Chris Madden:
In today’s digital world, people want to feel that they matter. They want to feel seen. As consumers, we want a brand that resonates with us, one that we can trust. When things all come together, we as customers feel the connection and we know the difference.

To explore such connections, we’re chatting with experts in brand strategy and positioning. This is Marketing Digital Health, and I’m your host, Chris Madden.

Brand strategy and positioning are the fundamental pieces that you have to get right so all of the subsequent work can perform. Brand is the sum total of all the public facing touch points that a consumer can have with your business.

Positioning is a strategic framework that analyzes what your prospects want, as well as what other competitive alternatives they’ll consider.

Now, this work doesn’t happen overnight. Chapin Herman is a founding partner at Herman Shear, where he builds leading brands in healthcare, self-care and wellbeing, clarifying who those brands are, what they stand for, and where the biggest opportunities for growth and scale live.

Your business’ brand is a reflection of your values, personality, and unique qualities. For Chapin and his business partner, their personal experience with the healthcare system was a driving force behind their mission.

---

Chapin Herman:
For the first 13 of those years, we were somewhat omnivorous to industry and space, and over the last couple years, both he and I had two really interesting reflection points that kind of changed our views of the business. We both had children. And at the same time, we both helped parents battle disease and found ourselves deeply immersed in the world of both consumer health and wellbeing and also traditional healthcare.

---

Chris Madden:
Chapin Herman is the chief executive of Herman Shear, a brand strategy and creative agency which specializes exclusively in health. For over 15 years, the firm has been a force in branding.

---

Chapin Herman:
We became members of who we defined as the sandwich generation, which is being the health advocates of our kids, of our partners, and our parents, and sort of became obsessed with this world.

And we had a sort of stars aligning moment. We took a look back, we looked at our body of work, and so much of it was already in this world of health and wellbeing, and we just saw this opportunity to go all in. It’s what we’re most interested in, excited about, and where we believe the most change is happening.

And so we work in building and transforming brands in healthcare, healthy food and beverage, fitness, recreation, health tech, personal care. That’s the world that we live in.

For us, brand strategy always begins with a hypothesis on where we believe a business has the biggest opportunity in the market. What kinds of customers or patients, depending on how you define them, are most ripe to fall in love with the business and a product and service. And that’s where the work always begins, with that hypothesis and putting some rigor behind those hypotheses to ensure that brand is the right opportunity.

And then from there, we begin to crystallize a positioning in the minds of those people, of what this business is and ultimately why they’re going to love it.

---

Chris Madden:
Getting into the minds of your customers is how you can find your place in the market.

Let’s start with the conceptualization. You’re looking for the “how” it will fit into the market, as well as your “who,” which would be your target audience.

---

Chapin Herman:
It begins with a collective sharing of intellectual capital between our team and our clients’ teams, and usually between the two of us, we’ve got pretty good understanding of where we believe the biggest opportunity for our business lies, and we want to ensure that we’re never living in a silo of our two teams’ respective thinking.

It’s then coupled with really wonderful qualitative sit-down one-on-one conversations with folks, be it the customers, be it on the B2B side, any kind of providers, payers, insurers, to validate or poke holes in our thinking.

Then with that, we begin building out or distilling the right sense of values and ethos for a business that’s really gonna resonate and make sense for these audiences. And then that leads and informs everything that we do from a creative standpoint.

One of the things that we’ve found to be really successful with our clients is what we define as a brand degradation exercise, and it’s where we help them to spot where their brand is potentially dying from thousands of paper cuts.

These are the less glaring moments within a brand and brand system and experience. It could be a sloppy email footer. It could be inconsistent product packaging, potentially a tone deaf ad. Many of these things don’t outright break the brand, but together they begin to chip away trust and degrade the positioning and the identity.

It’s a way to figure out where and how to remain sharp and not just look at the core experiences, but also look at the micro moments within the experiences that don’t ladder up to how we aspire to be positioned and identified within the market.

This is not something that happens once, but rather there are teams that are dedicated to identifying brand degradation across the experience and building out the right resources and actions to be able to solve for those moments of brand degradation and shore up the experience holistically as often as possible.

We’re constantly thinking about what we define as the growth audience, right?

And in the end I think that the benefit lands on the consumers and the patients. And I’ll give you an example as to why.

You’ve got, obviously, wearables that track loose sleeve heart rate, glucose, and so people are inundated and flooded with numbers. More data doesn’t always mean more clarity for folks, but what I think this makes space for is really a wonderful end benefit to patients and consumers, in providers needing to consider more holistic offerings.

And I’ll use GLP-1 medications like Emti, bruja as an example. Their efficacy is so directly tied to lifestyle factors, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and now more precise data available. Consumers are expecting these brands to address these interconnected factors, not just prescribe a pill or an injection.

What that means for a lot of these businesses is that they will build their own integrated offerings. Some will form strategic partnerships and some will just maybe play in those adjacent spaces solely through the means of content.

What that really means is that in the end, more holistic offerings are gonna define success for these businesses because we have so much access to data to prove efficacy that it’s currency for modern healthcare business.

---

Chris Madden:
Our bodies are integrated systems. From a business perspective, this can represent opportunity for expansion for digital health companies. They can expand from being a point solution to being a platform.

There’s a human biology reason as well as a business reason that these digital health companies tend to start with a single problem, then expand to care for the whole person.

One of the most important things about branding is to keep it alive and vibrant.

---

Chapin Herman:
One of the biggest misconceptions we see is this idea that branding ends with the delivery of a brand book that’s like this static document that solves for everything. But for us, our belief is that branding is the sum of all the experiences that people have with the company and it transcends product, customer service, social presence, packaging.

It’s this living system and it’s evolving constantly. And at the end of the day, so many times people ask, “What is good branding?”

It, full stop, is the kind of branding that helps to sell product. All the aesthetic and emotional strategic work that goes into it is all entirely focused around conversion and growth and loyalty, and if it serves any other purpose, it’s not doing its job.

Every business should be brand sharpening on a continuous, never ending basis. They should be conducting brand degradation exercises.

The ones that understand it are the ones that stand out, and the ones that know that they have to continue to move and evolve and be comfortable being a little bit amorphous, with the right sets of values and the things that remain true, but with soft and squishy parts around the edges that allow them to extend to what’s happening in the market, what’s happening with competition, with technology, with culture.

That’s where the most sizable opportunity is, both from a business standpoint, but also from the ability to help more people with any kind of product or service.

---

Chris Madden:
As the evolution of healthcare branding undergoes such monumental shifts, what do marketers need to take into consideration when it comes to positioning?

Quite simply, April Dunford is the go-to authority on positioning. As the author of two books, Obviously Awesome and her new book Sales Pitch, she has helped hundreds of companies from startups to enterprises find their positioning edge.

April’s clarity driven approach is especially useful for digital health companies navigating crowded categories, emerging trends, and the challenge of building trust with patients and other stakeholders alike. She’s all too happy to clear up mischaracterizations of brand positioning.

---

April Dunford:
My personal pet peeve is when people talk about brand positioning, which really bugs me, because I think there is branding and there is positioning, and those two things are actually not the same.

I would argue we cannot build a good brand or understand really what the brand should represent until we understand the inputs to it, which are positioning.

So in my world, positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering something, some value that a very well-defined set of customers cares a lot about.

It defines things precisely like: who exactly are we positioning against? What are the alternatives to our product? How are we different from those alternatives? And specifically, what is the business value that we can deliver that the alternatives cannot?

Then we also need to define who’s a really good fit for that business value, because when we decide this is the value that only we can deliver, not every company in the land cares the same about that value.

And then lastly, it defines what is the market you’re gonna win, or put another way, the market category or the frame of reference that we position a product in such that our value kind of makes sense to those people.

That’s how I think about positioning.

I work mainly with technology companies. In technology companies we tend to have a vision, the far future state of our glorious product. It’s the all singing, all dancing thing we wanna be when we grow up, 10 years from now or five years from now. If we’re raising money, it’s the future that we paint for the investors and say, “Oh, the vision is, eventually we’re gonna be this.”

The strategy is the way we’re gonna get from where we are right now to where we wanna be in the future.

For tech companies, often that means we’re changing the market we go after. We might say, “Well, we’re gonna start by focusing on little wee companies, because we can service them very well, even with a product that doesn’t have all the things. We have a good product for little wee companies, so we’re gonna sell to little wee companies. But then once we’ve dominated that market, then we’re gonna start focusing on the mid-market a little bit more. Then once we get the mid-market, then we’re gonna add some other things, or maybe we’ll even do an acquisition, and then we’ll have this much broader set of offerings. Eventually our vision is we’re gonna be the best thing for everybody in the land.”

All the way, the strategy outlines what are the steps we’re gonna take to get there.

Your positioning at every step in that journey defines why a customer should buy you versus the other alternatives at that step.

I worked for a company and our vision was to be the greatest CRM for large enterprises anywhere. That was the vision. But our first step in that journey was we were gonna sell to investment banks.

Our original positioning was: we are the greatest CRM for investment banks, and we had a way to win there. There wasn’t as much competition there, and the competition that was there, we were clearly better.

But our strategy said, well, we’ll start there. Once we’ve established a beachhead there, then we’re gonna add some new functionality, and then we’re gonna go after retail banks. At that point, the positioning isn’t gonna be CRM for investment banks anymore. It’s gonna shift, and then it’s gonna be CRM for retail banks.

Now we’re not just targeting investment banks, we’re targeting banking, so we’re gonna be CRM for banking.

Then the next step in the strategy was, banking is sort of adjacent to insurance and in some ways overlaps with insurance. So we were gonna add a bunch of things for insurance, and then we were gonna go after insurance.

At that point we would shift the positioning and say: we are CRM for financial services. So investment banking, retail banking, and insurance.

Then if we captured that market, then we reasoned that we would be very big at that point because that is a very big addressable market. Then we could take on the established leader for all of enterprise CRM, and then we would knock them out.

How do people actually do positioning?

The closest thing I ever came to that was something called a positioning statement. Most people are familiar with this, but if you’re not, it’s kind of like a mad libs, fill in the blank sort of a thing.

“We are a blank that does blank, unlike blank, blanky blank blank blank.”

The blanks are things like: here is my competition, this is the value I deliver, these are my customers I’m going after, this kind of thing.

When I first encountered that thing, I had already repositioned a couple of things, and what bugged me about the positioning statement was there were these blanks in there like “market category,” and I’m like, I could position almost any product in a dozen different market categories. The question is, what’s the best one? There was no answer to that.

So the positioning statement, I thought, encouraged you to just write down whatever your assumed positioning was. It certainly wasn’t a methodology to get you to great positioning, or even better positioning than the positioning you had right now.

So I found that very frustrating.

I embarked on a multi-year journey to dive deep into how we do positioning. Maybe I could take positioning and break it down into its component pieces, get the best answer for each of the component pieces, smash it back together and voilà, good positioning.

Breaking it into pieces wasn’t hard because the pieces correspond to the blanks in the positioning statement, and so there are five of them.

The first one is competitive alternatives. If you didn’t exist, what would a customer do?

Second one is differentiated capabilities. So what have you got that the other guys don’t have? That is feature function of your product, but also capabilities of the company. Maybe you do pricing in a different way or services in a different way.

The third one is differentiated value. This is the “so what” of your capabilities. What is the value that your product enables for a customer that no one else can? What’s your differentiated value? How are you helping a customer make money or save money or do something better?

Fourth is best fit customers. We’re not trying to sell to everybody. We’re trying to sell to customers that are really a good fit for our stuff. So how do we define that?

The last one is market category. Am I a database or a business intelligence tool? Am I email or am I chat?

Once you break it up like that and you lean back and look at it, the first thing you’ll notice is each of the component pieces actually has a relationship to the others.

The positioning statement gives you no clues about this, but it should.

The value my product can deliver for customers that no other product can is completely dependent on my differentiated capabilities. I have stuff in my product that it does that no one else does, that unlocks that value. So I can’t figure out differentiated value without figuring out these distinct capabilities.

But my distinct or differentiated capabilities are only distinct or differentiated if I compare them to a competitor. So I can’t figure out what’s unique about my stuff until I know who a customer is comparing me to.

So those three things are tied together. I can’t figure out one without knowing the other.

Then think about best fit customers. What’s my definition of a best fit customer? That’s a customer that really, really cares a lot about the value that they can only get from us.

So I can’t figure out best fit customers until I understand what my differentiated value is. Those two things are related.

Then market category is the last thing. Market category is the context I position my product in such that this differentiated value kind of makes sense to these best fit customers.

We start at something, we work our way around, we get candidate positioning, we take it out to the market, we see if it works. If it works, great, we run with it. If it doesn’t, we go back to the drawing board and we do it again.

I sat there for years doing that, and it was terrible, because it’s great if your first guess is correct. Then you look like a star. CEO hires me to go fix positioning. I come in as a VP of marketing, I get this positioning, we take it to the market, we test it. If it works, I’m a hero. Everybody’s like, “Best thing we ever did was hire that April. She came in here and fixed that thing and everything’s great.”

But if I get it wrong on the first try, now I gotta go back to the CEO and say, “Oh yeah, remember that thing? Well, the first test failed, so now I need two more months to go run another test with new positioning, which also might fail.” It’s a good way to get fired.

Eventually I had an epiphany about this. I got really into Clayton Christensen and thinking about jobs to be done and jobs theory, and how that intersected with this.

Where I landed was we needed to start with competitive alternatives. If we do not start with competitive alternatives, what we end up with is positioning that sounds very good in the office, but it doesn’t work when we take it out to the market, because our positioning is insufficiently differentiated from the other things that a customer could do out in the market.

So my process starts with competitive alternatives.

If you didn’t exist, what would a customer do? That’s our stake in the ground. This is what I have to position against or what I have to beat in order to win a deal.

I start there. Then I can say, okay, what have we got that they don’t have? Here are my differentiated capabilities, and I can make a big list of those. There’s probably all kinds of things. Write them all down on the board.

Then, for every one, what I’m trying to get at next is differentiated value.

I go down the list of capabilities and for every one I’m asking myself, “So what? I got a whizzbang AI thing. So what? Why does the customer care? What’s the value that that feature enables for a customer’s business?”

While I’m going down that list of capabilities and translating to value, I don’t want to end up with 9,000 points of value. I want one, two, maximum three value themes or value buckets.

What we want at the end of this step is to be able to say: look, customers should pick us because we are the only solution on the market that can deliver this value plus this value, and the features are how we get that done.

Once we’ve got that, then we can say, okay, we’re the only ones that can deliver these points of value, but let’s be real here, not every customer cares about those things.

So what are the characteristics of a target account that make them really care a lot about the value that they’re only gonna get from us? This is our bottoms-up way of getting at an ICP.

Once I have that, then it’s like, okay, I got this value, I’m trying to communicate it to these folks. What is the best market category to position the product in?

If we are doing a B2C thing, like we sell to a business and that business then sells our thing on to a consumer, typically we have two positioning challenges. We have the positioning for the business. Why should the business sign on with us? Why should the business pick us versus other things they could do or other partners they could work with or other choices they might have?

But if our success depends on ultimate consumer adoption, then either we are out there marketing to the consumer, trying to get the consumer to adopt this thing, or the business that we’ve just sold to has that responsibility to then try to get consumers to adopt the thing.

So we will have this consumer positioning, which is often very different, because the consumer is making a different comparison. There are different competitors in the minds of the consumer, and for the consumer there are different points of value.

When we think about selling something to a business, generally we only have two real value pillars. We’re either helping you make money or we’re helping you save money, and that’s it. The business doesn’t really care about anything else.

Whereas if I’m selling to a consumer, consumers care about all kinds of stuff. They care about getting a date. They care about looking cool. Sometimes that value we can kind of make up, and that’s really different from B2B.

---

Chris Madden:
If you’re a marketer, how much thought have you put into positioning?

Let’s say you’re a smaller company where roles overlap and everyone wears multiple hats. Someone’s working on positioning, right? Do they know what they’re doing, and is it sufficient?

---

April Dunford:
Often what we see is that positioning is happening, but it’s happening accidentally. Someone wrote a sales deck sometime, somebody wrote a tagline, somebody wrote a value proposition. It all kind of got bolted together, and that’s what we’re running with.

I think it’s really important to have a cross-functional team working on this so that we get the best possible answer that takes advantage of everything that everybody understands about the customer, their process, and the market.

---

Chris Madden:
How does this apply to digital health companies, I wondered.

Many of them have B2B sales teams to create partnerships. For one, they have to get employers on board with a new way to improve patient health. Then there’s the insurance networks, which also need to be convinced. They’re the ones that decide which treatments are covered.

In terms of B2C, digital health enterprises need to get people that work at those companies, or are covered by those insurance plans, to activate and actually use the benefit that is offered to them.

There are a few things that a company can consider to properly position for the consumer.

---

April Dunford:
If I have a thing that I’m selling straight to a consumer, there’s no B2B2C, it’s just B2C, straight to consumer. I think you can use a similar process to get to your positioning, although I will caveat that my process is not designed for consumers.

The piece that you really need to think about is the value.

---

Chris Madden:
In the health field, direct choices by consumers have extremely high stakes.

Let’s say you have cancer and you must make a decision whether to use a virtual clinic or to do exactly what your primary care physician tells you.

---

Chapin Herman:
There’s a number of products and companies that I’m excited about.

One is a company called Echo Health. It’s a digital stethoscope business. As the world digitized, the most commonly used device in medicine remained analog. They digitized it, and now they have, on the way to, millions of recordings. They use those recordings in their AI to detect cardiac dysrhythmia, heart murmurs, and heart disease two to three times better than a human can, which is remarkable.

We’re also working with a company called Fatty 15, which is an incredible supplement. It’s an essential fatty acid, the first one discovered on the way to 90 years. It has awesome leadership in Stephanie Van Watson and Eric Van Watson.

There is an incredible story of how they discovered it, studying dolphins on two different parts of the country for decades and recognizing aging and disease patterns in those dolphins, and ultimately distilling it down to different levels of C15 in those dolphins.

They were able to isolate that as a supplement and sell it as Fatty 15. I think it’s one of those products that’s right for everybody. I don’t think that there’s anybody that can’t and wouldn’t benefit from taking it. It has tremendous impact on overall health and wellbeing.

And then the last one is a company called Mild Detox. It’s modern physical therapy. It’s not just reactive therapy once you get hurt, but it’s proactive. It’s a combination of both massage, traditional physical therapy, and chiropractics.

Incredible experience. They’re based in Canada, have a sort of cult-like following, and we’ve been helping them to grow the business and the brand here in the US market. I can’t speak highly enough of the experience. I went there for myself and signed up for a 10-pack immediately thereafter.

---

Chris Madden:
The enthusiasm for those new health products really does illustrate how right Chapin is. Consumers are more involved. Some are more obsessed with their health than ever before, especially with products and services that they can buy to improve it.

So if you want their attention, you have to learn to stand out.

And if you want people’s trust, you have to be honest and authentic with them, because the business of health is about personal relationships.

Branding sets the stage, but how do you actually earn attention?

The next episode, episode three, digs into people focused sales and marketing, exploring how influencers, enterprises, and earned media shape credibility in healthcare. It’s where human trust creates momentum within markets and audiences.