Faith-Based Advertising? In the Right Part of the Country, with the Right Message, One Hospital Can Sing Its Praises

by Peter Hochstein

A surgical team in blue scrubs stands silently in a circle under the intense lights of an operating room. They reach out to hold hands. Then one of them speaks: “Lord, we invite you to be the center of everything we do this morning. We ask you to be our hands and our eyes. Watch over the surgeon. Give him the skills he needs, and keep us all safe.”

“Amen,” choruses the team.

It’s more than a moment of solemn drama. This is the content of a 15-second TV spot for Saint Thomas Health, a hospital system based in Nashville, TN, that is daring to proclaim its faith-based origins and culture—so far with positive results.

Saint Thomas Health—with five campuses and 1,400 licensed beds— found that its image needed sharpening, explains Rebecca Climer, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of the institution.

There were several reasons, but one was that Saint Thomas Health is a Catholic institution that had acquired the local Baptist Health System. “There was not a concerted effort to bring the hospitals together in terms of culture, or to strongly identify them. For a long time each of the hospitals maintained their existing logos with the tagline, ‘A member of Saint Thomas Health,’” says Climer. And some doctors at Baptist Health, she adds, reportedly felt disenfranchised.

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