STORY BY
JULIA WARD
Senior Director of Marketing , Cincinnati Children’s
What’s in a brand? Well … everything
Cincinnati Children’s refreshed brand embraces the past with arms outstretched to the future
E
ven though it was almost seven years ago, I remember my final job interview at Cincinnati Children’s as though it happened yesterday. I’m guessing that not many people can say they walked directly from their son’s hospital room into a job interview, but that was me on day seven of what turned out to be a 10-day stay for our 4-year-old son. My first experience was strictly professional. In 2008 I was working at an advertising agency charged with developing a campaign to open the new Liberty Campus. As a client, Cincinnati Children’s had me at hello. What’s not to love about creating advertising for a children’s hospital? My relationship with the brand got more personal when our son had an outpatient procedure at 11 months old. It wasn’t serious or life-threatening, but nothing is routine when it involves your child. When we were called into the recovery room, and I saw a nurse holding him as tenderly as I would myself, I fell in love with Cincinnati Children’s a little more. After 22 years of working in the ad agency world, I hoped to join the Marketing and Communications team. I had made it through the first two rounds of interviews and was a finalist when “it” happened. I had one of those moments in life that shakes you to your core. Smack dab in the middle of the interview process, our 4-year-old son became suddenly and seriously ill. He had a very severe form of pneumonia along with a lung infection.
It was a potentially life-threatening combination that landed him here for 10 days, in isolation. Everyone involved in the interview process was wonderfully understanding and supportive. On that seventh day, he was finally on the mend thanks to our wonderful care team, and there was no doubt in my mind that this was where I was supposed to be. I had a heart full of gratitude and an up-close-and-personal experience of what makes Cincinnati Children’s special. Our son is now a healthy and fast-growing 11-year old. You could say the same about Cincinnati Children’s – healthy and fast-growing! I didn’t fully appreciate until I worked here, just how much Cincinnati Children’s has grown over the last 10 years. So much so, that our leadership decided it was time to evolve our brand to more fully express who we are and who we aspire to be. There are many definitions of “brand.” Some think of it as a name or logo, but it goes deeper than that. A brand is everything you do and everything you say. So, we dug deep. It’s been nearly two years of thoughtful re-examination, including input and feedback from more than 500 employees, patient families, community members and other stakeholders. I’ll put my marketing hat on and tell you that we did lots of research to validate that this new mark is communicating our brand attributes
Harris, now 11, is much like Cincinnati Children’s itself: healthy and fast-growing.
of collaboration, innovation, compassion, family inclusion and patient centeredness. I’ll put my mom hat on and tell you that for me it feels like a warm and caring hug. In fact, it is symbolic of two figures moving toward each other in an embrace, with the larger half-circle – the adult figure – lifting up and supporting the smaller half circle – the child. Some people see caregiver and child, others see parent and child. Some even see mentor and mentee. There is no wrong answer here – our hope is that you embrace the new mark on your own terms. 1