Advertising An Evolving Heart Program:

Research, Strategy And Creative Solutions

Background

KGB's ongoing strategy for Southern Ohio Medical Center has been to advertise incremental advances of their Heart program as they approach full Open Heart capabilities in 2009. To date, we have presented testing, rehab, angio and vascular success stories in three phases of testimonial advertising featuring both patients and caregivers. Our latest campaign continues this series, introducing more SOMC Heart Success Stories and delivering new information about the advanced technology and talented doctors at this continually evolving hospital.

Research

We have found that focus group research is an ideal method to gather information about SOMC's target audience. It's crucial to know what consumers think and to learn what's important to them. Discovering what they know and, more importantly, hearing from them in their own words helps us craft messages that resonate within the community.

SOMC is undergoing extensive building construction while adding evolving care delivery systems and Heart services. Consumers believed these new Heart services were connected to a future new building opening in 2009 and currently unavailable. Our research also found that competition and stepped-up advertising from a hospital on the edge of SOMC's service area left consumers asking valid questions. We took what could have been interpreted as consumer confusion as an opportunity to tell the next phase of SOMC's story. Our challenge was to demonstrate the depth of SOMC's current Heart service line while keeping consumers informed of new developments, new doctors and new technology.

Strategy

Testimonial advertising has proven to be a highly successful creative strategy in our previous SOMC Cancer and Heart campaigns. In this geographic and demographic environment, testimonials are a powerful and emotional way to connect person to person and spark important word-of-mouth advertising. By listening to our audience, we learned that SOMC's consumers are typical healthcare consumers - they feel they deserve more information. They understand SOMC is adding services and they want clarification as to what services are currently available, as well as more information about doctors and technology. And they want these messages delivered in a meaningful way.

Creative Solutions

This latest phase of the SOMC Heart series continues to give consumers precisely what they want: more information about the growing service line, including doctors and technology, as well as heartfelt success stories from grateful patients. In addition to the personal connection of testimonials, we wanted to show the different facets of building a service line from the ground up. By presenting various images of construction and improvements with state of the art cardiovascular technology and expert doctors, we were able to paint a well-rounded picture of a hospital committed to building a highly competitive Heart and Vascular Service line.