Branding is the lynchpin of your overall hospital, clinic, destination or facilitator corporate strategy and identity.

Branding defines your identity, frames your marketing and promotional messages, and informs employees and customers about why you do business the way you do it.

If your market environment changes, failing to update your brand in response to new environmental factors like changing demographics or new procedures, technology or competitors, is a major mistake that can cost you your loyal customers and prevent you from finding new ones. Sometimes your targeted source market environment changes, as in what's happening right now in Brexit and the new US presidential election as it pertains to globalization and U.S. healthcare reform.  

Those who planned on advantages of British subjects using the EU's Cross Border Healthcare Directive and targeted messages to British buyers must now rethink that strategy, messaging and target market value. In reality, much of the hoopla and hubub of the anticipated British utilization under the EU's Cross Border Healthcare Directive simply didn't occur.  People didn't use the benefit all that much.

Much of the estimated US interest in traveling abroad to access expensive healthcare has been the victim of false news, unverified hunches, uncited statistics, and cited statistics without defined parameters of what exactly was being counted and how.

If either of those target markets were the foundation of your brand messaging and targeting strategy - perhaps it is time to reconsider your brand relevance and impact in other potentially more lucrative target markets.