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Our Clients

Stryker

Stryker

"To develop an innovative and realistic external and internal communication strategy to deliver competitive advantage." That was the challenge posed by Daria Tolstoy, the Director of Marketing Communications for Stryker Corporation in its Europe, Middle East and Africa region.

"Stryker is a great company with an unusual culture. It prides itself on five key distinguishing factors, which it calls its organizational pillars. These include a winners intensity and innovation that endures"

Stryker is a global leader in medical devices. Its diverse range of products is used by surgeons, nurses and other health professionals. Underlying the brief were the following challenges:

Decentralization.
Stryker is managed in each country by Country Managers who own their own P&Ls so any recommendation had to clearly link regional initiatives with local market needs which differ widely

Multiple purchasers.
Buying medical devices is a complex process. The needs of surgeons, nurses and professional procurement specialists have to be met. Priorities amongst these groups differ widely - from medical efficacy, compliance, service support to price so how does Stryker tailor messages and behaviour to the different purchaser needs?

Multiple internal audiences.
A complex internal mix of skills is involved in bringing Strykers products to market. These include sales, customer service, human resources, communications and marketing Again, the challenge is to reach these different audiences with appropriate messages and processes and to do so in a way that clearly supports the business growth goals.

Growth.
Although operating in a competitive market, Stryker has a phenomenal track record and ambitious growth plans; communication needs to support a 20% compound growth target

In constructing our response to this brief, our major concern was how to identify and quantify different audience needs. We felt a multiple research plan was required and we designed a research template that is illustrated in the figure.

  1. Triangulated customer research segmenting different customer groups in the major regional markets the concern here was to isolate the different perceptions and needs of surgeons from nurses and from the purchasing managers in the customer organizations, and also to identify and reflect the differences in the different markets across the region. Common themes also emerged relating to the gaps between Strykers desired positioning and the customer perceptions
  2. Panel interviews in which different Stryker communities (e.g. Area Directors, sales people, HR, etc) were cross-examined on their needs and their customer needs (acting in part as a surrogate to extend the reach of our customer interview program)
  3. Focus discussions to determine local market communication issues and opportunities
  4. An on line employee survey to validate qualitative data and to develop metrics and differentiate shades of opinion and needs across the region

Critical to success was the engagement of the decision makers and implementers of the final strategy. We created a core multi-functional team to drive the project drawing on communications people from the regional HQ in Montreux and from different country operations. The team met approximately every two weeks during the work to review findings and support the development of recommendations.

The key findings included the need to more strongly support Stryker's positioning through its customer communication, and given that much of this is face-to-face, to ensure that internal communication reflected and reinforced the messages Stryker wants to get across to its customers. Some of our results, conclusions and recommendations are commercially sensitive and are not available in the public domain. However, the team developed a strategy with three major thrusts:

  1. Support the leverage of existing customer relationships to extend Stryker's reach within existing customer organizations
  2. Create more noise in the marketplace to support sales teams efforts to convert prospects and to bring more into the prospect pool
  3. Build a more effective internal communication infrastructure to provide regional direction and enhance knowledge sharing

Stryker now has a pan-regional communication strategy that is focused on the acquisition of new business and that maximizes the strengths of the regional community, while retaining local autonomy. Key enablers to deliver the strategy include a new network of international communicators and a core script to guide all communication so that the company's brand positioning is given a distinctly European expression.

The Stryker work was conducted by Mike Pounsford, Sheila Hirst and Domna Lazidou, the same HCO Alliance team responsible for the Cabinet Office project.