the best way to differentiate your practice from others.

Brand management is the process of creating and maintaining a brand and taking a step-by-step approach to maintaining uniformity is key. When the public is able to easliy identify your practice based on your unique theme, you have achieved brand recognition.

Before you begin to develop your brand, you have to identify your target market.  While many DCs maintain a wide target market, it can also be beneficial to narrow your focus. The geographic location of your practice often dictates what market would be best for your practice to appeal to and it is becoming increasingly popular for DCs to model their brand around a certain niché. Once you have identified your market, you can create your brand.

In creating your brand, the individual parts need to be masterminded together to ensure uniformity.  The major parts include brand identity, brand personality, and brand design. All these together aim to deliver your message clearly, confirm your credibility, and connect to your target patients emotionally.

Brand identity is defined as how the brand owner wants their target market to percieve the brand.  While each of the other parts of the brand are specific, this sets the overall theme of the brand.

Once the brand identity is established,

the brand personality and brand design are next.  Brand personality allows you to achieve diferentiation by attributing human characteristics to the entire theme of a brand.  In the case of DCs, good personality traits would include thoroughness or being particularly sympathetic to a patients needs, but these should be based on your target market.

Brand design should then be directly linked to the brand design in order to unify the theme of the brand. There are many aspects that go into brand design including actual symbols, colors and text or typeface.

One of the best, recent examples of a unique and effective brand was the theme behind Senator Obama´s recent successful presidential campaign. His campaign team was able to develop a design that conveyed a clear visual message and was extremely consistent in presenting the message.

One specific part of his campaign that was very effective was the typeface he used, called Gotham.  Brian Collins, a branding expert, explains why Gotham was so effective. “It has a blunt, geometric simplicity, which usually means words feel cold and analytical, but it also feels warm. It´s substantial, yet friendly. Up-to-date yet familiar.”

While the typeface Senator Obama used during his campaign greatly helped to convey his message, it was the unified theme that allowed his message to be easily understood.  Creating a brand for your practice that is effective, requires creating a brand that is consistent and unified.

Once you have created your brand, implementing it into every aspect of your practice  allows your brand to grow and become easily recognizable.  Your target market can then associate your brand with your practice and you will begin to stand out among DCs that you compete with.

Blake Gill is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to ChiroEco.com. He can be contacted at blakefgill@gmail.com.

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