How GE Healthcare Transformed Its Marketing Approach After Spinning Off of General Electric
Kate Rodgers, global brand media director at GE Healthcare, established a standalone marketing function, post-spinoff, to align her brand's storytelling with its demand generation efforts. What's more, she discussed how the brand overcame internal resistance and measured the impact of its rebranding initiative.
Key Takeaways
A year and a half ago, General Electric (GE) split into three new brands: GE Aerospace, GE Healthcare, and GE Vernova. For GE Healthcare, this meant undergoing a marketing rebrand to build trust with stakeholders, leadership, cross functional teams, and customers. While the brand was great at marketing its products, it now needed to tell a story that would resonate with a uniquely health care audience. The brand ultimately wanted to connect marketing from brand to demand through a human-centric, emotionally resonate approach.
The Value Evaluation
Health care brands often define value through quality of service and products and cost. However, evidence suggests these attributes aren't driving desired outcomes for patients. In contrast, patients value a "connection economy" prioritizing transparency, transition over time, and the seamless access to information. This caused GE Healthcare to rethink how it brands itself to stakeholders and customers.
Building Trust with End Users
Looking at GE Healthcare's new organizational structure was key to revamping its brand and building trust with its customers and stakeholders. First, the brand looked at market research and found that consumers didn't see it as a differentiated healthcare brand. In response, the brand deployed a new human focused strategy leveraging its identity. It shifted its mindset from demand generation and product marketing to identifying how it could connect brand all the way down to demand.
To this end, GE Healthcare bought together cross functional groups of different CMOs, from different products and regions, and its central teams to create and implement new governance, guidelines, and tools to support its marketers.
For its North American region, known as "USCAN," the brand in-housed resources and capabilities it used to rely on agencies for. The brand also looked at its different marketing activities that lived across the brand and demand side.
Measuring Outcomes
To measure the impact of its initiative, GE Healthcare leveraged business impact reporting — quarterly reports that map out where USCAN marketing efforts move the needle in each segment among the key accounts being targeted. These reports help illustrate the brand's overall marketing impact and areas of opportunity for strategic refinement.
GE also used campaign performance reporting — monthly and quarterly reports covering campaigns running to date. These reports help the brand highlight what's is and isn't working for campaigns, allowing for real-time optimizations by analyzing where in the funnel prospects are getting stuck.
Action Steps
Identify where you can go fast and what needs time. Think about what your brand knows it can do quickly to drive significant impact right away. This includes things like brand guidance and toolkits that can unlock marketers on your team.
Thinking differently as an opportunity. Challenge your team, especially your legacy marketers, to think about shifting its marketing approach as an opportunity to think differently and adapt and thrive as a business.
Understand the trust factor. Deliver a consistent message through multichannel touchpoints to build trust with audiences.
Q&A with Kate Rodgers, global brand media director at GE Healthcare
Q. Work us through how you segmented accounts and how you paired and decided which cohort received marketing and which didn't?
The concept here was to make them as equal as possible, splitting them into two cohorts similar in size along the spectrum to make sure we had a similar sample size. A lot of this was done with the commercial leaders to make sure we knew who we were not targeting and getting their buy-in so they also knew that some of those demand gen activity would not be going to their markets.
It does take a little of that trust. We knew that if this doesn't work, we were fully prepared to pivot and try something different, but doing this cohort approach and sharing the results when they're not in our favor has gained a lot of that trust.
Q. What's your sales cycle?
It depends. For huge multimedia dollar pieces of equipment, a customer could have that for about 30 years. But then we have things like an ultrasound that a clinician can go buy online today. In general, we look at about that 10-year mark, but that leaves a lot of people in that 95 percent of not ready to buy yet, so we do have to keep them warm and educated. We're giving them value all the time and this has allowed us to focus a little bit more.
Q. How are you able to determine the right size of your internal team?
I think it has a lot to do with your business and where you want your resources to be. I've worked on teams where we're super lean and we rely heavily on our agency partners. I've had teams where we bring everything inhouse and we operate that way. Both are valid. It totally depends on where you are in your business and how you want to operate and function.
Q. After GE split its brands into different companies, did the GE in your name help or hurt?
We did a lot of research to test this specifically. For us, there was so much value in a trusted brand as a healthcare company that we couldn't afford to lose it. That was the biggest deciding factor for us.
I think it could go either way and it totally depends on where the legacy brand holds value in your customers eyes, because if doesn't it really doesn't matter. But if it does that's something you'd consider long term.
Q. Can you comment on the data visualization program you use for your reports?
We use Tableau for a lot of data visualization. That's probably our most used platform today. I'm not a data analyst at all. I won't pretend to be one. Sometimes we'll use Domo for our finance team because that's what they prefer. We've had good luck with both of those tools. I think getting consensus around it is the most important part.
Q. How do you address and overcome resistance within the organization when implementing new marketing strategies and processes.
Executive leadership and buy-in was key for us. Our CEO was like, "Let's go." Literally we had the phrase "Let's go GE Healthcare." We have a new company; this is our opportunity and as part of this we have to market differently.
There was a lot of resistance from our actual marketers because they were so used to doing what they've always done. We had this change adopting curve where we had those people that were ready to go and then we had the people that took a little bit longer and we used early pilots and tools to bring them in. Pilots and executive leadership were super important. Never underestimate the value of that. Them believing in your vision and having a vision is so important and really makes a big difference when you're overcoming resistance internally.
Q. How long did it take to establish that brand muscle?
I would say the brand muscle takes about a year to do the bulk of the work, then we work on it year over year. But establishing the right team was a very important first part of that. We did that right away, so we had that infrastructure internally to manage the brand and establish those toolkits and guidelines.
Q. What are the top brand campaign metrics you measure?
I like to do those cohort studies. So, I do a lot of lift studies — i.e. market A versus market B. I like to see where we point people, what the traffic looks like once they get there, and if they convert into the product page we want them to.
Q. What framework do you use to think differently?
We use a lot of frameworks from the ANA, LinkedIn, and Stein IAS. They have really valuable things to say and they're challenging us to think differently. Those are great thought starters.
The other thing I found very helpful was laying things out for people and putting themselves in our customers' shoes. It's so powerful to have someone see how confusing it is to try and buy your product and see how many different places they have to go, and how many different people we're trying to reach. That was a powerful way to make our team think a little differently.
Q. What role did market research play in the GE Healthcare's decision to keep the GE name while largely changing many other elements of the historic GE brand.
It honestly played the leading role. We actually collected data points from three market research firms. We didn't want to just take one firm's word for it and go forward. We did quantitative and qualitative research. We talked to investors and employees. We had a real time employee feedback tool that we used. We of course talk to our customers and our sales force and really look to quantify all that.
Source
"From Spinoff to Spotlight: How GE is Revolutionizing Marketing Best Practices in Healthcare." Kate Rodgers, global brand media director at GE Healthcare. 2024 ANA Masters of B2B Marketing Conference, 6/13/24.