Interview: Physician Brand Strategy With Nick Westergaard | FEED ...

Join us as we interview Nick Westergaard, Vice President, Brand Strategist of Westergaard a brand development and strategic communication agency located in the great midwest town of Coralville, Iowa.

In this interview, physicians will learn:

• How your brand is like Gestalt theory
• The patient marketing value of great content
• How your practice is due for a Brand Check-up in 3 easy steps
• To assess their own value of social media

If you find these interviews helpful and you have any questions about positioning your physician brand to be unique vs. generalist in your most profitable specialty, please contact us and we?ll reach out to you immediately.

FEED The Agency: Nick what are you thinking and writing about in brand strategy that you feel people don?t get, but when they do, it will be a revelation that can tremendously impact their business?

Nick Westergaard: Probably the biggest misconception about branding is that it starts and stops with your logo and a few front-line brand touch points. The truth is your brand is so much more than this. I like to think of brands as being like Gestalt theory ? the whole is much more than that just the sum of the parts. So how does this thinking change your strategy? That?s easy. Everything ? every piece of your customers? experience ? is part of your brand. When you are mapping out your brand experience you need to include every touch point and the things seemingly unrelated to your brand, whether it?s how the phone is answered, to the clothes your team members wear, to how people are thanked for being a part of your brand-driven community. All of this is fair game for a holistic discussion on branding.

FEED The Agency: You recently wrote an interesting post, Writing Is Selling: Why Content Creation Is Worth the Time. Why is content marketing so challenging for physicians and small business owners to recognize as a revenue producing tool and do you have a favorite story you can share with us about how content marketing helped an organization grow their business and brand position.

Nick Westergaard: Well, a favorite story of mine relates our business, branding, to a physician?s business, medicine. My father started our business 30 years ago. Among the many values instilled in our agency?s culture is that, ?at the end of the day it?s just advertising. No one died on the table.? This anecdote is insightful here as the opposite is true in a physician?s business. The stakes are incredibly high. And at times, as I?m sure you and your clients have observed, things like branding can and should be very secondary. However I think branding in the form of useful content that solves a problem ? of which there are many in the health-related field ? is a part of the experience of care. I think that is a big mental hurdle that physicians need to clear in terms of thinking about branding and marketing. Brand touch points including helpful content are part of the overall experience of care that providers work to wrap patients in.

FEED The Agency: I love your post, Brand Rx for Professional Services where you start your post with ?Some things you don?t want to see at a doctor?s office,? and you go on to humorously list your doctor using his Palm Pilot to assist in your diagnosis. Share how physicians or other professional services can implement a Step 1, 2, 3 Brand check-up to diagnose the best brand treatment.

Nick Westergaard: A brand check-up! I have a feeling that physicians might respond to something called that. I would approach this by borrowing from a few different industries.

First, retail-focused businesses engage in secret shopping all the time. I think professional services should give this a shot too. Start with your own practice and have someone unknown to the rest of the team work their way through your business, auditing your brand touch points along the way. How did they respond to your website? What did it feel like when they arrived at the office? If you?re feeling bold, have your mystery shopper try a few competing practices as well. To be clear, I?m not advising anyone to fake healthcare problems. It might be best to find someone that is due for a routine physical and have them do this favor for you.

From here I would call all hands on deck to review the results. Too often, especially at small organizations, branding is kept at the top and not institutionalized. Work any pain points together and make branding a fun, team building effort. Third, I would take a page from lean manufacturing and practice rapid continuous improvement (RCI). Develop a process for continually making your brand even better. Whether that?s a suggestion box or rewarding people for enhancing the customer?s experience, make sure everyone understands that branding isn?t a ?set-it-and-forget-it? initiative. It is ongoing and can even change (hopefully for the better) over time

FEED The Agency: Nick, I?d like you to respond to one viewpoint of engagement and social media ROI.

Bob Hoffman, an ad agency veteran and author of the book and blog, Ad Contrarian argues nobody can agree on what engagement means, how to measure it, or what value it has. A head of planning for Wieden+Kennedy?s Amsterdam office says this about engagement,

?Let?s be clear. ?Engagement? is an unworkable and meaningless concept. It means everything. And absolutely nothing. And as such it cannot possibly claim to be any kind of metric.
?It really is time to call bullshit on ?engagement?. Better, to bundle it into a coffin labelled ?Agency Puffery? and put a nail firmly in it once and for all.?

Nick Westergaard: While I think ?engagement? is an oft-used and abused term, I?m not sure that I?m ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Terms like ?return on engagement? do smell a little bit of agency or even marketer BS. (Yeah ? I tossed marketers in general in there too as its not been my experience that bullshit is the exclusive dominion of agencies alone.) Ultimately I don?t think there is a real easy answer for social ROI. On the other hand I think it?s easy to write opinionated pieces about this hot-button topic, essentially lighting the fuse and running, but that doesn?t really solve the problem for organizations who want a better handle on the topic. And, to be fair, there is a lot of bullshit out there. You can?t just say, ?what?s the ROI of the telephone?? and walk away. At the same time social media is often unfairly put under a microscope but almost no other media channel has to answer to.

Industry talk aside, I think the biggest take away for organizations in terms of getting a clear handle on social media measurement is making sure that they have a clear social media strategy anchored by solid business objectives first. If you have a goal, you should have key metrics around that goal that you can measure as well. Pair this with some idea of what your expenses for social media are and you?re close to being able to get a handle on your return.

FEED The Agency: What are the two most recent books you?ve read that will cause you to change what you thought you knew about branding or social media?

Nick Westergaard: Brand Against the Machine by John Morgan is a great book. If I felt like being clich? I would call it ?branding 2.0? as it very clearly makes the case for building a strong brand through expert content that helps your community solve problems and building connections via social media conversations. The book is also an especially good fit for a professional services firm.

While I read a lot of business books, I also try to get back to my personal passion of US history often as well. Surprisingly there are a lot of great business lessons there too. Currently I?m reading The Defining Moment by Jonathan alter about FDR?s first 100 days in office. There are a lot of good ideas one can borrow from Roosevelt as he kept trying different strategies to get the country out of the Great Depression and raise morale. This gets back to the need for brand builders to practice rapid continuous improvement. You have to keep trying things.

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