Robin Wyatt, CMO at AtlantiCare on Infusing Disney’s Customer-Centric Approach in Healthcare

Robin Wyatt is the chief marketing officer at AtlantiCare, one of South Jersey’s largest healthcare organizations. With a history that includes key roles in marketing agencies, the Walt Disney Company, and Northwell Health, Robin brings a wealth of experience in strategic and performance-driven marketing. 

Christian Banach sat down with Robin to discuss how she’s marketing a beloved community healthcare system in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Where to find Robin Wyatt: LinkedIn

Where to find Christian Banach: LinkedIn

The Disney University Curriculum 

Christian: 

Tell us a little bit about your background. 

Robin:

I started my career on the agency side and spent five or six years on that side of the business. I decided that going on the client side was more appealing to me and transitioned over to entertainment.

I moved in-house to the Walt Disney Company as a manager early in my career. I had a chance to spend eight years based out of Burbank, working on the digital side of the Walt Disney Company’s work, and then transitioned out to New York and spent eight more years working on their live entertainment properties.

A couple of years ago, I got a call from Northwell Health. It was during the height of a global pandemic, and I decided that was my moment to put my marketing skills towards mission-driven work and make the transition into healthcare. 

Christian: 

What an interesting path and journey. I’d like to focus on a few things you mentioned, like your sixteen years at Disney. How did that experience shape you?

Robin:

The short answer to that is that it has shaped everything. I got a master class in all things marketing through my version of Disney University, essentially. I got to be boots on the ground for many years, learning the Disney way.

Asking questions like, How do we put customers first? How do you have a customer-first, customer-centric approach? How do you make sure that your brand message is always succinct, clear, concise, and consistent?

For AtlantiCare, that’s “how do we make sure that we’re filling schedules and appointments and making sure that we are the healthcare organization of choice?”

Christian:

After Disney, you moved into healthcare, but that seems like a very different industry. Tell us more about that. 

Robin:

It seems like a huge pivot to go from entertainment to health care. At its core, it’s all the same. How do you connect with people on their journey and meet them where they are? 

It doesn’t matter if they’re planning a vacation or choosing a physician; they just want to know they are getting a good customer or patient experience.

I’m considering how I, as a consumer of healthcare, can think about making it a little less scary and a little less fear-based for anyone who has an ailment and is too nervous to find out what it’s about. We use a lot of jargon in healthcare. I want to get rid of all of that and just approach people where they are and how they want to be spoken to.

Wyatt’s Vision for AtlantiCare

Christian:

Tell us more about AtlantiCare and your current role.

Robin:

Sure, I am the Chief Marketing Officer for AtlantiCare. This is a role that has been vacant for roughly 10 years prior to my joining. A lot of work is being done here in the community, but marketing was never their focus. And in recent years, they recognized it was time to put the quality of the work they do out in the market. 

We have about 6,200 employees at more than 100 locations. And that includes hospitals, urgent care centers, physician provider offices, and a freestanding emergency department. As a company, we’re guided by the question, How do we take care of the health and well-being of the communities we serve?

Christian:

Healthcare is very competitive now. How are you thinking about differentiating AtlantiCare from other organizations?

Robin:

Healthcare plagued by a sea of sameness. The charge that I have to my team here is simple: How can we make sure that we are different from everyone else? 

In these first 90 days on the job, I’ve focused on getting to know the business and making sure that every single communication, internal and external, elevates our brand. 

One of the first things I noticed when I joined was a logo everywhere. Within the company, being 125 years old, a lot of departments and organizations have modified our logo to serve their needs. We’re going back to make us one united company with one united look and feel. 

I was able to get those RFPs on the market right away so we could hit the ground running. There was a lot of listening and learning happening, but what can we activate so that we’re ready to go when the time is right? How do you make sure that the brand is clear, concise, and consistent?

Christian:

What are some of the KPIs that you’re tracking in your role, and how are those shaping your RFPs or other work you are planning?

Robin:

I think the KPIs are standard in marketing. Are we driving volume? Is our brand’s awareness high? Is our market share growing? 

What I like to challenge my team on is to go one step further and ask, Does it elevate the brand? Does it have a positive brand investment? Is it a key priority? 

It’s not always just the metrics; it’s also about the entire journey and how do we map the patient from the minute they see a billboard all the way through—to their patient engagement with a physician, surgical centers, or inpatient treatment.

Christian:

Tell us a little bit more about that team. How big is it? What are their main responsibilities versus the agencies that you’re working with? 

Robin:

My team currently has about 20 people, and we’re growing. Their remit is really focused on brand management, advertising and media, creative services, internal and external communications, and our digital services – CRM, web platforms, apps to help patients, and patient portals.

We manage all the marketing for our brand and the marketing for our individual service lines, which for us are the areas of behavioral health, cancer services, orthopedic services, cardiology, pulmonology and neurology. And the team also manages our web presence, our patient portal presence, and our CRM—moving people through the pipeline. 

Honesty in Agency Relationships

Christian:

What about agencies? What are some of their main focuses? 

Robin:

Agencies are an augmented staffing model for me in many ways. We have teams working on our creative services and media buying. We have an agency that is managing our brand management and defining the brand architecture and hierarchy for us.

We have a team that helps us with our publicity. We manage internal resources and look to them to help get our brand and our message out locally and nationally so that we can be a part of the national conversation on healthcare. 

We also have developers and implementers who help us with the website and, most importantly, CRM. We work with very talented consultants and agencies to make sure that our CRM is smart and scalable so that we can make the most of that tool for every patient engagement.

Christian:

What do you look for in an agency partner? How important is healthcare experience? Do you consider agencies that don’t have healthcare experience?

Robin:

We look for healthcare experience, but it depends on the work they’re doing. If you’re working in brand architecture, that experience doesn’t have to translate to healthcare, but if we’re going to talk to you about data warehousing, HIPAA compliance is going to be very important to us. 

We consider many things: their expertise in their market—not necessarily my market, but in their area of focus; are they truly subject-matter experts? Do they have access that we couldn’t get? How will they staff their team to truly augment our work? 

Sometimes, just the presentation matters. A Word document that is all words might be treated differently than a very thoughtful keynote or PowerPoint PDF—something that shows me how they take pride in their own brand speaks volumes for how they’ll think about my brand. 

Personality is the other big thing. I’ll spend a lot of time talking to you in a week, a month, or a quarter, so I ask myself, Do I like you? Do I want to work with you? Can I put you in front of my executives if I have a big presentation? 

It takes a lot of time for an agency to put together an RFP. I don’t want to waste anybody’s time, so I always set up a preliminary call to review the scope of the RFP.  I appreciate it when an agency says, “This isn’t my scope of business, but here are the things that we do when you’re ready for them.” And I called them back for other work because they were honest about what they could do.

Christian and Robin discussed more about her thoughts on AI and automating marketing, her weekend routine for catching up on industry news, and taking the “Year of Yes” challenge. You can see more of the interview here.

Edited for brevity.