Bringing Healthcare Marketing Teams into Partnership with Experience

Michelle Silva, M.A., Strategic Advisor of Consumer Experience, NRC Health

Some marketing teams are reticent, but collaboration matters

Hospitals and health systems increasingly recognize the importance of consumer and patient experience in shaping reputation, loyalty, and market competitiveness. Yet a divide often exists between marketing and branding teams on one side, and experience and operations teams on the other. While marketing departments attract consumers and patients and influence their perceptions, some consider the actual experience of patients once they enter the system as being outside their domain. This siloing undermines credibility, erodes trust, and creates misalignment between the expectations set through branding and the reality patients encounter in the clinic.

In some health systems, marketing has been viewed historically and narrowly as a communications function, responsible for advertising, brand positioning, reputation, and public relations. Unlike marketing teams in consumer-facing industries like retail and e-commerce, who are often responsible for driving the customer journey from beginning to end, healthcare marketing teams tend to limit their focus to early-stage touchpoints like awareness-building and acquisition. This mindset encourages marketing teams to view patient experience largely as operations-driven, with little or no connection to their work.¹

In addition, hospitals and health systems are often highly siloed, which leads marketing teams to focus exclusively on shaping perceptions, while operations teams manage service and care delivery.² Collaboration is uncommon, because few processes exist to incentivize or require cross-functional planning and execution.

Marketing teams may resist involvement in patient experience because they lack authority over the clinical and operational processes that most directly affect satisfaction. If associated with patient experience, marketers can fear being held accountable for negative outcomes beyond their control.³ By avoiding collaboration, they protect their performance metrics (e.g., brand awareness, campaign reach) from skewing along unpredictable and fluctuating patient satisfaction scores.

Differences in key performance indicators also create misalignment between departments. Marketing is evaluated based on metrics such as impressions, web traffic, campaign ROI, and patient acquisition, while patient experience focuses on HCAHPS scores, loyalty measures, and qualitative feedback. Because these measurements rarely overlap, little natural incentive exists for teams to work together. Without shared performance frameworks, collaboration tends to be limited or even nonexistent.⁴

Research shows that patient experience is the brand.⁵ Promises made through marketing campaigns lose credibility if the actual patient journey does not align with the expectations they set. Therefore, brand trust and loyalty are directly shaped by consistency between messaging and experience.⁶ Without collaboration, hospitals risk creating brand dissonance that erodes consumer confidence.

At a time when patients increasingly think and act like consumers, marketing is no longer just about outreach. In today’s consumer-centered world, patients actively shape their own care journeys in partnership with hospitals, blurring the line between what’s promised in communications and what’s experienced in care and service delivery. To compete successfully in their markets—and against growing retail healthcare competitors—hospitals need marketing, experience, and operations teams to work together in shaping not only perceptions, but also the environments of care and service that patients encounter.

Collaboration can drive both marketing effectiveness and experience improvements. Marketing communication has the strongest impact when care delivery reinforces those promises in practice.⁷ In this way, operations and marketing teams share responsibility for ensuring authenticity, which strengthens both brand equity and consumer/patient satisfaction.

Experience teams often uncover bright spots, such as a clinic with an exceptional, compassionate care team or a service line that consistently delights patients. Marketing teams can spotlight authentic stories to build a positive external reputation while also reinforcing internal culture.

Consumers and patients don’t separate brand promise from experience. If a hospital markets itself as “seamless and compassionate,” for example, patients expect to feel that at every step of their journey. If reality doesn’t match, experience scores decline, complaints rise and trust erodes. What’s more, expectations shape perceptions of care. When patients come in expecting efficiency, warmth, and convenience because that’s what they were promised in marketing campaigns, they judge every interaction against that standard. Even strong clinical outcomes can feel disappointing if the surrounding experience falls short.

Collaboration also creates consistency, which builds confidence and decreases friction. Patients want to know what to expect, and to feel that the hospital reliably delivers. When marketing and experience are aligned, it creates a sense of dependability that reassures patients during what is often an overwhelming and stressful time. If patients encounter friction, confusion, or indifference after being promised ease and compassion, that mismatch adds frustration and anxiety, undermining their sense of safety and trust.

Finally, authenticity matters. Consumers and patients value honesty. When a hospital’s external story matches the experience lived inside its walls, people feel respected, rather than sold on something that’s not great. That authenticity strengthens loyalty more than any campaign can.

Creating exceptional experiences for consumers and patients is everyone’s responsibility. This means that marketing teams must help break down silos and actively collaborate with experience leaders to ensure that the promises they put into the marketplace are lived out in practice. Below are a few steps they can take to drive alignment:

¹ Nguyen, T. and Simons, J. (2021) “Healthcare branding and patient-centered experience: A systematic review.” BMC Health Services Research, 21(1), 812.
² Gupta, A. and Kumar, S. (2022). Hospital marketing communications and consumer experience: The mediating role of perceived service quality. Health Services Management Research, 35(4), 230–242.
³ Berry, L. L. and Bendapudi, N. (2019). Service branding in healthcare: The patient experience as the brand. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 94(1), 3–5.
⁴ Almazrouei, F. and Nyadzayo, M. (2023). The effect of hospital brand image on patient experience and loyalty in private healthcare. International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing, 17(3), 385–403.
⁵ Berry, L. L., and Bendapudi, N., “Service branding in healthcare.”
⁶ Shabbir, R., Khan, M. M. and Hassan, R. (2025). Hospital branding and patient satisfaction: The mediating role of trust and loyalty. Health Marketing Quarterly. Advance online publication.
⁷ Gupta, A. and Kumar, S. (2022). “Hospital marketing communications and consumer experience.”