MMHA 6801 Week 10 Brand and Alliance Final Paper Example

Earning the Name: Brand Architecture and Alliance Strategy for Sable River Health

Student Name

Walden University

MMHA 6801: Building Healthcare Brand and Alliances

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Earning the Name: Brand Architecture and Alliance Strategy for Sable River Health

Introduction

Sable River Health, the invented two-hospital system whose choices this course has traced since its merger, must now decide how to present itself to patients and with whom to ally. These are usually treated as separate questions, one for the marketing office and one for strategy. This paper argues that they share an answer. Until patients have reason to trust the new parent name, the system should build that trust in the wards, clinics and partner sites where people receive care, and only then put the name forward. The paper draws on the term's earlier work, revised in light of peer review, and sets out a strategy with measures and conditions.

Why Brand Must Follow Experience in Health Care

In the customer-based model Keller (1993) proposed, a brand's worth shows up in how differently people act toward an offering because of the memories and feelings its name calls up. For most products, that knowledge comes heavily from advertising. For hospitals, it comes from births, emergencies, long stays and what neighbors say about theirs. Patients cannot easily judge clinical quality, so they judge what they can see: how they are treated, whether staff seem to work together and whether the place keeps its promises (Berry & Bendapudi, 2007). A hospital's brand is therefore built mainly by its operations, and a name that promises more than operations deliver will be judged by the gap.

This has a practical consequence for a merged system. Combining two hospitals does not by itself make them alike, or better. When Beaulieu and colleagues tracked hospitals that changed owners, clinical measures did not get better and patients' ratings drifted slightly down (Beaulieu et al., 2020). Peer reviewers asked whether this evidence belonged in a brand paper. It does, because it is the reason a merged system cannot assume that its patients will see one organization just because the legal entity is one.

Brand Architecture: Endorsed for Now, With Conditions to Move

The St. Ansel's name has 81 percent unaided recognition in its service area and is described by most residents as caring or trusted; Sable River has 23 percent, according to an illustrative system survey. Patient experience ratings differ by eleven points between the two hospitals. Folding everything under one name now would throw away what the older name has banked and pledge an evenness of care the two buildings cannot yet show.

The strategy adopts an endorsed structure. Under it, the two hospitals go on using their own names, each followed by a short endorsement naming the parent; clinics the system owns, and services it runs centrally, use the parent's name by itself; and partner clinics lead with their own identity while noting the partnership. This places the system between the ends of the brand relationship spectrum, where a known brand is supported by its parent rather than replaced (Aaker & Joachimsthaler, 2000). Interim brand standards issued to all departments make the structure consistent at every point of contact.

Peer reviewers who favored a single brand argued that two names cost more to maintain. That is true. The endorsed structure accepts a modest, reversible cost to avoid a large, irreversible one.

Table 1

Conditions for Moving to a Single Brand, Reviewed Annually

The board will revisit the brand when all three conditions are met, not on a fixed date.

Alliances: Care First, Names Last

Sable River cannot provide everything its patients need. Two alliances extend its reach. For the patients of Northgate's five health center sites, Sable River will provide video specialty consultations within five business days, two same-day imaging slots each weekday and a jointly funded care manager who calls every Northgate patient within two days of hospital discharge. With Halford University Medical Center, it will provide stroke neurology by video at any hour, shared protocols and a clear transfer path for clot removal, consistent with national guidance on telestroke (Schwamm et al., 2009).

Both alliances are designed around the changes patients will notice. Partnership research identifies synergy, the ability of partners to accomplish together what neither could alone, as the source of an alliance's value, and links it to how partners share leadership, resources and decisions (Lasker et al., 2001). The Northgate alliance therefore has a steering group with equal membership and a rotating chair. Prior ties, such as residency rotations at Northgate and existing calls to Halford neurologists, provide a base of trust that allows governance to start simply (Gulati, 1995).

History supplies the main warning. Many announced coordination they did not deliver, and their promised gains did not appear (Burns & Pauly, 2002). Sable River's alliances will avoid that pattern by measuring care changes from the first quarter and publishing the results.

Where Brand and Alliances Meet

The two strategies meet at the sign on a partner's door. Studies of paired brands find that a joint name can help both partners if people think the match makes sense, yet the borrowing runs both ways and can cost the better-known name (Washburn et al., 2000). For Northgate's clinics, the brand with deeper trust among their patients is Northgate's own. Joint signage will therefore wait until the alliance's care changes have run for six months and interviews with Northgate patients, in English and Spanish, show that a joint name reads as more help rather than a takeover. For the stroke program, presenting the service under Sable River's name, with Halford acknowledged as affiliate, keeps responsibility clear for families and means the program would survive a change of partner.

In both cases, the principle is the same as inside the hospitals: the name follows the experience.

Measurement

Table 2

Strategy Measures

Measures for care changes come first and are reported publicly; brand measures follow annually.

Limits

The strategy rests on illustrative survey figures that a real system would need to collect. It assumes both partners remain willing, and alliances can end. And it may move more slowly than a board eager to signal unity would like. Some board members will see two hospital names as a sign the merger is unfinished; the strategy's answer is that the merger is finished legally and is still being finished in patients' experience, and the brand should tell the truth about which is which.

Conclusion

Sable River Health should keep its legacy hospital names under an endorsed structure, build two alliances around care changes patients can feel and let co-branding follow evidence rather than precede it. The same principle governs both strategies: in health care, a name is earned through experience. If Sable River delivers consistent care across its hospitals and through its partners, the conditions for a single brand will be met, and the name will carry the trust the system has earned.

References

Aaker, D. A., & Joachimsthaler, E. (2000). The brand relationship spectrum: The key to the brand architecture challenge. California Management Review, 42(4), 8-23. https://doi.org/10.2307/41166051

Beaulieu, N. D., Dafny, L. S., Landon, B. E., Dalton, J. B., Kuye, I., & McWilliams, J. M. (2020). Changes in quality of care after hospital mergers and acquisitions. New England Journal of Medicine, 382(1), 51-59. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa1901383

Berry, L. L., & Bendapudi, N. (2007). Health care: A fertile field for service research. Journal of Service Research, 10(2), 111-122. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094670507306682

Burns, L. R., & Pauly, M. V. (2002). Integrated delivery networks: A detour on the road to integrated health care? Health Affairs, 21(4), 128-143. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.21.4.128

Gulati, R. (1995). Does familiarity breed trust? The implications of repeated ties for contractual choice in alliances. Academy of Management Journal, 38(1), 85-112. https://doi.org/10.5465/256729

Keller, K. L. (1993). Conceptualizing, measuring, and managing customer-based brand equity. Journal of Marketing, 57(1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299305700101

Lasker, R. D., Weiss, E. S., & Miller, R. (2001). Partnership synergy: A practical framework for studying and strengthening the collaborative advantage. The Milbank Quarterly, 79(2), 179-205. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0009.00203

Schwamm, L. H., Audebert, H. J., Amarenco, P., Chumbler, N. R., Frankel, M. R., George, M. G., Gorelick, P. B., Horton, K. B., Kaste, M., Lackland, D. T., Levine, S. R., Meyer, B. C., Meyers, P. M., Patterson, V., Stranne, S. K., & White, C. J. (2009). Recommendations for the implementation of telemedicine within stroke systems of care: A policy statement from the American Heart Association. Stroke, 40(7), 2635-2660. https://doi.org/10.1161/STROKEAHA.109.192361

Washburn, J. H., Till, B. D., & Priluck, R. (2000). Co-branding: Brand equity and trial effects. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 17(7), 591-604. https://doi.org/10.1108/07363760010357796