Prathap Reddy, Who Made a Hospital Something You Choose
For most of the twentieth century an Indian hospital was not selected. It was the one nearby, or the one the doctor sent you to, and preference did not enter the decision.
Prathap Reddy, a cardiologist, opened Apollo Hospitals in Madras in 1983, and it was inaugurated that September by the President, Giani Zail Singh.
The first corporate hospital
Apollo was India's first corporate hospital, which sounds like a financing detail and was a brand decision with consequences. A corporate hospital has to attract patients rather than receive them, and attracting them means being known, compared and preferred.
Teaching a market that it can choose
The category had no habit of comparison. Building one meant making the things a patient could not evaluate visible in some other form, through named specialists, published outcomes, equipment and the simple physical impression of the building.
In healthcare the audience is frightened, uninformed and deciding quickly. That is not a marketing opportunity. It is a duty of care.
Why the founder mattered so much
He was a doctor before he was a chairman, and in a category built on clinical credibility that biography did work no campaign could. He began at fifty, an age at which most careers are being wound down rather than started again.
What Prathap Reddy left behind him
A chain across the country, an industry that followed his template, and an expectation among Indian families that a hospital is a decision. He was honoured with the Padma Vibhushan.
What advertising people should take from it
That some categories require the audience to learn a behaviour before they can have a preference, and that this is slow, expensive and mostly invisible in a quarterly report. It is also where the largest brands come from, because whoever teaches the behaviour tends to be the name attached to it.