B2B Marketing: Toshiba America Medical Systems conducts a unified messaging overhaul to distinguish itself in the marketplace

SUMMARY: When the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, Toshiba America Medical Systems took it as a precipitating event to adapt to a changing marketplace. It was decided that a unified messaging overhaul was needed, preceded by exhaustive qualitative and quantitative research with customers.

See how the Toshiba team was able to distinguish its messaging in the marketplace with an integrated focus on customer voice.

by Courtney Eckerle, Senior Manager of Editorial Content

THE CUSTOMER

Toshiba America Medical Systems provides diagnostic imaging and interventional systems to primarily hospitals and imaging centers.

"The people that we work with, both in the hospital environment and at the imaging center, would be primarily within the radiology and cardiology, the physicians, the clinicians on that side. It could be the techs, so the people who run the systems are called technologists. Sonographers on the ultrasound side," said Cathy Wolfe, Senior Director, Communications and Research, Toshiba America Medical Systems.

Her customers are "the people who make recommendations on equipment, and then because they're very high-dollar purchases, those recommendations go up to someplace in the C-suite, and the C-suite will decide on the actual purchase," she said, adding that the C-suite is most likely a CFO, a vice president or someone heading operations at the hospitals and imaging centers.

CHALLENGE

Toshiba Medical Systems saw the Affordable Care Act being signed into law as a precipitating factor in an already changing market, Wolfe said.

"When your customers' market and business is changing, and for our customers, it changed significantly … your business changes as a provider of products or services to that group," she said.

Wolfe said she and her team knew they needed to change how they reached out to customers, but beyond that, "we needed to do something that was going to be differentiated in our market, but also showed our customers that we really understood their challenges."

This campaign helped her team to deliver both messages to her customers and showed how Toshiba Medical Systems differs in the market. They positioned the brand around delivering the singular message that Toshiba is the only medical imaging company that adapts to you.

CAMPAIGN

This campaign to change brand advertising was launched in November of 2014 at Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), which is the brand's biggest show of the year.

"Our goals were to deliver that message to our customers to ensure they understood how we were different in the market, that we're a company that really works to understand their needs and adapt to those needs, and then also relate to them how it can be helpful to them as they address all of these challenges that they're facing in the market," Wolfe said.

If your customer's business is changing, your business is changing, she added. So her team got to work to address the market in a different way.

They went through several steps of positioning, creating creatives, testing suppositions in the creatives, integrating and measuring how it fit into all the various channels. They then went back to make any changes that needed to be done to consistently evolve for the customer.

"It wasn't an easy transition to make entirely. It was easy in terms of the graphics that we were using, but there was some investment involved. But there are times where you just, you need to make sure that you respond to the market, and respond to all of your stakeholders. So we felt it was that important that we wanted to do that," she said.

Step #1. Conduct a positioning assessment

To start off, Wolfe and her team looked at three factors:

What was currently being done at Toshiba

What customers were doing

What the competition was doing

"We did an assessment basically looking at the competition's advertising, and we found that overall, they had a very sort of similar look, with a lot of blue," she said, adding that creatives often featured people with equipment and some lifestyle photos.

After seeing that, she said, they knew they needed to change more than messaging but the overall brand creatives as well.

Although the decision was made to change the creative significantly, one aspect they decided to keep was the color palette, because, "we were really differentiated on the color palette. We have red, and most of our competition has blue."

To thoroughly back up these changes, Wolfe and her team conducted qualitative interviews with customers.

"We would show people the materials. We did that with a relatively small number of the target audience," she said. Once that was done, and the team ensured they were on track with customers, they went to a quantitative survey online that was sent out to customers in an email.

Step #2. Test creative approaches

With the qualitative research done upfront, the team moved on to assess what was happening in the market and how Toshiba materials compared to the competition. They did this by developing two different creative approaches to the messaging and positioning — that Toshiba is the only medical imaging company that adapts to your needs.

They did this with different visual elements that worked with a quote voicing customer concerns or needs. After testing each of those approaches with customers in both qualitative and quantitative interviews, they landed on what they call a "voice box."