Philips:::Simple gift of time

BRAND OWNER:Philips
CATEGORY:Pharmaceuticals/ Healthcare
REGION:China
DATE:Jan 2008 - Apr 2008

Philips brand proposition is ‘Sense and Simplicity’. It is relatively easy to communicate within their traditional consumer products divisions, but harder for Philips’ Healthcare division to become meaningful and rewarding to consumers in Chinese hospitals.

The Philips target audience in China is an affluent, working, white collar audience. They have busy work and social lives.

Time in busy cities like Shanghai is scarce and can be wasted when dealing with government bureaucracies like hospitals which have long waiting times and a ticketed queue system.

Philips developed the communication platform called ‘Create Time’, to bring Sense and Simplicity to life in the most meaningful way possible by giving consumers back that most precious commodity, their own time.

The brand developed a tool that let patients track their place in the hospital queue. This freed them up to leave the hospital for 3 or 4 hours without missing their appointment.

Once given their place in the queue, patients registered their mobile on a Philips terminal and received a text message giving them time to get back to hospital. Philips inserted brand messages into the text response mechanisms.

5 major hospitals installed the system, which reduced over-crowding in public areas and increased the efficiency of their patient flow.

At the same time Philips rolled out a TV campaign that demonstrated the benefits to consumers in using the newly refurbished, less crowded community clinics, rather than the major hospitals.

It showed consumers that they could save time by visiting the community clinic. By working with the Public Health Bureau to classify the Philips commercial as an official public health message we secured a 65% reduction in Shanghai TV airtime costs.

The system has already been rolled out to 10 hospital departments in Shanghai. Each terminal is used by 125 consumers per day on average, creating time for them and reducing congestion for remaining patients. Our simple, common sense system saves each patient 3 hours on average