From time to time this column has focused on the critical need to separate your continuing professional education (CPE) program from that of your competitors. To accomplish that you must create a distinct and sustainable competitive advantage. By so doing you avoid the unrewarding position of being thought of as one of the "usual suspects." That is, you avoid breaking one of Shore's Ten Commandments of Marketing: "Thou Shall Never Be Perceived as a Commodity." This of course is easier said than done in an environment where CEOs on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing private companies list "competitors' strategies" as their number one concern--ahead of managing people, growth, or money--ahead of keeping up with technology!

Can CPE providers be far behind in deploying this kind of competitive reconnaissance? (See the March/April 1997 column, "Competitive Profiling.") We must all be concerned with value migration--that is, the movement of growth and profit opportunities from one CPE player to another. "Innovations are good for about three months," says FedEx CEO Fred Smith, and at this point his estimate may be generous. Do I hear a nanosecond?

Image Is Everything Whether you prefer the words of Andre Agassi, that "image is everything," or a somewhat more enduring source of inspiration, "A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches" (Proverbs 22:1), image or branding is a competitive advantage without equal. While the all-too-common belief that "if you build it, they will come" is a formula for unemployment, there are certain programs, products, and services for which this is in fact true. They all come from "builders" who share a very positive brand identity--brand being most associated with assumptions of quality, reliability, confidence, and service--in short, value and peace of mind--in brands we trust.

McDonald's and its Golden Arches, Volvo's "safety first," Nike's Swoosh, Notre Dame's Fighting Irish, Howard Johnson's orange roof: Make no mistake about it, there is a very big difference between a product and a brand. Just ask the makers of Band Aid, Kleenex, or Xerox among others. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to change your CPE Program from a program/product maker to a brand maker.

Branding: The Columbia/HCA Case Question: Can you name the nation's largest integrated provider of health care? As a member of the healthcare industry you of course know Columbia/HCA, the $23 billion hospital management company. You probably also are aware that Columbia/HCA is more than 50 times larger than its nearest competitor. But this familiarity is not nearly so present for the more than 40 million patients of the company's 342 hospitals, 147 outpatient surgery centers, and more than 500 home-care operations in 1996. Since you can't have brand loyalty and thus repeat business without a brand, the King Kong of hospital chains has set itself a course to establish Columbia/HCA as a brand name.

The scope of Columbia's national branding campaign matches the scope of its healthcare empire. In 1996 Columbia spent $106 million on advertising. Another $90 million has been budgeted for 1997 to promote the Columbia name. To put this spending in perspective, in 1996 Columbia spent $1,567 per bed or $309,038 per hospital as compared to ad spending for all U.S. hospitals at $1,106 per bed or $195,100 per hospital (sources: Modern Healthcare Reports and Quality Expectations). The company even has a tag line that accompanies all of its advertising, "Health care has never worked like this before."

Creating Strategy for Brand Loyalty Columbia/HCA has discovered branding's allure. Providers of seminars, conferences, conventions, distance-learning products, and all the ingredients we call continuing professional education should discover it as well. Columbia now has a tag line that attempts to position it in the marketplace. So can your CPE program. For example, my own center at Harvard's School of Public Health has just registered a tag line: "Where theory informs practice and practice informs theory." All of our marketing and all of our programs are now plastered with this slogan. What might your program's tag line be? What do you want your programs to be known for? In our next column, we will go beyond a discussion on the importance of defining a brand to examine specific strategies for building loyalty to your brand.