Branding of a Maternity Hospital

A maternity hospital as the word defines is a place that provides care for women during pregnancy and childbirth and for newborn infants. Maternity hospitals are usually run & managed by gynecologists.

A lady mostly consults when she first takes pregnancy urine test and it shows a positive result. The lady usually meets her gynecologist after a period of 30 days or less depending on the criticality of the pregnancy.

These nine months can be an important branding exercise for a brand manager of a pharma company or companies marketing products for children between one to two years.

Let’s analyze, how a brand manager can translate this opportunity.

• The number of visits of the pregnant lady 12 and waiting time 15 min, which a/c's to 180 minutes to focused viewer ship for any brand. Most often the lady is accompanied by her husband of a relative, so double the viewer ship.

o These companies can distribute reading material, with co-branding

o A TV screen can be displayed in the waiting room, and visual education material can be shown, like yoga exercises during pregnancy, diet to be followed, interview of the gynecologist, etc

• Maternity hospitals are usually branded on the lines of hospital, but most fail to understand that the lady is not suffering from any diseases, its just a new phase in there life, her transformation to motherhood. So the hospital set-up should change. The lady should feel at home, decorate it as a place where she is feels more at home

• Give or suggest books to read, coz their are many things she wont know. The companies targeting would be mothers should publish informative books for these ladies.

• Suggest some instrumental music she should hear which will help in the development of the foetus. There are studies to indicate that you can teach you child in the womb itself.

• The first consultation is first impression; give her accessories with the maternity home branding e.g. "Admit me to Ankur hospital in case of emergency". This will be a good branding initiative for the maternity home. The accessories can be t-shirts, teddy bears, etc.

• Conduct pregnancy classes for would be mothers as they are going through lot of changes like psychological, hormonal, diet, etc. These classes can address their queries and also teach them yoga & exercises, which are very important. Though we will find maternity hospitals in each and every corner, but hardly any gynecologist is interested to run such classes.

• Post delivery have the room decorated with balloons, this will create a moment of joy, so she will forget the pain of delivery. Also a lot of relatives visit the family after delivery, have a small flower boutique next to the hospital as they can buy flowers for the lady.

• Post delivery the clothes of mother and child, should be branded on the lines of the maternity home colours and logo. This will have a good brand recall.

These are some of the branding exercises which can be undertaken by a maternity home, one example which I can think of is about Cradle in Bangalore.

If Branding and PR strategy is done properly the maternity home will reap huge benefits.

Brand categories, rather than Brand products

For long, the Pharma Company’s have been promoting their products, which only influenced doctors, chemists and people connected to the industry. No matter how hard the companies tried they were hardly able to address their target audience. With the entry of more Pharma companies, National & International, and increase in competition the need to differentiate from the clutter of products has risen. The questions product managers are always hunting, how should a Pharma company communicate their target audience on products?

The Pharma companies need to target their audience directly. The patients/ consumers in this new age are a lot informed. They know what they need and how to get it. Now the Pharma Company’s communication should be directly to its consumers through information about the diseases, about symptoms, etc.

The new age marketing will be on diseases category development, mass awareness about disease symptoms, effects about a particular deficiency, online forum, support group meetings, publicize disease specific docs, disease information brochures, etc. The Pharma companies now need to communicate the masses and KOLs. Also in this information age specific day related to the disease needs to be publicized with the help of KOLs, media and events. Some of the days which can be publicised are

1. World Heart Day
2. Breast Cancer Awareness Day
3. Hepatitis Awareness Day
4. World Anti- Tobacco day

These days inform the masses about the diseases and symptoms. Resulting in patients asking the doctor for more information. The doctor answers the queries of patients and gives information brochures. The consumer then for further information visits the website, created for that specific purpose and loaded with all the relevant information. This is new age marketing which involves the doctors and patients.

This also helps to promote the brand further by the same patients who become the Brand Ambassadors of the information, by spreading word-of-mouth publicity. The reason behind this is most consumers once they acquire information, they become knowledgeable and talk about it to the people they meet about the disease.
Now the Pharma companies have to be better informed because the consumer is empowered with knowledge. The Pharma companies are trying to realize this, but still are undecided on the strategy. It's high time they realize this and change their strategy, be more informative and mass oriented.