A hundred years ago, John Stewart, chairman of Quaker Oats, said:
"If this business were to be split up, I would be glad to take the brands, trademarks and goodwill and you could have all the bricks and mortar - and I would fare better than you."
In other words, a brand is an organisation’s most valuable asset. This applies to the hospice sector as much as it does to any sector; commercial or not for profit.
But thinking about brand can feel a bit like thinking about pensions. You know it's important but it can be difficult to fully wrap your head around.
What is a brand?
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Let’s start with a simple definition of what a brand is and isn’t. A brand isn’t just your ‘branding’ (your name or logo), although those are important. It is the sum of how people think and feel about your organisation.
Brand is the north star of north stars. It informs not only your communications, but also your experiences, products, services and internal culture.
Virgin Atlantic, for example, was never going to copy other airlines when it created its version of a merged business and first class, called ‘Upper Class’. Even the name exudes the fun and swagger we have come to expect from Virgin brands. Similarly, their Clubhouses feel more like a swanky bar than a stuffy airport lounge.
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Ultimately your brand should be a mirror and a magnet.
A mirror because it reflects what you do and why you do it. A magnet because it inspires people to want to spend time with you - whether as customers, patients, partners, supporters or colleagues.
So how is your brand doing?
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It can be tricky to know if your brand is working hard for your organisation, even with a dedicated brand team and brand tracking in place.
Here is a simple set of questions to check your brand health.
The most obvious expression of a brand is its name. Think of it as your organisation’s front door.
Have you made it easy for people to get to know you? For example, do you have a name that is simple to read, understand, and pronounce?
I recently worked with a charity whose logo was the initials of their name. Whilst it made sense to them, for anyone unfamiliar with the organisation it just created confusion.
Never underestimate the power of provenance. It can be tempting to rebrand to sound more contemporary or fashionable, but there is tremendous equity in names that come from a founder, a location, or historical affiliation.
Think Macmillan Cancer Support, Tunnocks Tea Cakes, Halifax Bank, or in my stomping ground of South East London, St. Christopher’s Hospice.
Your organisation doesn’t exist in a vacuum in people’s minds. For hospices, it's likely you will be mentally rubbing shoulders with the likes of the NHS, other hospices, and charities like Marie Curie.
Do you have a sense of how you exist in relation to them?
I led the reboot of the Macmillan Cancer Support brand. It was rooted in the insight that very few people could distinguish between Macmillan and other big cancer charities, including Cancer Research UK (despite one technically doing ‘care’ and the other doing ‘cure’).
This opened the door for thinking of Macmillan as a bigger force for good within cancer and healthcare more broadly.
A brand is more than a logo, or a description of what you do. It’s what you stand for. It informs how you show up in communications and experiences, externally and internally.
For example, Dove is more than a soap brand - it stands for body confidence and self-esteem. This informs not just its advertising, but everything from product design to the development of educational programmes and other resources to help with body positivity.
A vital element of successful brand building is consistency - looking and feeling like the same organisation, year after year across every channel and touchpoint.
An easy way to check this is to take a sample of your materials and put them on one page. This might include your:
leaflets
advertising posters
social media posts
web pages
images of your physical environments.
Look at them like a stranger would, or better still ask someone who isn’t familiar with your organisation.
On first glance, does everything on that page feel like it comes from the same place, without looking like a cut and paste job?
Are things like colours, fonts, images or illustrations being used consistently?
Does the messaging align and feel true to your organisation’s purpose and style?
The most well-known aspect of brand is brand identity, which is a combination of visual and verbal elements.
The visual is at its core a logo, colour palette and fonts; while the verbal includes tone of voice and key messages.
This approach has recently evolved into thinking more broadly about ‘distinctive brand assets’. This includes things like:
the visual elements of a logo (Legal and General’s umbrella)
colour (Cadbury purple)
straplines (‘Every little helps’)
sonic branding (Intel’s jingle)
mascots (Comparethemarket’s meerkats)
a distinctive tone of voice (Oatly or Innocent).
Think of these as mental shortcuts for identifying an organisation.
Do you know what your distinctive brand assets are? Are you putting them to good use to build your brand and achieve your organisation’s objectives?
For more on this, Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute is one of the world’s leading expert on distinctive brand assets and writes regularly on the subject.
About the author
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We are grateful to Jo Juber for sharing these tips with us.
Jo is an independent consultant and former head of brand and marketing at Macmillan Cancer Support, Poppy’s and Lloyds Banking Group.
