How internal structure becomes external experience
Brand is built through experience
A useful way to think about brand is as the accumulation of people’s experiences with an organization. That makes a brand much more than a logo, website, marketing campaign, or set of visual guidelines. It also makes a brand much harder to manage inside a complex organization.
To facilities, replacing broken chairs and frayed carpet may feel like a small, one-off issue. To an individual department, not answering a phone call may feel like a minor issue that happens on a busy day. To a clinical team, an uncomfortable waiting room may feel secondary as long as the medical care is excellent. To a help desk employee, one cold interaction may feel isolated.
But to patients and families, these moments build on each other. An unanswered phone call, an uncomfortable waiting room, unclear directions, and an unfriendly interaction do not remain separate experiences. They become part of the same impression.
Patient feedback reflected that contrast. Clinical competence was viewed very highly, while themes around personal touch could describe the broader experience as cold, intimidating, or impersonal. Excellent care and an uncomfortable experience could exist at the same time.
That is where organizational complexity becomes a brand problem.
Who owns the pieces that shape the experience?
In a large health system, one of the hardest questions is not whether patient experience matters. Almost everyone knows that it does. The harder question is who owns the pieces that create it.
Who owns the broken chairs? Who follows up when phones go unanswered? Who notices that a waiting room feels cold or neglected? Who makes sure help desk staff understand that giving directions is part of the patient experience, not an interruption to their work?
And when an organization has multiple campuses, how do those expectations hold across every location? How does a patient at a satellite branch receive the same care, clarity, and attention as a patient visiting the flagship location?
These are not purely cosmetic questions. They are operational questions. They are communication questions. They are governance questions. And because they shape how people experience the organization, they are also brand questions.
A brand team inside this kind of environment has to think beyond visual identity and marketing strategy. It has to understand how decisions made across the organization accumulate into a more consistent or inconsistent external experience.
Understand the patient perspective
The formal work at Mass General sat within communications and marketing for clinical departments, including neurosurgery and gastroenterology. But the work often extended beyond traditional perceptions of marketing. It meant looking at the experience as a patient or family member would encounter it.
What happens during check-in? Are people greeted when they arrive? Does the waiting room feel cared for? Do calls get answered? Are directions clear? Does the physical environment support the level of care people expect from a leading hospital?
It also meant looking beyond a single department. We analyzed patient feedback across multiple departments, considered clinician perception in relation to other large health systems, and viewed the public-facing experience alongside internal priorities, operational constraints, and departmental realities.
That kind of work is difficult to place neatly in one box. It is not just communications. It is not just brand. It is not just operations. It is all of them.
Develop the internal structure
Many customer or patient experience problems do not begin as experience problems.
Someone cannot find the right information because ownership is unclear. A check-in process feels cold because the workflow was designed for efficiency, not reassurance. A waiting room feels neglected because no one is responsible for seeing the space as part of the patient experience. A help desk interaction feels dismissive because the role is treated as operational support rather than a public-facing extension of the organization.
The experience people have with an organization is shaped by the systems behind the scenes. That became a central principle of the work: internal structure shapes external experience.
What the work revealed
In complex organizations, the problem is rarely a lack of effort. People are working hard. Teams are responding to pressure. Departments are solving the problems directly in front of them. Facilities handles facilities. Departments handle their own phones. Marketing handles content. Operations handles process. Clinical staff handles patients.
But the public does not experience the organization in pieces. They experience the whole thing.
That is why someone has to be able to see across the system. Not to take ownership away from individual teams, but to understand how their decisions accumulate into one public-facing experience. At Mass General, this work gave the brand team a reason to look across those departmental boundaries and connect issues that might otherwise have remained separate.
A broken chair is not only a facilities issue. An unanswered phone is not only a departmental issue. A cold interaction is not only a staffing issue. Each one is a small part of how the organization is understood.
Clarity comes from seeing those connections, then building enough structure to make them easier to manage. In a complex system, the brand is not just what patients see. It is also what they move through.