Episode Highlights:
Craig Kartchner: “You have to understand who you are and who your customers want you to be, find the overlap between what’s authentic to you and what your customers actually want. I think one trap we fall into in healthcare especially is we try to be everything to everyone. We have so many specialists, so many different areas where we provide care, such a broad system that we end up trying to be everything to everyone.
It just doesn’t work. You’ve got to figure out what you do exceptionally well and find out where it aligns with customers’ needs and wants, and then just stick to it year over year over year. That’s the key to success.”
Episode Overview
In this episode of Ignite, Alex Membrillo sits down with Craig Kartchner, Chief Marketing and Customer Engagement Officer at HonorHealth, to explore the intricacies of building a strong brand identity in the healthcare industry. Craig brings his wealth of experience from his time at Intermountain Healthcare and HonorHealth to discuss the challenges of differentiating a healthcare brand in a highly competitive market like Arizona.
Craig emphasizes the importance of viewing patients as consumers, a shift that requires healthcare marketers to adopt a more retail-like approach. This means focusing on the customer experience, understanding consumer needs, and aligning operations to enhance engagement and retention. One of the key takeaways from their conversation is the necessity of “fanatical consistency” in branding. Craig explains that healthcare organizations often fall into the trap of trying to be everything to everyone, which dilutes their brand message. Instead, he advocates for finding what your organization does exceptionally well, aligning it with consumer needs, and sticking to that focus consistently over time.
Craig also touches on the unique challenges in healthcare marketing, such as the broad target audience that ranges from young, vibrant individuals to elderly retirees. This diversity makes it difficult to craft a one-size-fits-all message. However, by identifying core values that resonate across demographics, like quality care, trustworthiness, and compassion, healthcare marketers can create a brand that stands out.
Whether you’re navigating the complexities of marketing at scale or seeking ways to set your healthcare brand apart in a crowded marketplace, Craig’s insights offer practical, actionable advice. Tune in to learn how to elevate your healthcare marketing strategy and make a lasting impact.
Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.
Alex Membrillo: What’s up, everybody? I always tell you guys you’re in for a treat, and I always say I really mean it. Today I really think you’re going to believe it. Thank you to all of our three to seven listeners out there. Man, we’ve hit 120 episodes, and this is going to be one of your favorites. I really do believe it because I had a pre-call with Craig and his thoughts around brand building and some of the stuff they have going on and on are really cool. Craig Kartchner, welcome to Ignite.
Craig Kartchner: You even got the name right for the most part. It sounds like it’s a hostile name. Kartchner, it’s like this hostile German name.
Alex: You are anything but, my sweet Craig. Tells us, where do you hail from? What do you have going on? Where do you work? What do you love?
Craig: Yes, man. I grew up in Salt Lake. I was at Intermountain Healthcare for 15 years, and then I came to the surface of the sun in Scottsdale, and I’ve been roasting here ever since, so it’s been about seven, eight years now. I’ve been at HonorHealth that entire time, so I came down for this job, and it’s been great. I have zero complaints. I love rock climbing, love trails, mountain biking and hiking, and an outdoor guy. I’ve gotten into gardening. I guess I’m getting old enough that vegetable gardening suddenly sounded attractive to me. Maybe once you cross that 40-year barrier, I don’t know. Anyway.
Alex: I’m doing that in December, and I started gardening years ago. Also love mountain biking, hiking. Y’all have a lot of snakes there, though, so I don’t know. The hiking scares me in Arizona.
Craig: I know. There are plenty of snakes. I want to see a Gila monster. I never have. That’s like bucket list. One of the days.
Alex: It’s rattlesnakes, too, where you are, right? Is that the– It is rattlers.
Craig: Yes. There are tons. You leave them alone, they leave you alone sort of thing. It’s live and let live.
Alex: We have a ton on our property here in Atlanta, but they are king snakes, and they do leave you alone. They’re not poisonous. Yours, I don’t mess with. Scottdale, it’s one of the most beautiful areas in the country. Tell us about Honor. I saw, what, 3,000 providers, 12,000 colleagues, 3,000 volunteers. It’s no small place.
Craig: It grows every day, so you check the website tomorrow, it’s going to be even more. We have six hospitals. We have a couple hundred clinics, a lot of specialties, about 15,000 employees. We’ve also got a lot of other cool– Maybe we talk about it on this podcast, but we’ve got integrated medicine centers, we’ve got behavioral health hospital, which is increasingly important nowadays, and a lot of other ancillary services too.
Alex: It’s a behavioral health hospital there to catch– Is it a moment of high acuity and they come in, or is it an entry point with therapist? How are you guys? How’s the business?
Craig: It’s both. We do inpatient and outpatient, and there’s a shortage, frankly, of both, but there is very few inpatient centers like that, where you can go if you’re in crisis, you’re a family member, a friend, whatever, can go, so it is inpatient, but we also have outpatient services there too, which again, they’re just not enough to serve the needs of the community, so really important.
Alex: There’s not. With COVID, the really cool thing with behavioral, and I digress a little bit, is that the stigma got removed quite a bit from behavioral health and therapy and all that fun stuff, but then the demand shot up and supply is not going to catch up for five years. Anyways, so you guys have big competitors there in Arizona. How are you differentiating? What do you focus? CMO of a huge thing. What do you focus on to try to gain market share and mind share, all that kind of fun stuff?
Craig: That’s really tough, and I’m sure you talk to marketers all day long, so I’m sure you hear this all the time, but especially in healthcare, it’s weird, because we’re in this third-party payment system, where the people you’re marketing to are not even the ones who are paying the bills necessarily, so how do you build cache? How do you build your brand in that environment? It’s really tough. I think it’s part of the reason that there is no household name in healthcare, really. There’s not one name. Maybe Mayo Clinic. They’re big.
Alex: Amazon tried. They’re trying.
Craig: Amazon’s tried. Walmart’s tried. Bertha Hathaway, a lot of companies have tried to get into this space, and Amazon is just shelling out millions of billions over the years, and it’s one failure after the next, so it’s a tough industry. If you look at a billboard, an average typical healthcare billboard or TV spot, and you remove the logo, you’re not going to be able to tell who produced the ad. All the ads look very similar. They’re indistinguishable, so how do you set yourself apart when that is the environment you play in, which is certainly the case in Phoenix. We have a lot of competitors, and they’re quality. We have a lot of quality competitors, so it is tough to set yourself apart.
Alex: Yes, but you got to try, and I think if I can tell you’re a brand guy, and so you have to try, and I’ve gotten so sick of the same stock images. You can name them at this point. How do you feel about this? It just feels like, why are the ads so similar? Are we being safe? Is it because we are in healthcare? You got to be so safe and thoughtful. What is going on? How do we start changing this and have more fun?
Craig: I know, right? I think you’re right. It’s a conservative industry. You’re talking about death. Healthcare is an unsought service. Very few people want to go to the doctor unless it’s for a baby, labor and delivery, or maybe plastic surgery or something. You’re not looking forward to it, so it’s automatically a more conservative environment. It’s not sexy necessarily either. Another huge problem, Alex, is it’s birth to death. It’s hard to define a target audience, a target market, because we serve people literally birth to death.
How do you focus? Some people in your age category, young guys, obviously vibrant and whatever, you’re going to respond to humor and a little irreverence. You probably would appreciate irreverence.
Alex: I love it. I don’t think I’m like most of the people. Yes, they love it though.
Craig: You’re marketing it to an 84-year-old retiree, and maybe she’s not going to be as receptive to the levity. It’s hard. I’ll tell you what I think is one of the keys, is fanatical consistency. You have to understand who you are and who your customers want you to be, find the overlap between what’s authentic to you, what your customers actually want, and then you have to be literally fanatically consistent to that. I think one trap we fall into in healthcare especially is we try to be everything to everyone. We have so many specialists, so many different areas where we provide care, such a broad system that we end up trying to be everything to everyone.
It just doesn’t work. You’ve got to figure out what you do exceptionally well and find out where it aligns with customers’ needs and wants, and then just stick to it year over year over year. That’s the key to success.
Alex: Is that like being the heart place of Arizona, the ortho place, or can you have multiple centers of excellence? How do you do that at Honor? Did you put a stake in the ground? Is it a service line-based thing, or it’s like an audience? We are great for this type of– What are you doing?
Craig: I guess you could do it just for one service line. I think it’s more about … In fact, I could just tell you, if you look at the research, people want, at the highest level, consumers want a couple of things when they’re forming perceptions of healthcare. You just ask them, hey, when you think about healthcare, what’s most important to you? What do you want? Quality care. Outcomes. Yes, outcomes. It’s the best experts. They want the most knowledgeable people. They want trustworthy. They want to be listened to and compassion.
Alex: That was awesome, man. We just had Craig Kartchner from HonorHealth helping us all the way out from Arizona. That was huge. I loved connecting with him. He’s done some big things. It’s really hard to have marketing effectiveness at scale like HonorHealth, so I’m so delighted to hear how he’s done. Big things at a big group. If you want to find him, hit him up on LinkedIn. This episode was short and sweet, and I hope to get him at our conference coming in October scaling up. Get excited about that, everybody.
Announcer: Thanks for listening to this episode of Ignite. Interested in keeping up with the latest trends in healthcare marketing? Subscribe to our podcast and leave a rating and review. For more healthcare marketing tips, visit our blog at cardinaldigitalmarketing.com.
Healthcare Marketing Insights At Your Fingertips
Listen and subscribe to Ignite wherever you get your podcasts.
