Northwestern Medical Center

The Challenge

The hospital’s services had been expanding for 15 years but research showed they weren’t getting credit. NMC needed to evolve its marketing platform to better reach and inform its community.

At the outset of our efforts, we wanted to establish baseline community awareness
levels and perceptions on key attributes.

Our Approach

Over the course of the first few months we conducted extensive research with area patients, hospital staff, and local physicians. Research revealed that the hospital’s smaller size provided a meaningful and differentiated benefit versus Fletcher Allen’s unwieldy, institutional feel. Rather than focusing on NMC’s “smallness,” we decided to focus on the positive aspects its smallness conveys: intimacy and community connectedness.

To call the hospital’s original website primitive would be an understatement. We re-worked
the user experience (UX) to more easily bring prospects to the services on offer.

Northwestern Medical Center Brand Pyramid

Our Solution

Our challenge was to devise a campaign that could deliver this new positioning. Critically, we wanted to shift the hospital from a communications platform of “let me tell you about me” to a new communications focused on “let me show how we’re serving you.” The new campaign needed to be flexible enough to reinforce the breadth and depth of the new service offerings the hospital was bringing to the community. That’s how we came up with the “we do that here” tagline. We’ve used it ever since, and have found it to be infinitely flexible in discussing the multiple offerings the hospital has for its community.

The Result

Our campaign, in conjunction with a successful launch of several new service lines (Ophthalmology, Walk-in Clinic, Spine Surgery, Primary Care, etc.) has been widely credited with facilitating NMC’s $36 million in revenue over the past six years. Moreover, Northwestern Medical Center’s operating margins continue to be the most robust in the state.