“We touched almost more than 5 million lives a year,” said Dr. Ashish Bajaj, CMO, Narayana Health in a conversation with exchange4media where he spoke about the company’s rebranding and the dynamic changes in the healthcare marketing industry.
Narayana Health is a healthcare services company which has a chain of hospitals across India and has recently rebranded to ensure consistent messaging across all healthcare verticals and keep with the foundation of its cardiac speciality history.
Bajaj spoke about the reason for this rebranding: “There was a need that started from saying that we were known by multiple names. When we started talking to our consumers, to understand us as a brand, we realised we don't have a unified view. As a brand, we are known for multiple things. But if you are known with say, eight different names nine names, that's not healthy for our brand. That is when we sat down at the drawing board and thought about what we do to solve it.
I think we are proud of it that we went into the conversation keeping in the centre the consumer. What are their requirements? What do they feel about us? How do we improve what they feel about us? How do we even bring in the colours that we need to bring in? From there, we started our conversation, and at every step, the remarkable thing that happened was that we were taking feedback. There was a time when it was a trend to produce user-generated content. Brands were using them to generate their logos in 2015-2016. We kind of did and we kind of understood from their point of view, and gave it a shot.”
“Now the change that it brings is in our Inside Out approach in terms of saying, we are redefining ourselves for the betterment and servicing the consumers wherever that is possible. So as a brand now you are eliminating any kind of roadblock in terms of you getting healthcare services, as per your requirements. So that’s a big change when you talk about a brand that has more than two decades of history, in terms of delivering health care as the way it used to be,” he added.
Speaking about the logo change, Bajaj says “The three hearts the way they have been aligned bring in compassion, bring in innovation and bring in integrity.”
Bajaj also spoke about the digital transformation in the healthcare industry and how COVID came as a catalyst towards digital transformation in the industry.
“For healthcare, I would say that Covid came as a trigger and as a catalyst for making digital movement possible for the healthcare industry. And yes, of course, there is acceptance of the digital way of consumption of healthcare, which I would say is not just only from a tele-consultation point of view, but it goes much, much beyond," he notes.
"Now suddenly the healthcare industry is looking at tying up the loose ends of knowing what is happening with the patient. So I think our organization has been fortunate enough in terms of building our own. It is building our own apps, building our own way of evaluating every aspect of patient care. We suddenly started to look at avenues where I could comfortably get information. Earlier it used to be word of mouth. Now Google Search has become word of mouth.”
Speaking about upcoming marketing initiatives, Bajaj indicated a bunch of new upcoming things for the second half. “We are coming up with something big in the next couple of days as well. We are going in for the Guinness Book of World Record for the highest number of ECGs being done in a day.”
Narayana Health has a pan-India presence, but Bajaj spoke about the regions the company has the strongest presence. He said that Narayana is very well routed into tier-two cities and with that point of view, East and South India have been strong where they have seen a very rapid growth.
Speaking about new initiatives by the company for growth, Bajaj said, “In our next phase of growth, we are looking at adding more clinics in different parts of India. We are also considering coming up with our own insurance product or health insurance product and starting different kinds of programs that solve a lot of patient care issues sitting at home. We are very excited about this that we are coming up as a as a brand that is now looking at not just as a super speciality hospital but we are looking at ourselves as an overall healthcare company.”
