WORK:
Competitively position an international breast cancer expert and practicing surgeon

SUMMARY:
Highly respected among his peers, the pioneering career of Dr. Jay Harness has placed him at the center of the development of a number of breast cancer treatment advances for over 30 years.

Locked into describing himself as a breast cancer surgeon, there was little to differentiate him from other breast cancer treatment practitioners in the highly competitive Southern California market.

Yet, his accomplishments scream of an expert who should be much better known publicly than he is.

After spending time with breast cancer patients, family members, other medical providers and members of his staff, it became obvious the conversation about Dr. Harness had to elevate beyond that of breast cancer surgeon – his function – and the pop culture language of war and survival, to a basis of relevance and unique benefit to his patient, referring physician and media audiences.

With patient access to online resources growing, we repositioned Dr. Harness as a pioneer in conferring breast cancer patients with a benefit unavailable through any breast cancer practitioner anywhere:

emotional reconstruction^®

While many breast cancer surgeons offer their patients surgical reconstruction as a treatment option, including Dr. Harness, none had as yet claimed the patient benefit of emotional reconstruction. 

Dr. Harness now owns the asset.

We developed a strategy and created new communications tools to express the emotional reconstruction benefit, demonstrating how women may move beyond being a "survivor" - and the accompanying implication of non-survival - to life.  

The communications property We Live You^® works as part of this equation to replace fear with facts. A patient may think beyond losing a portion of one's body through radiation, chemotherapy and/or surgery – to treatment, breast preservation and reconstruction - to achieve emotional reconstruction; an improved patient result beyond that of cancer survivor.

Understanding how online information access often reshuffles the doctor-patient relationship, to the benefit of both, we further framed the benefit of emotional reconstruction for use online and with social platforms, attracting sponsorship from companies such as Genomic Health.

For example, within a few short months Dr. Harness achieved over 6.8 million video views of content answering breast cancer patient-submitted questions, content independently produced for his YouTube channel.

In addition, Dr. Harness now hosts a Google+ Hangout series broadcast live weekly, which in a few short weeks has attracted over 35,000 followers.

Each of these tactics supports a successful search engine optimization focus for the client's online platform, ensuring top-of-page, first page search results for a range of functional search terms, geotargetted within the client's practice area, with no paid placement.