Brand Matters : Pass ‘The Mayo Effect’

How the Mayo Clinic’s brand is naturally bolstered by its patient-centric experiences

I cannot stop talking about our family's recent experience at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. For a person who makes her living by helping companies with their brands, that is a very good thing. Creating word-of-mouth "buzz worthiness" through customer-centric experiences is at the heart of all memorable branding.

I also cannot stop thinking about the power of "The Mayo Effect" and the application it has to other brands outside of the health community.

Indeed, a few years ago, Leonard L. Berry and Kent D. Seltman wrote such a book: "Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic." There is much to learn from studying this nonprofit at a distance, and these authors share many important insights that may be duplicable for other service providers. However, I'd like to focus on a few aspects that I lived firsthand and struck me as especially impressive.

Good Branding Hits Close to Home
My father-in-law was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this fall. Not the news you ever want. Upon getting this information after a rather routine exam, we all wanted another opinion about his options. We ended up going to the Mayo Clinic for a three-day consult and then back again the following week for an eight-day stay for a life-saving surgery.

Our time at the Mayo Clinic was remarkable in every sense of the word, starting with our first "brand touchpoint"—an online search to discover how to set up an appointment—to each of our interactions during both our consult and our stay. The very best of high tech meeting high touch.

Like most brand introductions for customers these days, my husband's initial brand experience took place online in finding out how to set up an appointment at the Mayo Clinic. This moved quickly to his "real person answering the phone" encounter. That person then kindly made a "three-day, multidoctor and several-important-tests consult" come together quickly and efficiently.

This was incredible and inspiring in and of itself. (Patients come from all 50 states and 150 countries; logistics and timely schedules are very crucial.) Before we even entered The Mayo Clinic's doors, we experienced its primary core value: "the needs of the patient come first."

• MORE ON
• DATABASE & CRM