A hospital group that was competing on the wrong thing

What we were asked

The group had grown to three sites and had never stopped marketing like a single clinic. Each site ran its own offers, its own social accounts and its own arrangements with local media. The result was three voices, overlapping discounts, and a marketing spend nobody could add up.

How we approached it

We started with the numbers the group already had and had never put side by side: which service lines were profitable, which were busy, and which were both. That is a two-week exercise and it changed the conversation before any positioning work started.

Discounting was not the strategy. It was what happens when there is no strategy, because price is the only lever available to someone with nothing else to say.

What the plan covered

• Positioning built on the specialisms where the group was genuinely ahead locally, rather than on the full service list.
• Audience definition separating the person choosing the hospital from the person paying, which are frequently not the same and do not respond to the same message.
• One calendar across all three sites, with the seasonal peaks each specialism actually has rather than a flat monthly spend.
• Budget allocation against objectives, with a stated rule for when money moves and who decides.

The hard part

The hard part was not the strategy. It was persuading three site directors who had each built their own local relationships to give up running their own marketing. We ran the plan-building sessions with all three in the room rather than presenting a finished document to them, which is slower and is the only version that survives contact with the people who have to run it.

What happened next

The group's own marketing lead runs the plan. We review it against results on a fixed schedule, and the plan changes when the evidence says it should, which has already happened once.