Imagine your hospital wins a prestigious award, but you can’t even talk about it. Unless, of course, you fork over a lot of cash. That’s the situation hospital communicators find themselves in each year, if their hospital wins a “Best Hospital” award from U.S. News & World Report. To display that small gold badge on any marketing material—or to even say they’ve won the award in a radio ad—hospitals have to sign a yearly licensing agreement. And here’s a twist: Based on my interviews with hospital communicators, the price of the licensing fee can vary from hospital to hospital. This could depend on how many awards the hospital has won, the number of hospitals in the system, and which licensing package a hospital buys. Why are so many hospitals “buying in” to this awards culture? And if a hospital isn’t, what can they do to fight it? There’s a lot of pressure for hospital communicators to say they’re the “best,” especially if an award says they are. But I wanted to show hospital communicators that there are other ways (less expensive, more effective) to market their hospital. For example, Mayo Clinic is the top winner throughout most of the U.S. News award categories. But instead of purchasing the winner’s badge, it opts to run runs an ad campaign on the U.S. News website. If you click on any hospital that’s ranked, an ad appears that will direct you to Mayo Clinic’s site. This approach, Mayo told me, was more effective than buying a licensing agreement.
