St. John's prepares for rebranding

If an empire can’t be built in a day, it follows that a change to an empire’s identity shouldn’t occur overnight either.

As folks at St. John’s Health System brace for its portion of looming systemwide name changes to Mercy, much work to market those changes is ahead and untold dollars will be spent on everything from new signs to nametags to letterhead.

St. John’s spokeswoman Cora Scott said an undisclosed Chicago-based company was selected following requests for proposal to manage the physical fabrication of signage, but local companies familiar to St. John’s – such as Transport Graphics Inc. and Springfield Sign & Neon – would have an opportunity through a similar bidding process to install and maintain new signage and create new vehicle wraps. Scott said details of that process have yet to be ironed out, and she declined to disclose the estimated cost to rebrand.

“We’re rolling these changes out across all the areas that Mercy provides services, so in St. Louis, they are already seeing signage and letterhead changes because they went live, so to speak, in the beginning of September – it’s going to roll out in Springfield in the middle of January, so that’s when people will start to see signage changes and things like that,” Scott said.

St. Louis-based Mercy officials announced the rebranding effort in August and said it should wrap up by early 2012. For the system, which serves 2.7 million patients annually at 28 acute-care hospitals and clinics in Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, the changes could bring together a collage of separate identities.

“Adopting the Mercy name across our organization is a tribute to the Sisters of Mercy who founded our ministry and helped lead us to where we are today,” Mercy President and CEO Lynn Britton said in a statement to Springfield Business Journal. “Our hospitals and other facilities and services have always been part of Mercy, but because of the many different names we currently use across our communities, people often don’t recognize that we are connected. Adopting the name that has bound us in spirit and action will allow our communities and patients to recognize that when they come to any Mercy facility, they have access to an extended system of skilled people, exceptional services and resources.”

Ron Marshall, owner of Springfield-based Red Crow Marketing and a 30-year marketer, said there could be more to it.

He said a move to the Mercy name could be a way for the system to stay true to its Catholic roots while not alienating non-Catholics.

“When you say St. John’s, you are particularly Catholic,” Marshall said. “Moving over to Mercy, it’s still Catholic, but it’s more of a religious thing and it’s not particularly branded Catholic.”

Marshall’s company, formerly Greenleaf Marketing, changed its own name in 2009 after authorities began investigating the unrelated Greenleaf Cos. and sister-firm The Real Estate Co. for its involvement in a real estate scheme.

The publicity generated by lawsuits filed by homebuyers and investors was unwelcome to Marshall, who was fielding questions from clients and prospects about whether his marketing firm was associated with Greenleaf Cos. He used a marketing formula of sorts to arrive at the current name.

“People say, ‘why Red Crow?’ If you look at Greenleaf – it’s an object and a color. It’s a very easy recall. It’s just a little formula that good marketers use,” Marshall said, noting his experience assisting companies through rebranding includes Reynolds, Gold & Grosser PC’s shift to RGG Law to make the name more memorable. Marshall said a big move like Mercy’s hangs on its execution because brand names imply a set of promises.

“When you see a brand that you’ve learned to recognize, you know what to expect from it. When you see the golden arches, you know to expect the best french fries in the world, clean restrooms, Big Macs or whatever,” Marshall said. “When you change the brand, what (customers) have to see is that you’ll deliver those same promises.”

St. John’s officials say the branding move is expedited with the help of Mercy’s implementation more than five years ago of a $450 million electronic medical records system.

Scott said internally the transition to the Mercy name has been under way for some time, but now the public face of the hospital will change.

“There will be some special events and some storytelling that we need to do to reassure people. Basically, what has always been our mission, is now going to be our only name,” Scott said. “We are known in different communities under different names, although most widely known in this region as St. John’s, because we have branded everything St. John’s. Across the four states we have many saints – St. Edward’s, St. Joseph – so, we’re just going back to a common name that all ties back to that same mission we’ve always had.”

The changes, Scott said, aren’t being mandated by a corporate headquarters because Mercy isn’t structured that way, but by the individual communities that Mercy serves. Those individual community hospitals will have a voice in how the new brand is marketed, she said.

“What works in our community is what we’ll do,” she said, adding that there will be a local budget dedicated to marketing, though the amount has not yet been determined.

Change can be good, Marshall said. After his company’s name changed, the threatening phone calls were replaced by polite interest from potential clients. By unifying its brand, he said Mercy officials could be creating significant synergy and interest.  

“It’s new. It’s bright. People say, ‘Why did they do that? Let me see what they are about now,’” Marshall said. “There is an investigation, a curiosity that will follow the brand switch. As long as they can field that and maintain the same high quality, (Mercy) will lose nothing. It will gain ground.”[[In-content Ad]]