Branding for Legacy Health Systems: What You Need to Know

Build a brand that reflects your health system’s full value

For legacy health systems, branding isn’t just about updating your look—it’s about unifying decades of growth under one clear, credible identity. Our healthcare-only approach helps you clarify your brand’s purpose, connect siloed departments, and position your organization for long-term growth.

We understand that legacy systems are complex. With layered decision-making, deep community roots, and evolving service lines, every brand move must be thoughtful, strategic, and grounded in research.

Our process brings together your stakeholders to create a brand platform that honors your heritage while moving your organization forward—visually, verbally, and operationally.

We then activate your brand across key channels and touchpoints, ensuring consistency, building trust, and helping your health system stand out in an increasingly competitive market.

Whether you're navigating decades of growth, outdated brand assets, or fragmented messaging across hospitals and service lines—we’re here to help.

At Ten Adams, we guide legacy health systems through brand transformation that honors your history while positioning you for what’s next. We help unify your organization under a single, strategic identity—modernizing your visuals, aligning internal teams, and building the consistency and credibility needed to thrive in today’s competitive healthcare environment.

Two women talking about the digital journey in an office.

How we're different

We serve only health systems.

With nearly 40 years of marketing and branding work for hospitals and health systems, Ten Adams employs surgical-like precision and expertise. We empower your team to live your brand in everything they do, From internal messaging that resonates with your patients to community-facing campaigns.

We create branding that supports your marketing efforts.

Added recognition and impact helps your promotion bring added influence because consumers are far more likely to opt for your services than less recognizable health systems. This credibility increases your brand awareness and will differentiate your organization from other providers in the market, giving you that competitive edge to boost your revenue and growth.

We're here to guide you.

We've been branding hospitals and health systems for nearly 40 years. We have a straightforward process and the expertise to guide you through it. In the end, the results speak for themselves, and you'll have a brand that resonates with your audience, turning patients into advocates.

Strategic Branding and Marketing for Legacy Health Systems

Legacy health systems face a unique set of branding, digital, and growth challenges. This guide explores the most effective strategies for modernizing your brand, aligning internal stakeholders, and improving patient engagement across service lines.

What Is a Legacy Health System?

Before diving into solutions, it’s important to understand what sets legacy systems apart. These aren’t startups or small regional players—they’re complex, deeply rooted organizations carrying decades of history, community impact, and internal complexity. And with that comes unique branding challenges.

Legacy health systems are large, established healthcare organizations that have often grown through decades of acquisitions, mergers, and community hospital integrations. They typically include multiple campuses, service lines, and provider networks — often with regional or statewide reach.

Common Characteristics:

Large, complex org charts and layered decision-making
Fragmented digital ecosystems
Brand inconsistency across locations
Deep local market roots and reputation to uphold

Top Branding and Marketing Challenges for Legacy Health Systems

Modernizing a legacy brand isn’t just about aesthetics—it’s about navigating deep organizational complexity. These are the most common (and costly) roadblocks that stand in the way of brand clarity and growth.

1. Lack of Systemness: Many legacy systems operate like loose federations of hospitals rather than unified brands. This creates confusion for patients and inconsistency in experience.

2. Outdated Brand Assets: Old logos, dated messaging, and inconsistent visual standards weaken trust and prevent cohesive communication.

3. Siloed Teams and Tools: Marketing, digital, brand, and strategy teams often operate in silos, making cross-functional efforts like digital transformation or campaign launches difficult.

4. Slow Decision-Making and Bureaucracy: Approvals are complex. Change is slow. Large internal stakeholder groups can stall progress.

5. Inconsistent Digital Presence: Websites, directories, and online scheduling tools often vary across locations — frustrating patients and decreasing conversions.

Strategic Priorities for Marketing Leaders at Legacy Health Systems

Successful legacy health system marketers don’t just manage campaigns—they drive transformation. These strategic priorities help connect internal teams, elevate the brand’s relevance, and deliver real business value.

1. Modernize the Brand Without Losing Heritage: Refreshing a legacy brand means honoring its roots while updating its message and look for today’s audiences.

2. Drive Alignment Across Departments and Service Lines: Brand strategy becomes the glue that connects internal teams — from marketing to HR to operations — around a unified identity.

3. Improve the Digital Front Door: The hospital website must be easy to navigate, mobile-first, and separate from the constraints of internal IT systems.

4. Equip Teams with Tools, Templates, and Training: From brand governance playbooks to editable campaign templates, enablement materials are key to maintaining consistency at scale.

5. Measure Brand Health and Campaign Impact: Use brand tracking studies, internal surveys, and digital analytics to report progress and secure continued investment.

Best Practices for Branding Legacy Health Systems

After decades of mergers and growth, brand fragmentation is real and can create confusion for your patients. These best practices will help you unify your system, align your teams, and scale with consistency.

Align Stakeholders Early

Great brands aren’t built in isolation—they’re built with input from the people who carry them forward. Before you begin designing logos or rewriting messaging, take the time to engage leadership, internal teams, and board members.

Conduct stakeholder interviews, cross-functional workshops, and facilitated alignment sessions to surface hidden tensions, clarify goals, and build buy-in from the start. This foundational alignment accelerates approvals later and reduces brand resistance at launch.

Create a Scalable Brand Architecture

Most legacy health systems have grown through acquisitions and affiliations, resulting in a web of overlapping names, logos, and sub-brands. A clear, scalable brand architecture helps clean up this complexity.

Whether you move toward a branded house (single master brand), a house of brands (independent identities under one parent), or a hybrid model, the goal is to reduce confusion, protect brand equity, and provide a framework for future growth. Architecture should support clarity for patients while accommodating the autonomy some service lines or regions may need.

Build a Brand That Works Across Touchpoints

Legacy health system brands must show up consistently across hundreds of interactions—not just ad campaigns. Your visual and verbal identity needs to flex from high-visibility moments (like billboards or TV) to critical but utilitarian spaces (like EMR portals, ER signage, or lab paperwork).

When patients see the same tone, look, and promise wherever they go, it reinforces trust. That means building brand guidelines that are flexible, accessible, and designed to support execution across channels, teams, and vendors.

Train the Front Lines

Your brand isn’t just a message—it’s an experience. And the people delivering that experience most often aren’t marketers—they’re schedulers, nurses, front desk staff, technicians, and outreach workers.

Equip them with brand training that’s tailored to their roles. Use story-driven onboarding, cheat sheets, and real-life examples to help every team member understand the “why” behind the brand and how to embody it in daily interactions. This turns your workforce into brand ambassadors and keeps patient experiences consistent from first call to follow-up.

Digital Strategy for Legacy Health Systems

Your digital presence is your new front door. For legacy systems with aging infrastructure and fractured web ecosystems, digital strategy must be smart, secure, and scalable—without losing brand integrity.

Separate Patient-Facing Sites from Internal Infrastructure: Use enterprise-grade hosting, 24/7 monitoring, and modular CMS design to keep websites online — even during system outages or cyberattacks.
Improve Provider + Location Directories: Make it easy to search by specialty, location, insurance, or availability. The digital front door must be as simple as booking a hotel.
Develop Content Hubs by Condition or Life Stage: Support patients with credible, branded education around maternal health, cardiac conditions, oncology, etc.
Design for Growth: Your web platform should be modular and scalable — able to absorb new hospitals, services, or JVs without a rebuild.

Marketing Campaigns That Work for Legacy Health Systems

From brand-building to service line promotion to workforce recruitment, legacy systems need campaign strategies that are rooted in data, elevated by storytelling, and aligned to business goals. These campaigns must not only drive immediate action but also support long-term growth, trust, and market differentiation.

Brand Awareness + Reputation Campaigns

In crowded healthcare markets, especially those with multiple hospital systems and growing retail health competition, legacy brands must reinforce their value and relevance. Awareness and reputation campaigns position your system as a trusted, mission-driven leader—focusing on clinical excellence, community investment, patient outcomes, and provider expertise.

These campaigns are most effective when they combine emotion-driven messaging with proof points, such as accreditations, rankings, and patient success stories. They help legacy systems stay top-of-mind while reinforcing pride among employees and physicians.

Service Line Growth Campaigns

To grow high-priority service lines—such as cardiology, orthopedics, oncology, or women’s health—legacy health systems need more than promotions. They need performance-focused campaigns that segment audiences by need, behavior, or condition and guide them through an intentional content funnel.

This includes educational content, physician spotlights, condition-specific landing pages, and conversion-ready calls to action. Combined with a robust media strategy and measurable KPIs, these campaigns drive patient acquisition and referral volume while reinforcing your brand’s specialty expertise.

Recruitment Campaigns

Workforce shortages continue to challenge health systems across the country. For legacy systems, recruitment campaigns must go beyond job listings—they must tell a compelling story of purpose, culture, and opportunity. Whether you're recruiting nurses, physicians, or non-clinical staff, campaigns should spotlight your system’s values, work-life balance, career growth opportunities, and mission.

Integrated messaging across digital platforms, targeted job boards, and employer brand videos can help differentiate your organization in a highly competitive market—especially among Gen Z and millennial healthcare workers seeking meaningful impact.

Partnering With a Healthcare-Only Agency

Legacy systems don’t need trendy creative. They need deep understanding, cross-functional collaboration, and thoughtful pacing. That’s where healthcare-specialized agencies come in.

What to Look for in a Partner

Finding the right partner isn’t just about capabilities—it’s about compatibility with the realities of a complex health system.

Experience With Complex Health Systems: Look for an agency with a portfolio of work across multi-campus, multi-brand healthcare organizations. Proven experience matters more than flashy trends.
Proven Processes for Research, Alignment, and Governance: Strategic success depends on internal alignment. Your agency should lead with research, stakeholder engagement, and a plan for long-term brand governance.
Integrated Brand, Web, and Campaign Execution: You don’t need three different vendors for brand, web, and media. A healthcare-only agency will bridge these workstreams so your strategy is cohesive and efficient.
Flexible, Long-Term Partnership Model: Legacy systems evolve—your agency should too. The right partner understands how to adapt with your organization and provide sustained support beyond launch.

Voices That Shape the Brand

Your brand doesn’t live in a style guide—it lives in the words and actions of your people. That’s why legacy systems must actively engage the voices that define the patient and employee experience.

1. Physician and Nurse Champions: These frontline leaders carry immense influence. Engaging them early in branding efforts increases credibility and adoption across clinical teams.

2. Marketing and Communications Teams: They manage the day-to-day execution and storytelling. Their input ensures that your brand platform is practical, scalable, and built to work across every channel.

3. Executive Leadership and Board Members: Your brand strategy should reflect the vision and values of system leadership while helping guide decision-making and strategic priorities.

4. Community Partners and Patients: Brand perception starts externally. Collecting qualitative and quantitative insights from your community ensures the brand reflects real-world needs—not just internal aspirations.

Case Study: Trinity Health — Rebranding a Legacy System for Modern Growth

Even high-performing health systems can struggle with outdated perceptions. Trinity Health, a long-standing provider in North Dakota and eastern Montana, faced that exact challenge. Despite investing in technology, facilities, and people, public perception didn’t reflect the organization’s excellence. That’s where strategic branding made the difference.

The Challenge

Trinity Health had been making major strides—expanding care, building a new state-of-the-art campus, and elevating patient outcomes—but still faced lingering skepticism as a “community hospital.” The brand needed to evolve to match the care being delivered.

The Strategy: Transformative Branding

Ten Adams partnered with Trinity Health to close the gap between perception and reality through a comprehensive rebranding initiative designed to inspire confidence and celebrate progress.

Brand Positioning + Messaging: We created a clear brand positioning framework centered around the idea of “Making More Possible,” a theme that anchored all messaging and helped express the organization's advanced capabilities, compassionate care, and commitment to innovation.
Logo + Identity Development: A new logo—composed of three overlapping circles—symbolized collaboration, wellness, and compassion. Inspired by the region’s Scandinavian heritage, it reflected both local pride and the system’s evolving future. We supported this with a full visual identity system and brand standards manual to ensure consistency at every touchpoint.
Internal Launch: Trinity's internal rollout was built to excite and unite. Employees received personalized invitations to participate in the launch, along with interactive brand commitment events, branded giveaways, campus graphics, and more—all designed to build ownership from within.
External Campaign: A robust, omnichannel launch campaign introduced the new brand to the community with TV, print, outdoor, radio, digital ads, social media, and branded environmental graphics. The goal: spark regional pride and shift perception from outdated to forward-looking.
Website Redesign: To complete the transformation, we reimagined the Trinity Health website to reflect the new brand and prioritize patient experience. The updated site aligned with the new messaging and made “Making More Possible” tangible for digital visitors.

The Results

The brand launch delivered strong engagement and visibility across digital and physical channels:

97,667 Facebook Impressions
1.74 Million Display Ad Impressions
3,827 Landing Page Views
62 New Instagram Followers during launch

The campaign helped Trinity Health shift community perception, build pride across its workforce, and step confidently into its next era of growth.

Ready to Turn Your Legacy Into Your Advantage?

Your brand should reflect the scale, impact, and excellence your health system delivers every day. At Ten Adams, we specialize in helping legacy organizations evolve with purpose—clarifying complex structures, aligning stakeholders, and building brands that drive reputation, recruitment, and revenue.

We’ve done it for Trinity Health, Kettering Health, and Willis-Knighton Health—and we can do it for you.

Let’s build a brand worthy of your legacy. To get started, contact our team.

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