It’s not a one-way street from the top down
It needs to permeate the hospital beyond slogans.
“What if even my staff can’t clearly explain what our hospital is about?”
Kangbuk Samsung Medical Center, a 700-bed tertiary care hospital, was once mired in this dilemma. Internal question marks about the hospital’s identity led to a brand identity (BI) redesign project. The BI revamp, which took place on the hospital’s 55th anniversary, was such a success that it led to a series of external lectures.
On July 16, a lecture was held at Minish Dental Hospital to share Kangbuk Samsung’s insights. “The important thing about branding is to let employees find the answer to the question of ‘what kind of hospital we are,'” said Park Sung-baek, head of the public relations team at Kangbuk Samsung. Kangbuk Samsung’s method of establishing branding was not through slogans created by the hospital’s planning office, but through direct participation of employees. Doctors, nurses, medical technicians, pharmacists, administrators, and other employees were selected to form a team and tasked with finding the hospital’s identity.
The course utilized Simon Sinek’s “Golden Circle” methodology. The process was guided by three questions: “Why do we do what we do,” “How do we do it,” and “What do we do? For six months, employees searched for the answers to these three questions to discover the essential values of Kangbuk Samseong. Through interviews, seminars, overseas trips, and discussions, they came up with the phrase, “adding warmth to the best.
Kangbuk Samsung made sure the values were not just a slogan. It created a talent image of “warmth, passion, and positivity,” reflected in its recruitment and compensation systems, and placed “Our Promise,” a message that expands on the slogan, on computer screensavers and throughout its hospitals. We created a brand song and brand video, and expanded our social contribution activities.
The most important changes occurred in the daily routine of the hospital. The way they spoke to patients, the way they treated each other, and even the smallest actions began to reflect the values they had defined for themselves. It became second nature to warmly recommend the kind actions of coworkers. The brand became a way of life at the hospital, not a campaign.
“A brand is not something that can be created in words or video,” Park said, “it’s something that employees can feel and share in their daily lives through their actions.”
“A brand is like a brazier that never stops burning. You need to keep adding firewood to keep it warm,” he said, adding, “Minish Dental Hospital should not be satisfied with the brazier of the brand that has already been created, but should continue the warmth of the brand by thinking about Minishness together.”
