You have just taken on a new role as a marketing manager for a new hospital in Ajo, Arizona. There is one other hospital in town, but it is 67.3 miles from the center of town, making it difficult for many residents to get to. The new hospital, Ajo Medical Center (AMC), will be much more accessible to a number of people who live further in town.
As you prepare to take on this role, watch the following video clips on branding and marketing. You will use the content of the videos to consider how the practices of Moving Brands might be applied to the marketing strategy of Ajo Medical Center.
Watch the following video case study clips: transcripts for these videos are in the attachment below
Chapter 1: Brand Vs. Branding.
Chapter 3: What’s the Difference Between Branding and Marketing?
The CEO of AMC has asked you to create a 4-6 page proposal in which you provide a competitive marketing entry strategy and a communication strategy and suggest marketing research tools for the new hospital.
Your proposal should include the following items:
A market analysis (SWOT or otherwise) to determine the best approach for market entry.
An overview of the marketing entry strategy you are proposing based on the information gathered in your analysis and concluding with how your hospital differentiates itself from the existing hospital in town.
An overview of the communication strategy you are proposing, also based on information gathered during your analysis.
A list of suggested marketing research tools and why those tools would be a good fit for use at AMC.
Keep in mind that this proposal is for the CEO, so the proposal should also:
Contain accurate and clearly written information.
Be professional in appearance.
Use headings.
Incorporate colors and/or graphs and charts as appropriate.
Use 4-5 sources to support your writing. Choose sources that are credible, relevant, and appropriate. Cite each source listed on your source slide at least one time within your assignment. For help with research, writing, and citation, access the library or review library guides.
A resources page at the end of the proposal, cited using the Strayer Writing Standards format. Note that these pages are not counted as part of the 4-6 page requirement.
This course requires the use of Strayer Writing Standards (SWS). The library is your home for SWS assistance, including citations and formatting. Please refer to the Library site for all support. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.
The specific course learning outcome associated with this assignment:
Propose competitive marketing entry strategies, communication strategies, and marketing research tools for health care organizations.
Requirements: 4 pages
CHAPTER 1 BRAND VS. BRAND VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
01:30
[WHAT IS A BRAND?]
01:33
BEN VOYER [continued]: What’s a brand for you?
01:34
DARREN BOWLES: For some people, it’s what it looks like.
01:36
[Darren Bowles, Executive Creative Director]
01:36
DARREN BOWLES [continued]: And for lots of people, that is all it will be. But I think from our perspective, it’s more about a promise. It’s a promise that you’re making, so either you’re making a promise about the performance of the product, the service of what it can do, or what it stands for. And I think what a brand isn’t, or often is lost, is when that promise is broken. So if you’ve said it can do something, if you said it represents something and it doesn’t, then the brand has lost its tarnish, and then, perhaps, it needs a change. So, something like BP, for instance, suffers because it promises to be beyond petroleum.
02:08
DARREN BOWLES [continued]: But a lot of what you see and what you have reactions to in the world are where the petroleum side is where it fails. So I think that’s where, perhaps, a brand sometimes breaks down.
02:18
HANNA LAIKKO: People are taking much more control about the brands and the products that they want to interact with.
02:23
[Hanna Laikko, Chief Operating Officer]
02:25
HANNA LAIKKO [continued]: So there’s much more ownership with the general public instead of the brand owner. So the brand is not actually truly owned by a company anymore. So you need to be able to kind of modulate between the truth, the story, the point of view of your company, and what the customers and consumers need. So being able to match between those things and continuously evolve and iterate the solutions is really important.
02:50
[BRAND VS BRANDING?]
02:53
DR. BEN VOYER: What’s the difference between a brand and branding, then?
02:56
DARREN BOWLES: The brand is a perception. I think it’s what people have experienced. So I think you have to create amazing experiences, because people will make a judgment upon that. It used to be that you could project this is what you should think of us, but I think people are far more savvy. I think their understanding of brands are more about the experience in and around it. So a brand lives in the mind of people, not in the mind of the business that’s portraying it. They hope to live up to what the business represents, and they hope everybody else sees that perception.
03:27
DARREN BOWLES [continued]: Branding, I think, is a terrible kind of verb, if you want, that people start to use where you force– I suppose, the physical nature of stamping of where branding originally came from, or the terminology came from. I think there’s still a behavior where people assume that you can force something to be something that it’s not through a branding process. I think what we try to live out is that we make real experiences. We deliver upon things and create, hopefully, perception in the mind of others something that’s truthful.
03:58
DARREN BOWLES [continued]: So I think the process that we go through is to try to bring those truths of the brands to life as they really do perform, rather than trying to force, or package, or wrap something that it isn’t.
04:08
HANNA LAIKKO: So branding, I suppose, the origin of the word comes from burning, making a mark of ownership. Obviously, in today’s context that’s not really how we understand branding anymore. My understanding of the word brand would be that it’s a total sum of the experiences that people have with an entity, whether it’s a product, or service, or company. For example, I would say that it encapsulates a story and an identity of that product so that people can understand what to expect, what the brand is about, and what’s different about it in relation to other products or services.
04:47
HANNA LAIKKO [continued]: I suppose, in relation to marketing or design, marketing often has the role of putting a promise or communicating the story in the marketplace. There has been design of the products or services and the experiences, then has to deliver on that promise. And I suppose from a more financial perspective as a business person, I see brand as an asset that has value. It can drive acquisition of customers, it can drive loyalty. It should be able to contribute to achieving price premium when you have similar products, and also employee engagement.
05:25
HANNA LAIKKO [continued]: So it should help you to get better people to work for your company.
CHAPTER 3 WHATS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BRANDING AND MARKETING VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
[WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BRANDING AND MARKETING?] For me, I think they serve a symbiotic relationship. They’re not two different things, and they shouldn’t be perceived as necessarily contrasting parts or pieces that need to be treated differently.
08:03
DARREN BOWLES [continued]: I think, as I said, I think a brand is a promise that you make. And I think that marketing is delivering on that promise, it needs to convey what it’s trying to achieve. As opposed to announcing to the world, this is the promise, this is what we represent. I think sometimes where, perhaps, brand and marketing come in competition to one another is where, perhaps, you market something that the brand can’t deliver upon, or what the service can’t deliver upon. And I think that’s where, perhaps, people have real problems, or they have an objection to a brand.
08:34
DARREN BOWLES [continued]: Because it is perceived, or it’s trying to make you perceive it in a different way, so I think that relationship– there’s what we do, and what we say we can do– need to work together. I think, otherwise, it feels more like spin, we’re all used to political spin. I think in terms of marketing and brand, we can see when something has being spun as a line to a person and not necessarily delivered upon. So they need to work together, and I think they need to come from that singular source where there’s an objective of the business that sets the scope of what it’s trying to say to the world.
09:04
DARREN BOWLES [continued]: That’s the point where these things join, and they’re both trying to achieve that aim.
09:08
HANNA LAIKKO: I would say that brand or branding, in general, is bigger than marketing. It’s bigger than design, as well. If we discuss about brand as the combination of the story, the identity, the promise, the differentiation, and the set of expectations the customer can have, but then also the product and the delivery of those expectations. Because if you don’t match those two things, over time, you will lose.