Making the Most of Hospital’s Prestigious Brand
Business Challenge
A top children’s hospital engaged TRC to help inform a more effective communications and growth strategy. While the hospital’s national reputation fueled growth beyond its region, it relied heavily on local patients seeking routine, lower-complexity care. Intense competition meant its #1 status did not always drive selection.
The hospital needed to understand:
- How its #1 reputation translates for routine care
- How to leverage brand value to gain more share locally
TRC’s Solution
TRC designed a multi-phase approach to quantify brand equity by service line and model the trade-offs parents make when selecting care, using a discrete choice conjoint to measure five key drivers of hospital selection:
- Physician recommends the facility
- Insurance coverage
- Hospital name (brand)
- Next available appointment (access)
- Out-of-pocket cost
The analysis showed that brand value was not one-size-fits all, varying significantly by type of care.
- For more complex care, parents were willing to pay more for the top-ranked hospital.
- For routine or lower-acuity care, convenience and cost played a larger role.
- For some services, appointment access outweighed both brand and cost.
TRC delivered an interactive simulator that allowed leadership to test “what-if” scenarios and quantify how changes in access affected selection, including how long parents would wait for specific treatments before choosing a competitor.
Successful Implementation
The results helped the organization align strategy with how parents actually choose care – by condition, urgency, and trade-offs between access, cost, and brand.
Specifically, the work:
- Validated the hospital’s pricing approach, while clarifying when its brand strength is most and least likely to drive selection
- Supported executive approval for investment in access programs for targeted lines of business
- Informed service-line marketing campaigns emphasizing speed and access where appropriate, and brand differentiation where brand value was strongest.
By combining brand valuation with an easy-to-use simulator for scenario planning, the hospital gained a practical toolset to support ongoing decisions about access, communications, and service-line growth.
