Consistency builds brands

The clarity and consistency of a brand are critical. A strong brand produces a powerful emotional connection, so you have to protect and project your brand through every representation of your clinic in the market. You need to reinforce the position of your brand that you want to have in the mind of consumers through all of your marketing communications.

When your marketing and PR efforts create one united set of impressions of your clinic, they are helping to build a meaningful brand. The brand experience needs to mesh with everything else you do, which necessitates managing every brand contact carefully. The brand image should project a consistent look and feel. Your communications should be written in the same voice to maintain a consistent tone. Retaining a consistent level of quality, products, and services is also imperative for brand building. Bear in mind that a premium brand can command a higher price in the market.

Consider Starbucks and W Hotels, for example. We can expect to go into any Starbucks in the world and have a relatively similar experience in terms of ordering a quality cup of coffee that is served in a white paper cup with a green logo on it, and we know there will be a plentiful supply of cinnamon, chocolate, green straws, and cup holders. Book into a W, and although each hotel will have its own personality to some degree, what is consistent about the brand is the modern appointments in the rooms, good quality of the bed linens, fine dining options, and stylish hallways and lounges. In short, these global brands deliver on their brand promise, and you know what you are going to get as a customer.

Although Starbucks has updated their logo a few times, and even added a blonde coffee to the menu, the brand is pretty much the same Seattle coffee company it started out as, only on a worldwide stage. The key lesson learned from power brands like Starbucks is to stick with your brand DNA. Changing the essence of your brand image is a risky business: don’t try to change your brand unless it is broken and needs fixing. Your brand is the public representation of your clinic. The customers you are trying to target may already know your clinic and have developed an opinion on what they can expect based on your communications strategy. If you change your brand too radically, you can end up losing loyal customers who like you the way you are, and have developed an emotional bond with your brand.

For example, if your clinic name has been ‘Coventry Spa & Salon’ for a decade and you have added a cosmetic doctor to offer injectables and light-based treatments, consider updating your brand to something like ‘Coventry Medi-Spa & Salon’. This will let customers know that the clinic has more to offer than just facials, manicures, and blowouts. Or, if you want to update your logo with a more modern design and it has been the same tired red and black typeface, hire a professional designer to create a new logo, using a variation of those colours, such as a deeper shade of red with charcoal grey. This strategy allows you to maintain your brand equity while modernising your brand image.

Rebranding can involve making impactful updates without having to start over with an entirely new brand image, which can take time to reach your target audience all over again. Your value proposition in the community should be preserved or you will have to constantly sell yourself to every new customer, and continually strive to get noticed among the sea of other clinics that offer similar services and products.

Customer insights should factor into building a brand. Stay alert to what consumers want and need, what they are willing to pay for, and devise services and products that meet or exceed those needs. As their needs change, you should remain agile enough to refine your offering in a compelling way to remain current and relevant to your target audience.

Clinic differentiation

When you started your clinic, you had a concept in mind of how you wanted to position your clinic and how patients would view the services you offered in the community.

Differentiating your clinic from the pack is an uphill battle. Everything competes with everything, therefore, your competition is not only every other aesthetic clinic in your region, but every beauty salon, spa, medi-spa, pharmacy, and department store with a beauty department. You are all competing for the same basic target audience and hoping to take a piece of the same pie. Your brand is what distinguishes your clinic from the rest; it is the essence of who you are as a practitioner, what you do, and how you do it. This forms the basis for defining your clinic’s brand.

The more closely you narrow the niche of patients you are targeting, the stronger your brand identity can be. For example, an anti-ageing clinic that targets peri‑menopausal women requires a very different brand image than an acne clinic that targets teens, and young women and men.

Your clinic’s value proposition or unique selling point (USP) is what sets your clinic apart from the clinic across the road, or the chain of clinics springing up within your county. This may entail your specific strengths and unique training; the quality of after care you offer to patients; hours of operation; your specialisation in skin rejuvenation, body shaping, or hair restoration; the convenience of your location; and/or the selection of lasers, light-based systems, or dermal fillers featured in the clinic. Your USP is usually a combination of factors that you can point to as making your clinic better than or different to the competition.

At the end of the day, there are many clinics that can deliver the same results and offer the same products and services. However, the greatest differentiator is the level of service and quality you offer,
and the people in your clinic who make it happen.