When Charleston, W.Va.-based Vandalia Health set out to consolidate three legacy health system brands under a single name, the marketing team braced for a long, expensive climb in name recognition. The journey turned out to be faster than expected.
Total brand awareness for Vandalia Health rose from 7% to 36% in a little less than two years, according to quantitative research the organization conducted across West Virginia and slightly beyond, Chief Marketing Officer Elizabeth Pellegrin told Becker’s.
Vandalia, now the state’s second-largest health system with 17 hospitals, was formed in September 2022 through the merger of CAMC and Morgantown, W.Va.-based Mon Health, with Elkins, W.Va.-based Davis Health System joining in 2023. Rather than swap every sign at once, the system took a phased approach, first introducing the Vandalia Health name beneath existing logos.
The $2.9 billion system’s employees pushed the timeline faster than its leaders anticipated.
“To be honest, I was surprised at how quickly people adopted it, particularly our employees,” Ms. Pellegrin said. “I thought there would be more of ‘we want to hold on to legacy brands,’ but we had employees who wanted to put Vandalia Health on everything and leave off all the legacy names, and I kept saying, ‘No, that’s not how the brand works.'”
Market research pointed in the same direction. Vandalia, which the British originally used to describe the territory that became the region in the 1700s, now leads a blended naming structure: Hospitals retain a nod to their legacy systems, while ambulatory services fall strictly under the Vandalia Health name.
Ms. Pellegrin said that mix lets the system market its full reach in a way three separate brands never could. The system operates more than 220 locations across four states, and the unified ambulatory branding allows it to promote, for instance, 50 primary care locations under one name.
The awareness gains arrived even though the most visible part of the rebrand — signage — remains a work in progress. Ms. Pellegrin attributed the pace of the rollout to scale and construction timing; the system is sequencing some signage changes to coincide with new building projects rather than installing signs only to tear them down later. She said the bulk of the brand change should be complete by the end of 2026, with the remainder finishing in late 2027 as construction wraps.
To track the gains, Ms. Pellegrin’s team built a fresh research baseline as the system became Vandalia, drawing on brand-awareness measurements she had long conducted under CAMC.
The system also leaned into an unconventional color palette to stand out in a market crowded with competitors in blue and green. With the legacy systems’ blues, grays and greens effectively off the table, the team landed on pink and slate.
“There’s nothing else in the market that has these colors in healthcare, for sure, and really in most other industries,” Ms. Pellegrin said. “So, between the name of being Vandalia Health brand new and then introducing a brand new color palette, it’s definitely done what we wanted it to, which is to separate us.”
Asked what she would do differently, Ms. Pellegrin said she was ready to lead with the Vandalia Health name from the start but came to see the phased approach as the right call.
“Looking back, having those two to three years of transition, I think did help with the brand transition, and probably in a less expensive way,” she said.
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