Can a brand in a highly regulated industry stand out without stepping outside the lines?
Today we’re going to talk about how to create memorable brands and even new categories—within established and often highly regulated sectors like healthcare technology. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Kristin Russel, Chief Marketing Officer at symplr.
About Kristin Russel
With over 25 years of experience in marketing, I am a senior executive and entrepreneur who has scaled businesses of all sizes, from startups to multi-billion dollar companies. I am passionate about leading innovation, building brands, and generating demand in B2B markets, especially in the healthcare technology sector. As the Chief Marketing Officer at symplr, I am responsible for all marketing functions, including product, solutions, brand, communications, operations, and business development. I leverage my expertise in positioning and launching transformational technology, developing agile and strategic marketing plans, and creating revenue channels and growth opportunities. I am also a champion of women in leadership and am listed as one of the top 110 women in MedTech by Beckers Hospital Review.
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom (00:00)
Can a brand in a highly regulated industry stand out without stepping outside the lines? Today we’re going to talk about how to create memorable brands and even new categories within established and often highly regulated sectors like healthcare technology. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Kristin Russell, Chief Marketing Officer at symplr. Kristin, welcome back to the show.
Kristin Russell (00:20)
Thank you. It’s great to be here. I’m excited to talk about one of my favorite topics, brands. So, ready to jump in.
Greg Kihlstrom (00:27)
Absolutely. Yeah. And, know, welcome back. You’re a returning champion here. So I always, always like the repeat guests here. So for those that didn’t catch your earlier episode, why don’t we start with you giving a little background on yourself and what you’re currently doing at symplr.
Kristin Russell (00:40)
Yeah, absolutely. So as a chief marketing officer at symplr, I’m kind of the chief storyteller, sometimes chief dishwasher, definitely chief of a lot of events and other activities. And so I have the pleasure of kind of wrangling all of our customer facing agents and people and helping them think about how we want to communicate with our customers. I also get to oversee our customer experience.
Although granted, have a terrific partner in crime who actually is point on all of our customer success. But by and large, I think a lot about growth, about pipeline, about that overall customer experience and how they all fit together. I haven’t always been in marketing, although I’ve been a CMO. This is my third CMO gig. Prior to that, I was in marketing with Humana, big old pair, maybe some of you know them, and also worked with a number of different health tech companies in the health tech vertical. I’m thinking most of your folks are not health tech vertical people. Bottom line, I’ve worked with a lot of health tech vertical companies, but I’ve also been way back when I was a speechwriter for Jean-Christian, the prime minister of Canada, started a company and teach a spin class on the side. you know, I got a few things going on.
Greg Kihlstrom (01:47)
Yeah, yeah, good, good.
Kristin Russell (01:49)
I’m a mom with three kids. Like that’s kind of the most important thing. Three amazing daughters.
Greg Kihlstrom (01:53)
Nice, nice, amazing. Yeah. So yeah, some good, good diverse experience there. So that’s great. Well, yeah, let’s, let’s talk, you know, we’re going to talk about a few things today, but let’s start with this idea of branding in a complex industry like health tech. So you’ve worked to build memorable brands in sectors that don’t typically scream like bold marketing, right? So, you know, how do you think about creating that standout brand identity in a highly established and often, you know, sometimes conservative industries like health and health tech.
Kristin Russell (02:26)
love this question. I think it’s a great topic as well. It’s definitely kind of been my MO in marketing. And honestly, this would apply in healthcare, but if you’re in any kind of vertical, a lot of times within the verticals themselves, we can get a little dreary. can get a little staid, particularly in healthcare. So a lot of healthcare marketing involves people dressed up like doctors wearing baby blue scrubs, looking over iPads. think you’ve all… It’s like, it’s in every… It’s all over the place. And
Greg Kihlstrom (02:51)
I’ve seen that photo, yeah.
Kristin Russell (02:55)
The challenge you’ve got in healthcare of sort of like helping get your brand to stand out is actually, it’s a relatively low bar. I don’t want to knock all my competitors because it’s not a low bar everywhere, but there’s just some low hanging fruit there to be able to take advantage of and create a memorable brand experience, a unique brand experience that’s going to resonate with your customers by gummy. That really drives awareness.
You know, think most marketers to kind of get excited about this stat that, you know, people can’t buy brands they don’t know. They can’t search for a brand they don’t know. They can’t look up. They can’t engage with a brand they don’t know. So making sure the brand is memorable and stands out is really a critical first step in the overall brand experience. And I certainly believe that, but to then take that into the healthcare space and to think about how do I create a brand that my customers, when they see us at an event, when they see us in an ad or when they see even our logo on a golf, on a golfer’s shirt that they’ll think, hey, that’s simpler. That’s important for us. It’s important for a number of reasons, not just because it’s kind of cool and it looks good, but because when you see that brand, you might think, gosh, you know what? I need to get back to my sales rep on a contract. Or you know what? These guys have approached me before. I wasn’t interested in buying then because keep in mind only 95 % of the buying audience, they’re all just looking. Only 5 % are actually buying at any point in time. And so the ability to sort of be that memorable brand that will trigger, yeah, you know what? I do need to get back to these guys on that contract program or on their spend or on the workforce management scheduling tool that they approached me with two years ago. I remember that company. I remember that brand because it stood out. It was different. It was purple. It had a logo that sparked some interest. It spoke to me in a way that other brands don’t. And that’s really our goal here at symplr. My goal in marketing is to create that memorable experience from a brand point of view.
Greg Kihlstrom (04:54)
Yeah, yeah. And so, you you’ve mentioned some you’ve been part of some established brands like Humana and others, but you’ve also brought brands to market. so, know, what, whether it’s opportunities or even some some challenges or limitations, you know, what have you encountered when trying to take a brand to market in a regulated industry like health?
Kristin Russell (05:17)
So, and by the way, there’s like varying degrees of regulation in healthcare from kind of pretty basic to very highly regulated areas. By highly regulated, I mean like when you’re talking about drugs or things that will go inside of a human, that’s extremely regulated. I’ve certainly had experience with that. We’re not doing that at symplr right now. I just want to be clear. But the challenges you have when you are dealing with regulations is you’ve to be really clear about what you’re saying how you’re speaking about yourself, how you’re talking about what you offer and what you don’t, and calling out any discrepancies or nuances in the offer itself. But that doesn’t preclude you from having a brand that is memorable, like I said, or a unique font, for example, or an interesting use of colors or pop, or applying things like waves and trees and different kind of unique photography to your collateral or to your brand experience.
Nor does it mean that you can’t think about how you want to resonate with the people who engage with those regulated items. And one of the things I think that happens a lot in healthcare or in any of these sort of more highly regulated brands is you come to work and you start thinking about the marketing campaigns and what I need to do to sell and engage with this company. And you forget that the company’s just made up of a lot of people and that those people go home at night and they take off their makeup and they have wrinkles and bad hair and all the other things that I’m speaking for myself partially, but all the other things just make us human. They’ve got kids, they’ve got… We’re rounded humans. And one of the things we try to do at symplr is in our marketing is speak to the whole human. So yes, we’re talking to the buyer who has to make sure that we’re dotting our I’s and crossing our T’s and we’re really clear in our value proposition and how we’re messaging the efficacy of our products.
But we’re also recognizing that that person has a life and they are, they’re a unique individual. And so we want our marketing to wrap around them and kind of have, have other images that they’re going to associate with that might just trigger them into thinking, this is interesting. I see a resemblance here. see myself in this product.
Greg Kihlstrom (07:23)
Yeah. And I mean, that really mirrors, I think, an overall trend in B2B marketing in general is that, as you said, we’re all consumers when we go home at night or whatever. It’s speaking to that. How does that… Is that a recent… In your experience, is that a relatively recent shift or is that something… How have you applied that with symplr and how do you encourage your team to think that way as well?
Kristin Russell (07:50)
We’ve been laying the groundwork for this for some time. In fact, one of the things I did right away when I first came on board was kind of introduce this whole human approach to our marketing and the fact that there are people behind these products. We’ve recently gone a step further working with the product teams, with the sales team across the board. We’ve actually organized our products in terms of the humans that use them. So while previously we had a category of products in our world, we call it provider data management or workforce management, which
I know a lot of people on this call are like, please don’t let her talk too much about her products. But we changed from kind of organizing around these very like categorical industry specific terms to aligning more to the people who use the products. So we’ve got a clinical product, like products that are aligned to clinical users and products that are aligned to administrative user or HR users. And that’s actually helped mightily because while
We were starting to do this in marketing. It’s one thing to do it in marketing. It’s another thing to have your sales team showing up and being able to communicate and think about the fact that they are communicating with a clinical buyer with this set of products or that your product team is building a series of products that are for a clinical user focused on with these needs. mean, it’s really, I think it’s pretty spectacular that we’re doing it company-wide and it’s not just a marketing initiative. And I would, you know anybody listening to the degree that you can kind of get that alignment at the executive leadership team and start thinking about the humans that are using, engaging, selling, buying, for whom you’re driving awareness, for whom will ultimately become advocates for those products, it makes a lot of sense to organize by those individual customer personas.
Greg Kihlstrom (09:29)
Yeah. And I think the other thing you’re touching on too is this is marketing product and sales alignment too, right? Would you say that that’s part of the success of it?
Kristin Russell (09:39)
That’s the holy grail. mean, it’s kind of like a good relationship. So like, it’s always ongoing. I would hate to say, oh yeah, we’re perfect over here. I mean, we’ve got a lot of work who are constantly working through this stuff. yeah, definitely. mean, the importance of that alignment shows up, to be honest, at the customer. So when the customer experience is a solid one, I think it’s because marketing, sales, customer success, professional services, product, I mean, the whole organization is aligned around those needs.
Greg Kihlstrom (10:08)
Yeah. Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit more. You know, we talked about bringing products to market and the brand component. Let’s talk about category creation, you know, kind of the whole other level of things. you know, it’s often seen as like the ultimate power move. You know, there’s books about it. There’s a lot of talk about it, but it’s certainly not easy. Probably that’s why there are books written about it. What does it really take to create a new category in a space that’s pretty established already.
Kristin Russell (10:38)
Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you, it takes a lot of coffee. You better have some good wine on hand too and a lot of determination. I’ll be honest, a terrific partnership with your CEO as well. In our world, so just kind of going back a step, when I first came into symplr, we had a thesis. I’m going to tell you all this to everybody who’s listening as well. You got to bear with me because again, you can apply this to any industry that you’re in or any area. But our thesis was,
There’s a bunch of stuff in healthcare and it’s kind of disconnected and it’s all this stuff. It’s all the technology you need to run your hospital. So we’re going to connect all those different things. We’re going to create a category to call all this stuff. And prior to us being here, our customers, they used to refer to all this stuff. They’d just call it the other budget. They had a category for things like maybe it’s a CRM or in medical terms, it’s an ERP or a…
RevCycle management program or their enterprise sort of medical billing systems. They had categories for those, but they didn’t have a category for this other things. And the other things were really important and they spent a lot of money on these other things. And so we felt like we needed to call this something and we needed to call it something that would resonate with our customers. And so by doing that, that is basically, that was the essence of a category. And so we set out on this mission to educate analysts, to educate the market, to create the name of the thing that we’re healthcare operations is our category. We wanted healthcare operations analysts. wanted the, or healthcare operations installers or healthcare operations managers. So people are actually becoming part of this category. We also, we kind of wanted our competitors in this, like sort of a by-product if you have a category and I mean.
Right now I can say by all means we have a category because there’s a lot of competitors who are saying, yes, we’re healthcare operations. But the ability to sort of create it means you’ve got to take time, you’ve got to educate the market, you’ve got to educate those analysts. And that was an important one. So they’ll start writing about it, they’ll start supporting it. And it’s the analysts that the customers are listening to. they’re also sort of, I you can go out there and say, hey, we’re a category.
But you alone, you’re still the vendor. You’ve got to have some of these other forces coming together. And so it was over a period of time, we were lucky. had some early wins from the analyst community, recognizing simpler and some of our moves in this space called healthcare operations. We also actively went out and got the analysts and shared our point of view and asked for their point of view, their partnership to think through what is this category missing and who else should be in it what other literally inviting competitors to the table to help us build this category. We were confident that our solutions were strong enough that we could lead in the category that the way we were looking at it was the right way. But we wanted that validation and we needed the competition as well at the table. And so that those pieces started to build it. We partnered with our own learning and development team to help build out and the thinking around how we do our training, how we start to build sort of an expertise in this healthcare operation space. And to be honest, we’re still doing that. That is work that, you know, we’ll continue to build programs that help build these healthcare operations people to support our work.
Greg Kihlstrom (13:56)
Yeah. So in doing this, I mean, as I mentioned, you know, there’s, it’s kind of the advice to startups and things of like, you got to create your own category and you know, like there’s, there’s a lot of advice out there to do this kind of thing. You know, as you just explained, it’s certainly not a simple thing. What do you, I’m to ask a couple of questions at the same time here. So choose, choose which ones you’d like to answer, but you know, what do marketers kind of
What can they get wrong when thinking about defining a new category? And I guess the other question here is, is it marketing that should be defining the cat? Like who, who should be part of the process of agreeing like, Hey, this deserves its own category.
Kristin Russell (14:37)
So I love that question. And I think at any point in time, if you’re in marketing and you’re using terminology and creating language that doesn’t, that’s not coming from your customer, like you’re on, you’re on ice at that point. I think you want to be taking words, language that the customers are already talking about and bringing it back into the market. And that’s, so that’s like really like in terms of what can you get wrong? You can get wrong if you’re like way out in front and no one is around with you and most importantly, your customers aren’t there. We certainly listen to our customers. We test this with our customers. It was our customers who told us about the other budget, who told us like, hey, this is what we’re calling this stuff now. It was our customers who actually validated our thinking and said, yes, this makes a ton of sense and we can think about this in a certain way. But I’ll be honest, our customers also push back and we’re like, I don’t know if this is enough. Like, I don’t know if this means exactly like, if this is all as big as my ERP system, for example. So we’re still building and defining and supporting that thinking. Meanwhile, so is our competition. Now, I think in terms of what you can get wrong, besides not listening and not pulling from the customers, and in particular, the customers who are already starting to think about and advocate for your solution, those ones, the ones that are out there building community and building thought leadership kind of the holy grail of customers, like pulling that thinking in is critical. But I would say you’ve got to be cautious and thoughtful about where your competition sits in all of this as well. I mean, if you’re not careful, you can end up creating a market for the competition. And we’ve seen, we see that time and again. All of us have seen examples of MySpace went out and, you know, early on, did some great work. Where are they now? You know, there’s a lot of stories of organizations that have created those big categories and then we’re able to stay around long enough to really reap the benefits.
Greg Kihlstrom (16:29)
Yeah. So, want to talk about back to, back to the topic of branding. I want to, get your thoughts on how do you measure the value of, you know, branding work and brand impact. And I guess my follow-up there, you know, as, we kind of wrap up here, my follow-up is, know, how do you convince those skeptics that don’t want to invest as much as maybe they should in branding?
Kristin Russell (16:53)
Yeah, of which there’s many. So I do think from a marketing perspective, you’ve got to have your eye on overall bookings for the whole company, right? And so I mean, if the company’s winning, if the bookings are there, if the company’s doing well, cool. When that starts to be a challenge, when you’re not seeing the growth, you’re all going to come under the gun and the scrutiny is real. I can say that firsthand. I think in terms of what you’re looking to measure from a brand perspective, is important. I will also introduce just, know you’re trying to wrap up, like I think about brand acquisition. So I don’t just think about brand alone. I think about the fact that brand done well drives your acquisition and can be closely connected with those acquisition and demand generation targets. And again, it’s back to that notion that the brand, if people know the brand, they’re going to engage with the brand and they’re more likely to engage with my demand gen, my revenue marketing tactics.
But in terms of what we look at here at symplr, we’re like scrappy, right? So we’re all about, I really hate putting a lot of money in a brand survey. If I could put that money in Google Ads or something that’s going to drive pipeline, I’m going to do that all day long. So our approach to measuring our brand, we look at things like customer perceptions. So the good old word clouds that you get free from your
Your social marketing, a lot of the social marketing tools have those included in them or our PR agency will pull those for us. And so we’ll get a sense of kind of our customer perceptions from that type of work. We also look at the competitive context. How is our brand stacking up against competitors? Again, here we’re looking at things like our LinkedIn analytics, our LinkedIn metrics, social do. We’ll pull from Google as well as SEM Rush just to get a sense of how are we stacking up. We look at category perception as well.
Google Trends is a great tool. Again, like this is all kind of in the, I’m giving you all, you guys all my free secrets, but it’s a way to kind of measure your overall brand perception without investing a ton of money, but get a sense of like who’s searching for what and who else is in these categories. And the final one as well, particularly from our point of view and for anyone who’s been through a lot of different acquisitions, you’ve got.
a series of product brands that may or may not be associated with your master brand. And if they’re not, you’re going to want to measure those and be looking at, I making the transition and the turn to move those brands over into my master brand? So we’re looking at all of those different metrics kind of at a global level. And then ultimately, if our marketing is performing, if our marketing campaigns are doing well, we’re going to take some credit on the brand side. And the last thing, most important from our perspective is our share of voice. And so we do measure our share of voice pretty closely. look at that relative to the competition. We want to be number one share of voice in our industry. And we are, I got to touch wood because we didn’t, the minute I say it, it’s going to be like, but that’s an important metric as well that you can’t forget.
Greg Kihlstrom (19:45)
Yeah, I love it. Love it. Well, thanks again for joining and for, you know, coming back on the show. One last question for you before we wrap up. What do do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Kristin Russell (19:58)
Well, actually just yesterday I was on a call with a bunch of CMOs. So I am part of, I’m going to give a plug for this group. It’s called CMO Huttles, but they basically, they put CMOs in groups based on the size of your organization. And it’s almost like a 12 step AA program. Like you all get together and you talk about what are you doing? How are you doing this? mean, Drew, Nyser coordinates and moderates for us, but it’s super helpful because I’m actually hearing from the other CMOs. So yesterday, for example,
I’m hearing from Jamie from Dexcare is telling me about what she’s doing in her demand generation marketing. I’m like taking copious notes. Whether it’s Sitecore that’s giving the update on this is the latest challenges we’ve had around whatever their regulations are, what they’re seeing from a brand. Those I think are some of the ways, at least from my perspective, to stay super agile and on top of things. And then candidly, I take…
I still take a lot of vendor calls. So vendors call me, I want to understand what the technology is, what it does, how I can take advantage of it. I think staying on top of that helps a lot in terms of just making sure you’re fresh and kind of aware of the industry trends.
