In his Consumer Health World keynote address, Raymond Nadeau, an acknowledged health care outsider, explores how health care companies can create a living brand, not by following in the footsteps of their peers in other industries, but by charting their own path.
They do, however, need to keep a few current mega-trends in mind:
Mood and Experience Enhancement: In the past few years marketing has focused on experiental marketing, which addresses all the person’s senses and needs. In the medical industry, an example of the experiental concept is the impact of music and lighting on wellness. In general, there has been a shift of “promotion” dollars away from traditional advertising and more towards experiental marketing. The medical industry still relies on traditional advertising to reach the consumer. The medical industry needs to create integrated marketing campaigns to reach consumers at every touch point. Bulgari and Armani have hotels to extend and reinforce their brands and what they represent. Why can’t the American Medical Association have a wellness hotel?
Humanized Technology: The quest for physical and psychological perfection: Hard science is no longer too complicated for the consumer. While other categories are emphasising it, the health and wellness industries are trying to dilute it and reduce their messaging down to emotional snippets. They don’t need to downplay the science behind their products in their brand communications. They can also be more transparent. For example, make all aspects of a drug, including the downside that currently gets squeezed into the last 5 seconds of a commercial, more accessible. This is important in the battle between generic and brand name drugs. Provide real reasons why a consumer should stick with your name brand.
There is a company called Par 3 Communications which has the Glow Cap, a wireless device that reminds patients, by glowing, that they need to take their medication. If the patient continues to not adhere to their medication, Par 3 is notified and contacts the consumer to see what is going on. They actually call the person on the phone. The solution is high-tech, but it encourages human communication. This is humanized technology at its best. Par 3 is trying to help solve an expensive problem. Medication non-adherence costs $100 billion per year and it puts millions of lives in danger.
Everymand Empowerment, Self-Creation and Personal Expression: There needs to be greater transparancy in pharma, insurance, doctors offices and hospitals. Up until now, the medical industry is the industry everyone loves to hate because people don’t know why insurance and drug prices are so high, or why one disease is prioritized over others.
Consumers should be empowered to help determine the priorities of services that health companies provide. That way, a drug company can point to the fact that their customers told them that disease A is the number one priority. What determines priority? Profit or need as it is defined by the consumer? If drug companies can show that they are creating products that have been asked for by the consumer, they can absolve themselves of blame.
Pharma companies can rationalize profits by saying to the consumer that we pour those profits into creating new life saving drugs, here are a few that we’re currently working on that have real promise and that we are most proud of. If society says muscular dystrophy, which doesn’t affect a large number of people, is low on our list of priorities, the people have spoken.
Lift the consumer and make them a partner. The new commercial for the American Medical Association (AMA) is a great example, with their appeal to consumers to address the dissatisfaction with HMOs. Rather than consumers ganging up on doctors, the suggested message is that consumers and doctors can join forces to initiate reform in the industry. Pharma companies could reach out to doctors and consumers and say we want to give you this experimental drug, but the FDA is holding it up.
In today’s world of self creation and personal expression, traditional media is not your best option to reach and influence your customer. Everyman empowerment requires a shift in your media spending. New media is an integrated approach that includes everything (the web, TV, special events, mobile, etc), not just the Web.
The Luxury of Ethics: Honesty and corporate responsability and cultural sensitivity are increasingly tools that luxury companies are using to differentiate themselves from other companies. Right now, the hippest movie stars are those that are saving African babies, bringing attention to places such as Darfur, and driving eco-friendly cars.
The most powerful influence today is the consumer. He or she votes with their dollars and the dollar is the only vote that truly counts.
We live in a consumer empowered world where a blogger can bring down Coca-Cola in India. Consumers can create you. They can also destroy you. And consumer perceptions of health care companies often include indifference, greed, arrogance and elitism. The health care industry preaches bringing costs down, but consumers can see the annual reports of drug and insurance companies.
This is unfortunate since health care companies focus on the most precious good of all, life. So health care companies need to change how they reach out to consumers. They need to start by understanding that consumers aren’t stupid. They are actually incredibly educated and street smart when it comes to advertising and marketing.
When British Petrolium creates commercials that try to reposition BP as a “Beyond Petrolium” eco-friendly company, I can easily call bullshit by asking their handsomely compensated CEO what percentage of their 2006 annual revenue and record profits came from anything other than gas and oil. Stop trying to play consumers like we are DUM. I experience eco-friendly BP at the gas pump every day, and my credit card bills tell me in crystal clear terms that it’s not positive.
Health care companies can respond to culture, update their branding techniques, and enlist the empowered consumer.
A few concepts that Raymond addresses:
A Brand Biosphere: Lycra (a fashion technology brand) is creating hotels, habitual spaces that represent what the brand is all about. Hospitals could create all sorts of new brand communications.
The Curation of Consumption: We live in an environment of consumption, but also of more brands than ever trying to grab the attention of a population that is busier than ever. There is a new trend in the curation of consumption. Following the museum curator model of shepparding people through works of art, the curator can gain the trust of the consumer to curate what people see within a product category. The curator is relied on as the trusted advisor to weed out the white noise and bad products in a category so that the consumer has choice, but within a small selection of choices that have been picked by the knowledgeable curator. In the fast-paced, limited free-time world we live in, this is helpful to people. They want to turn to someone who can recommend choices, but let the consumer make the ultimate purchasing decision.
Experience is an invisible logo: Participatory marketing is the foundation of experience.
The branding of wellness has emulated obsolete models. Wellness companies are in the most important category, that of improving lives. And wellness companies should lead, not follow other companies in other industries, in how they brand and market themselves. Wellness companies should set new ethical collaborative standards with their consumers.
If anyone in the health care industry took the role of consumer advocate instead of a supplier of services to consumers, it would define that company as a luxury. The better you are, the more luxurious you are perceived.
