In this episode
Ramon Soto, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Northwell Health, and Scott Goodson, Founder and Chairman of StrawberryFrog, explain how Northwell built the Raise Health movement inside a 100,000-person workforce before taking it to market, and how a 30-year-old challenger brand in metro New York went from sixth place to the number one brand in the market. The conversation covers why movements have replaced mandates inside organizations, how Northwell Studios turned Netflix and HBO docuseries into brand infrastructure without product placement, what a client-agency partnership needs to produce this kind of work, and how Soto measures a purpose-driven program in funnel metrics, media mix modeling, and incremental volume when he sits down with his CFO.
Key takeaways
- Movements replaced mandates inside organizations. Goodson’s view is that CEOs no longer hold the “jump / how high” position; people act because the cause matters to all of them, not because an individual was told to.
- Northwell’s employee engagement moved from the 47th percentile to the high 90s, and its attrition rate is half the national average, which Soto attributes to employees believing in the movement rather than to brand advertising.
- Two Netflix docuseries (Lenox Hill and Emergency NYC) did almost 100 million hours of viewing in 54 languages, generating patient inquiries from India, Argentina, and Saudi Arabia and forcing Northwell to stand up an international consult division.
- “Our brand work is our performance work.” Soto measures the movement with traditional business metrics: funnel metrics against competitors, media mix modeling for channel and message effectiveness, and incremental volume, which runs at about ten percent of overall volume.
- You can’t script 100,000 people, and no leader should try. Goodson’s alternative is giving everyone the same North Star and letting the marketing team keep feeding the movement with new ideas and narratives.
- Boring healthcare brands are expensive. In what Goodson calls the age of average, a traditional healthcare brand costs more to manage internally and more to engage patients with.
- Raise Health is a challenge, not a motto. It challenges consumers to take command of their health and challenges healthcare’s status quo, because, in Soto’s words, healthcare is not what it needs to be.
- A movement-grade partnership runs on honesty, trust, forgiveness of mistakes, absence of fear, acknowledgement, and top-level involvement on both sides. Goodson’s list of what makes the Northwell–StrawberryFrog relationship produce breakthrough work.
- Healthcare is now the bleeding edge of marketing. Goodson traces the frontier from automotive (60–70 years ago) to running shoes (30–40 years ago) to health and wellness since 2020.
Chapters
- 00:01:12 — What happens to a brand promise when 100,000 employees have to deliver it
- 00:03:29 — Scott Goodson on StrawberryFrog, the world’s first movement company
- 00:03:50 — Ramon Soto on Northwell Health: 6 million patients, 100,000 employees
- 00:04:30 — Why differentiated positioning plus creativity isn’t enough
- 00:07:00 — Why a 30-year-old challenger brand chose movement thinking: Raise Health
- 00:10:12 — Starting inside: the untold story and the employee engagement numbers
- 00:12:52 — Healthcare as the bleeding edge of marketing; what makes the partnership work
- 00:16:23 — Leaning into disruption as the creative opportunity
- 00:19:35 — Northwell Studios: Netflix, HBO, and keeping it from reading as product placement
- 00:25:21 — Aligning 100,000 employees without scripting them
- 00:28:49 — Raise Health as a challenge to the status quo; top doctors as contemporary athletes
- 00:33:43 — Measuring the movement: KPIs, media mix modeling, and the CFO conversation
- 00:37:27 — How Goodson and Soto stay agile
Why a movement starts inside, not in market
Northwell is a 30-year-old brand competing against institutions with hospital charters signed in the 1750s and affiliations with two Ivy League universities. Soto says the organization was “listless” in telling its own story to employees and needed something that unified head and heart. Movement thinking gave the brand authenticity because it drew on work the organization was already doing: a research division inventing bioelectronic medicine, the first high school for health sciences in New York, and the first gun violence campaign run by a health system. Employees were already passionate about those things; the movement gave them a frame to express it.
Why mandating behavior stopped working
Goodson’s argument is that traditional marketing, where you develop a differentiated positioning and then use creativity to express it, is not very effective, and that movements have shaped human behavior for 10,000 years. Inside organizations, he says, there was a turning point when CEOs lost their general-in-the-army position. The idea of mandating behavior shifted, and movements became the way to corral and motivate change because people do something when it matters to all of them rather than because it was ordered.
What the employee numbers show
When Soto joined Northwell more than 11 years ago, engagement scores sat in the 47th percentile. They are now in the high 90th percentile, the attrition rate is half the national average, and retention has improved over time. Soto’s explanation is that employees believe in the organization and wear their pride on their sleeves, and that the brand expresses an intangible quality the movement created. He also credits the approach for Northwell’s ability to recruit and keep nurses and physicians during national shortages, while three competitors recently absorbed brand damage from a nursing strike.
Why Northwell put content on Netflix instead of buying more healthcare advertising
Northwell Studios started during the rebrand, when the team wanted a conversation with consumers rather than talking at them, and wanted to show care longitudinally rather than as a transaction. Soto says that is nearly impossible in a 30- or 60-second spot, so they studied entertainment and the way it builds super fans, and treated a health event as a mystery viewers want demystified. Filming in a clinical environment carries patient privacy risk and other organizations have been sued, so Northwell built a process for it. The result is eight projects to date and five in the pipeline, including Lenox Hill and Emergency NYC on Netflix and One South on HBO, which followed 20-plus college students who had attempted suicide. Soto says they do not make these for brand love; they make them to address socially important issues, and the brand credit follows.
How you align 100,000 people without scripting them
Soto describes an ecosystem of employee engagement built the same way as consumer engagement: a platform for telling employees’ stories in their everyday work, a red-carpet premiere where 1,000 employees cheered when they saw themselves on screen, and the Northwell Nurse Choir, 18 nurses who formed a choir during COVID and went on to America’s Got Talent, the White House, Carnegie Hall, and Broadway. Goodson adds that Raise Health is not intended to coerce or control output. Everyone gets the same North Star, and the marketing team’s job is to keep challenging people inside with new ideas and narratives.
How the movement gets measured
Soto uses traditional, business-based metrics: funnel metrics versus competitors, the economic value of the brand work, and media mix modeling for both channel and message effectiveness. He rejects the brand-versus-performance debate; the brand work is the performance work. Marketing accounts for millions of transactions, and about ten percent of overall volume is incremental volume taken from the marketplace through marketing. Intangibles, including employee perception of the brand and how differentiated and meaningful the brand is to consumers, are measured too.
FAQ
What is Northwell Health’s Raise Health movement? Raise Health is Northwell’s brand platform, built with StrawberryFrog, that challenges consumers to take command of their own health and challenges the status quo of healthcare. Scott Goodson describes it as a challenge, not a motto.
Why did Northwell start its brand movement with employees instead of consumers? Ramon Soto says Northwell, as a relatively new 30-year-old brand, lacked a unified way to tell its own story to its 100,000 employees. Galvanizing them first made the external brand authentic and moved employee engagement from the 47th percentile to the high 90s.
What did Northwell’s Netflix series achieve? Lenox Hill and Emergency NYC did almost 100 million hours of global viewing, were translated into 54 languages, and produced patient inquiries from India, Argentina, and Saudi Arabia, prompting Northwell to create an international consult division.
How does Northwell keep streaming content from feeling like product placement? Soto says the content exists to address socially important moments, such as gun violence and the youth mental health crisis in HBO’s One South, rather than for brand love. Showing real physicians, patients, and care journeys behind the glass is the point, and the brand benefit follows.
How does Northwell measure a purpose-driven marketing strategy? With traditional business metrics: funnel metrics against competitors, media mix modeling for channels and messaging, and incremental volume, which Soto puts at about ten percent of overall volume. Employee perception and brand differentiation are measured alongside.
What makes a client-agency partnership work on movement-based marketing? Goodson lists honesty, trust, mutual forgiveness of mistakes, an absence of fear, curiosity, acknowledgement of great work, openness to ideas from anywhere, and close involvement at the top of both organizations.
Resources
Strawberry Frog: https://www.strawberryfrog.com
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Transcript
[00:01:12] Greg Kihlström: Hi, I’m Greg Kihlström, host of The Agile Brand, and here’s a question for you: What happens to a brand promise when 100,000 employees have to deliver it every day? Most marketing organizations are built to run campaigns, finite, controllable, measurable on their own terms. But when a brand’s promise has to hold up across an entire workforce, a community, and every moment a customer actually encounters the organization, the campaign model starts to strain. Something more durable has to sit underneath it. Today, we’re going to talk about why building a movement starts inside the organization, and what that changes about how marketing gets built. Using unconventional channels like streaming services, community action to activate purpose well beyond advertising, and how a purpose-driven strategy translates into revenue growth and market leadership in one of the most competitive sectors there is. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Scott Goodson, founder and chairman at StrawberryFrog, and Ramon Soto, chief marketing and communications officer at Northwell Health. Scott and Ramon, welcome to the show.
[00:03:09] Ramon Soto: Great to be here, Greg. Thanks for having us.
[00:03:11] Scott Goodson: Great to be here. Nice to meet you.
[00:03:13] Greg Kihlström: Absolutely. Looking forward to diving in. Definitely a topic I know the audience is interested in. I’m certainly interested as well [laughs]. Before we do that, why don’t each of you give a little background on yourselves and your roles?
[00:03:28] Ramon Soto: Scott, you go first.
[00:03:29] Scott Goodson: So I founded a company called StrawberryFrog almost 30 years ago as the world’s first movement company, and we started with the launch of the Smart car when it first came into the world as a movement to reinvent the urban environment. And we’ve been doing movements ever since.
[00:03:50] Ramon Soto: And my name’s Ramon Soto. I’m a senior vice president with an organization called Northwell Health. We’re the largest health system in the metro New York market. We treat about 6 million New Yorkers each year. We have over 100,000 employees. And we love teaming with Scott to really express the brand in a unique and differentiated way, a really meaningful way, both to consumers and to our associates. Looking forward to sharing that conversation with you.
[00:04:16] Greg Kihlström: Love it. And Scott, maybe a little bit more. I know you gave a brief intro of StrawberryFrog. Could you talk a little bit more about what’s the core philosophy behind the agency, and what types of leaders and organizations are you partnering with?
[00:04:30] Scott Goodson: So the basic idea is that traditional marketing, where you come up with a differentiated positioning, and then you find creativity as a way of expressing that out to the world, is really not very effective. If you look at human behavior that obviously predates modern marketing, that goes back to when man first came out of the Fertile Crescent 10,000 years ago, movements have shaped humanity. And movements, whether they’re religious movements or philosophical movements or political movements or even business movements, have really motivated people to do something, and I think we’ve just basically distilled that into a science. And we’ve worked with… We did the launch of Google. We did the launch of, as I mentioned, the Smart car. We’ve worked with Emirates Airlines in Dubai, Walmart here in the United States, and Northwell, which to me is actually one of the most joyful and inspiring efforts we’ve made because healthcare is really probably one of the few areas where purpose really does impact both the people working in the organization and also citizens of the state. So I found this particularly enriching for me. But we’ve worked across all different types of sectors, and I know we’re focusing today on inside organizations, and I think a few years back there was like a turning point when CEOs kind of lost that position of almost like the top general in the Army where they would say to their employees, “Jump,” and the employees would say, “How high?” And salute and do it. And I think the idea of mandating behavior inside organizations has shifted, and now movements actually are more important to corral and motivate change inside organizations. Because the basic idea is that people wanna do something because we all want to do it, ’cause it’s important to all of us, rather than something being mandated to an individual. So that’s a brief background on me and StrawberryFrog.
[00:06:49] Greg Kihlström: Well, and Ramon, based on that and StrawberryFrog’s philosophy, what made that the right approach for Northwell?
[00:07:00] Ramon Soto: I think Scott established a strong foundation on why movements can be powerful. For us, we’re a relatively new brand. We’re about a 30-year-old company. And we’re in just a hyper-competitive marketplace. And there were really two things that attracted me personally and our organization to Scott’s thinking. One is, how do you really differentiate yourself in a highly competitive market? And we have storied institutions that, some of them had their hospital charters signed in the 1750s by King George, associated with two Ivys. And just storied, storied brands in healthcare. Why is a consumer gonna choose us? The power of movement thinking really extends beyond the transactional and allows you to build a relationship with an individual. And as Scott articulated, it’s so applicable to healthcare. The physicians take the Hippocratic Oath. How do you express that? How do you express that purpose in a really meaningful way? And you might suggest, is that really differentiating? The reality is, many of our competitors are very profit-led and we in turn have really leaned on movement thinking to express our brand in the form of Raise Health, a challenge to consumers to take command of their own health and really position themselves in a different way. But it’s also our challenge to the status quo, to smash it, ’cause healthcare is not what it needs to be. And in addition, the internal part of that was, as a new brand, we were really kind of listless in telling our own story in a thoughtful way to our employees, and needed a unification of who we were, something that motivated both the head and the heart. And this was just a fabulous platform to change the dynamic on helping tell an untold story in the marketplace and to inform and energize an employee base to believe and act differently than our competitors and show up differently than our competitors. And it’s worked fabulously well. Our metrics are at historic highs. We do incredibly well vis-à-vis our competitors in the New York market. We have a highly differentiated brand and quite a bit of momentum behind that brand.
[00:09:32] Greg Kihlström: So I wanna talk about how that brand came to be. And I think a lot of times when we talk about branding and when we see stories, good or bad, about rebrands, it’s often very external focused and consumer facing, and certainly this brand is consumer facing as well. But the Northwell story seems to begin first with that internal, the 100,000 employees, and galvanizing them. How does starting with an internal movement change the strategic approach to how you market externally?
[00:10:12] Ramon Soto: For us, the movement expression just allowed us to be authentic. And I had mentioned before, there’s this power of an untold story. We do amazing frontier things in this organization. We have a research division that’s literally inventing a brand new category of medicine called bioelectronic medicine. The person who leads it, Dr. Kevin Tracey, everybody knock on wood when I say this, but hopefully he’s a candidate for the Nobel Prize for medicine in the future. The opportunity to really change the health trajectory for millions of people, not just Americans, but in the world. We started the first high school for health sciences in New York, in collaboration with Bloomberg and the New York Public School System, to really change the trajectory of how kids learn and give them a pipeline right into a healthcare institution. We launched the first gun violence campaign in the country offered from a health system’s perspective because in 2019, this insidious thing happened that guns became the leading cause of death for children in this nation. Just pause and think about that for a second. It’s an absurdity. And not enough consumers knew that. But our employees were passionate about it and it gave us runway to coalesce all these nodes of challenge to society and our ethos of smashing that status quo and let employees express themselves as part of this movement. I can tell you the effect is not just in the brand metrics, but it’s in the employee engagement metrics. When I started at Northwell over 11 years ago, our engagement scores were in the 47th percentile, really less than average. We are in the high 90th percentile now. Our attrition rate is half the national average. More people stay with us for longer. And that attrition rate has declined over time, so it’s a higher retention rate of employees. That is because people believe in this organization. They wear their pride on their sleeves. They believe the movement that we offer. There’s this intangible quality to what we do that’s expressed in the brand, and Scott and his organization have helped us bring it to life in a really thoughtful way.
[00:12:52] Scott Goodson: I would say something that I think is really unsaid and super important to think about. And that is, 60, 70 years ago, the bleeding edge of marketing was automotive marketing. That’s where the greatest innovation, the most fresh and fragrant ideas were coming out. Then 30, 40 years ago, it was in running shoes, and the coolest, most interesting, most breakthrough marketing was happening in that space ’cause it was a real change. This introduction of the idea that sport could actually help you live longer, be healthier. That was a new science, and the shoes kind of brought that to life. As of 2020, with COVID and the pandemic, I would say the bleeding edge of marketing is in health, healthcare and health sciences and wellness. And I think what you’re gonna hear in this podcast are things that no other brand in any other category is doing. And Ramon is a modest individual [laughs] but he was the first to do a major global Netflix series when no brand had ever done that. I mean, the innovation is so fresh and so inspirational for this generation that are coming into this space, and I think movement is a part of that. I will go one step further and say that partnership is also an important component of it. And what makes a great partnership, I think Ramon and I, we run our own organizations, and the teams work incredibly well together. And I think they work well on the value-based relationship, which is based on things like honesty. Whatever happens, client and agency need to tell each other the truth. Trust and mutual forgiving of mistakes, which are unavoidable. An absence of fear and a curiosity to produce great work. No one can produce brilliant work with a Damocles sword over their head. Acknowledgement. Ramon is very good at acknowledging great work. And I think there’s an openness where great ideas come from. The thing about movement is it’s a framework where ideas can come from anywhere. And I think one final one is the close involvement at the very top of both sides. I think Ramon and I keep a very open communication, and it not only helps to stimulate each other, but it helps to ensure that complex things work well with both sides of the team, I should say. And those are some, I think, core elements. So movement, really breakthrough marketing happening in the health and wellness space, and then deep and trustworthy relationships where nobody’s permitted to waver from the [laughs] values that we set forth.
[00:16:23] Ramon Soto: If I could just add one really important element to what Scott said, ’cause he is exactly right. So there’s a kinship in how we think, and I do think it is grounded in, where is the marketplace, where is culture, where is society, and where is the white space and the creative opportunity? And we live in a time of hyper change. I’m not saying anything the audience doesn’t know. But everything is so challenging, and everything is changing so quickly, whether it’s technology, or culture or politics or economics and even healthcare. And for us, it’s how do you lean into that disruption? ‘Cause those elements of disruption, those are actually opportunities, right? So there’s so much institutional rust that keeps things in the status quo, and very few things can rupture that opportunity to break through, and that’s where the gold is. And so Scott brings a real curiosity. And I complement that with kind of the business aspect and the traditional view of marketing. And the expression of that through movement thinking has really led to a really profound strength in an asset that we’ve built for Northwell, and frankly, for consumers as well. We’ve given them another reason to believe the good things behind healthcare in a very skeptical world.
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[00:19:35] Greg Kihlström: Scott, you had mentioned the Netflix show, and there’s a partnership with HBO as well. Certainly not the typical healthcare marketing play that you might see, and yet certainly worked well in this capacity. I wonder, a couple things there. One, based on some of the things that you’re talking about, it makes sense from a strategic standpoint. But what was some of that strategic rationale? But also, how do you keep partnerships like that to just not feel like product placement or not feel inauthentic? How do you make it feel not only on brand, but really authentic to the brand and make it really resonate with the audience?
[00:20:25] Ramon Soto: If it’s all right, Scott, maybe I’ll start the answer, and you could layer in. The thinking behind Northwell Studios, the organization that actually created this branded content, started when we were doing the rebrand, and we were really trying to look at the industry and not just talk at consumers, but really have a conversation with them to engage with them, and then look beyond the transaction of care and think longitudinally. And when you think longitudinally, care means different things to different people at different points in time. In some cases, it may be wellness and illness-oriented. But the journey of care is very personal, and it fuels your life, your love, your passion, your careers. That essence that Scott talked about during COVID that we all rediscovered, what happens when you don’t have health. And so we thought, how do you express that? And it’s very difficult to do that in a 30-second or 60-second film. And so we started looking at different industries that engage with consumers really well. We really got enamored with entertainment. They tap into this concept of fandom, which, you don’t just build fans, you build super fans of these franchises and assets, and how do we pull some of that in? And it was really taking advantage of scarcity. When you have a health event, you enter into a mystery, and you are trying to demystify. And if we could provide some information, what does a person go through when they’re going through this mystery, and invite people in behind the glass and show them the unique physicians and the platform and the place that it happens and what happens to individuals when they’re patients or they’re going down their kind of longitudinal journey of care. We thought we could capture great content and share it. And there’s a reason all of healthcare doesn’t do this. It’s super hard, and it’s super risky. Filming in a clinical environment, you’ve got patient privacy issues. There have been other organizations that have been sued and written big checks. So we took all that to bear, built a process that allowed us to capture great content, and it’s led to eight projects to date, with five more in the pipeline. The first two were Netflix shows. One was called Lenox Hill. The other one was called Emergency NYC, unscripted, multi-episode docudramas. Those two films did almost 100 million hours of viewership globally, translated into 54 languages. Immediately, we saw the business benefit of doing that. We’re a regional brand, and we got to break out of the northeastern geography, and we were getting calls from people from India and Argentina and Saudi Arabia saying, “Hey, I saw the show. I have symptoms just like that. Can I talk to this doctor?” To the point where we had to set up an international consult division to handle these interactions and screen and then fly people into the States to actually seek care. And then there’s a second aspect to this which is super important. We don’t do it just for brand love. We do it to talk about socially important moments. So we don’t shy away from gun violence. That’s very prominent in one of our Netflix shows. And one of my favorite programs is a program called One South, a collaboration with HBO, where we filmed 20-plus college students who had attempted suicide. And it is not everybody’s cup of tea. About 2 million people saw the programming. But it was such an important social message. There’s this stigma with mental health and the mental health crisis we’re going through in this country, that we wanted to create a conversation and apply heat and light and access to this behind-the-glass component of what are these kids going through. What I love about the show is you see these kids that are at their most vulnerable in the first hour of the show, and in the second you see them in recovery and really kind of thriving. And it’s a reflection of where the science is. The science is actually in a great place. If you can intervene early and identify early, and you can overcome these issues of stigma and access, the outcomes can be absolutely fabulous. And even there, where we didn’t do it for brand love, we got credit on the brand side, and we had employees who were just so grateful that we were telling these really important societal stories in the marketplace, and it was just another chapter of kind of that movement philosophy.
[00:25:21] Greg Kihlström: So I wanted to get back to the internal component. I know we touched on it a little bit, but there’s a couple aspects here that I wanna dig into a little bit. That movement idea, first of all, requires active participation. We’re talking about 100,000 employees, so we’re certainly talking about a lot of people [chuckles] doing activities and things like that. So first of all, how do you empower those employees to be able to, A, be aligned along that same movement? And then I guess the second part to that is, when you have 100,000 people that are speaking on behalf of the brand, how do you make sure that… Not everybody’s gonna use the exact same words, and that’s not necessarily the point, but how do you keep them aligned so that the brand does feel consistent?
[00:26:24] Ramon Soto: I’ll start, Scott, and maybe you can add a little bit and talk about Best Doctors and actually showcasing our employees in action. This is just part of an ecosystem of employee engagement not dissimilar to the consumer engagement we talked about as well. So, healthcare’s hard. Physician burnout’s a real thing. It is really long hours to deliver care. It’s a lifestyle job. And so one of the aspects of this ecosystem that we built is just a platform to help tell their stories in their every day. I could tell you one of the most amazing moments of my career was when we did the red carpet for our second Netflix show. We had 1,000 employees in the room. We had the Netflix first episode play. You had that iconic Netflix audio signature, the dun-dun. And you just had 1,000 people cheer ’cause they saw themselves on the screen as a representation, and that energy is really palpable. And they appreciate it. It allows us to express it in a unique way. There are other chapters that would probably take another episode to talk about. We established the Northwell Nurse Choir during COVID. These were 18 nurses who used the healing power of music to deal with this terrible thing they were going through and formed a choir. Doesn’t sound so sexy, but they were discovered by America’s Got Talent. They got the Golden Buzzer by Howie. They made it up to the finals. They are still in demand almost six years later. They’ve been to the White House three times. They’ve played at Carnegie Hall. They’ve played on Broadway. They are beloved by all of our associates ’cause they’re an expression of them, right? They’re these people who believe. They’re movement thinkers. They’re in the front line of the movement. And so we love telling their stories. We love giving them outlets to express who they are. They’re at the center of everything we do in this ecosystem. And maybe, Scott, you could talk a little bit about the latest work we’re doing.
[00:28:49] Scott Goodson: I would just say, Raise Health is not just a motto. It’s a challenge to the status quo. And whether you’re thinking about what does it feel like to work at Northwell, and what does it feel like if I’m a patient and I wanna go to Northwell, why Northwell? What’s the business problem that Ramon tried to solve when they rebranded? It was, we don’t wanna wallow in sixth place. To be successful, this brand needs to be among the top tier, and today it’s the number one brand in the New York market. I think that’s all based on this idea of challenging the status quo, the fact that we’re living in this, I call it the age of average, and where boring healthcare brands are expensive. The cost of managing a boring traditional healthcare brand is expensive internally, and it’s expensive to engage patients and consumers. So brands have to be surprising. Brands have to be different. So this idea of Raise Health as a challenge to the status quo, that there’s a better, smarter way to solve things that’s come before, I think that weighs on millions of New Yorkers, and now also in Connecticut. And internally, if you’re an employee, you wanna feel that you’re working at a very special place that hears you, that understands you. And Raise Health is not intended to coerce or control output. You can’t script 100,000 people, and nor should any leader try to do that. I think ultimately, you wanna give everyone the same North Star that they’re part of feeding this movement, and that job comes to Ramon’s team to keep challenging the people inside with new ideas, new narratives, and externally. And in the latest work we’ve done, a lot of hospitals talk about how their doctors are number one doctors. So we wanted to showcase in an elegant and distinctive manner these top docs, which Northwell has employed over the last decade. And instead of treating them as if they were just doctors, although that’s obviously important, we treated them as if they were contemporary heroes. And when we say heroes, if you ask young kids what’s a hero, they’ll tell you a sports athlete. So when you see this work, it starts off, you think you’re watching a tennis player in the last moments of the US Open. It turns out it’s actually someone who’s saving someone at four AM [chuckles] on an operating table. So it leads you in with this cultural idea that you admire these great contemporary athletes, but in fact, they’re these incredible medical professionals. So everything we touch, we challenge. Everything we do, we do differently, whether it’s women’s health or pediatrics or heart health or gun violence, as Ramon mentioned. Everything we touch, we try to tell the story in a fresh and different way, so we’re not adding to the age of average. We’re constantly challenging the status quo.
[00:33:43] Greg Kihlström: As we wrap up here, I wanna talk about measuring impact as well. And so certainly, from a financial standpoint, the results are certainly impressive, three billion in net new revenue annually. I wonder, in addition to some of those types of metrics, how do you gauge that the movement is sustaining, growing, being successful? Are there KPIs, or what are the KPIs for that, I guess?
[00:34:15] Ramon Soto: I’ll start. And it’s interesting that you’re asking this question now because we’re just entering budget season, so I’m preparing for my conversation with our CFO on the value creation behind our marketing activity. Look, we use very traditional metrics that are business-based, and everything from what are the funnel metrics vis-à-vis the work that Scott does in building our brand, and how does that contrast via competitors? What’s the economic value of that work? So we use media mix modeling to understand both the effectiveness of channels and the effectiveness of messaging. We measure everything. Our studios work, we measure in a very traditional funnel fashion as well. And I know there’s this big debate about brand versus performance marketing. We think it’s all components of the same thing, right? So our brand work is our performance work. We do have dedicated volume driving. As you articulated, our work accounts for millions of transactions, and we generate about ten percent of overall volume as incremental volume taken from the marketplace via our marketing activity. Those are the tangible pieces. The intangible is the effect on our employees, the employee perception of the brand. How differentiated is the brand to consumers, and how meaningful is that differentiation vis-à-vis this purpose-driven and movement-driven lens? We measure that as well. And in this hyper-competitive market, this challenger brand has really roared to the front in terms of its performance in the marketplace. And I had shared with you a couple of the employee metrics in terms of retention rates. In a time where there’s a nursing shortage and a physician shortage in this country, our ability to recruit and maintain those individuals as part of our system is really unmatched in the New York market. We’re really thoughtful in terms of how we engage with our associates. Some of our competitors will go to war with nurses. One great competitor, actually three great competitors, recently had a nursing strike, which did a little bit of brand damage for them. We knew we were able to successfully have a win-win philosophy and meet that element of our employee base right in the middle, and celebrate who they are and what they do. And that philosophy, really trying to be the employer of choice in a very crowded market, has worked incredibly well for us.
[00:37:27] Greg Kihlström: Scott and Ramon, thanks so much for joining today. Got one last question for both of you before we wrap up here. What do you do to stay agile in your roles, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[00:37:40] Scott Goodson: For me, it’s about I just love reading, reading the latest old books, new books, fresh ideas, new ideas from all over the world. There’s so many great ways of solving problems from all the four corners of the planet. I love also traveling and seeing these things up front. I just got back from Sweden where there’s just some incredible things happening and meeting up with brilliant innovators and sitting down. Ramon and I actually did that in Amsterdam, I think it was last year. It’s just so rich.
[00:38:24] Ramon Soto: To build on that, very much like Scott, I’m a lifelong learner. Went back to school recently just to stretch my mind on how do I show up both as an employee at work in this time of hyper change, and how do I show up as a board member. Scott and I both sit on the board of the Ad Council, and we work with them to really think about how do we do good in society with our brands and our skills and our capabilities. There are so many social issues that need to be dealt with. It’s a way of giving back. That exposure, by the way, some of the best brands are on that board and participate, and you get to just meet this audience that is really engaged. The board meetings for the Ad Council are like group therapy, right? We get to take a step back and breathe out on, “Oh my God. What’s going on with this world?” But then think about how do we use that anxiety and try to push it in a better way to be good.
