hackensack univ medical
Healthcare visionary John Ferguson had an idea for a hospital 10 years ahead of its time. But he first had to open people’s minds that the best medical care in New York just might be in New Jersey…
COPY ON FOREHEAD: The most uncomfortable part of a breast examination is felt here. COPY ON BREAST: Not here.
“What Jan did was look and listen, like nobody ever did before.”
– Anne Marie Campbell, VP, Hackensack Univ Medical Cntr
Exec Summary
Category Thinking: Serious health problem? Go to New York.
New Insight: People in the New York area will consider a New Jersey hospital for serious needs if they feel it is sophisticated and authoritative in specialty areas. They will empathize with and relate to surreal emotional moments resolved by real reasons to believe.
New Position: Hackensack is the New York hospital, in New Jersey.
Result: Awareness, respect, and credibility for Hackensack’s capabilities, not just in cancer treatment, but overall.
Full Case Study
Situation: Hackensack University Medical Center was this sleeping giant of a hospital, in the relatively quiet New York marketplace of New Jersey. And it happened to have one of the nation’s most respected pediatric oncology programs and breast care departments, as well as one of the best stem-cell treatment centers in the country. The Big Picture was its plan, led by its president, John Ferguson, a visionary healthcare leader.
Category Thinking: Serious health problem? Go to New York.
New Insight: People in the New York area will consider a New Jersey hospital for serious needs if they feel it is sophisticated and authoritative in specialty areas. They will empathize with and relate to surreal emotional moments resolved by real reasons to believe. To be relevant in the New York market, and dominant in New Jersey, Hackensack first had to be considered in the same conversation with New York hospitals. Consumers pay attention when the images, the words, the mood and tone, feel authentic. And they retain and recall the message even longer when it triggers a fascination and deeper connection with the surreal memory of an event. Let the value of Hackensack’s specialties be felt, one by one, in each story, rather than cram self-serving facts and intuitively predictable images into each message.
Solution: a surreal step beyond the predictable testimonial: a deeper, surreal empathic lens through which a 12-year old boy relates his experience of his father’s cancer…and through which a unique emotional perspective emerges of the patient himself. Fear not long copy to the parents and family and friends of a child with cancer — they want to know everything and will respect more the message that doesn’t try to appeal to them on an over-simplified, predictable marketing level. Appeal to women who procrastinate on getting their breast examinations not just because they find it a scary thing, but because it’s something that makes them feel uncomfortably disconnected from it, as if the exam and environment were constructed only from men (which intuitively it was). Rethink and ring true with messages that have an uncanny, counter-intuitive understanding of The Person. Messages from a hospital that truly listens to the way that particular consumer feels, be it a woman or man, husband or wife, parent or child.
New Position: Hackensack is the New York hospital, in New Jersey.
Result: Awareness, respect, and credibility for Hackensack’s capabilities, not just in cancer treatment, but overall.
