“Ripped from Today’s Headlines!” Can Fat Be a Strategy for Healthcare Marketing?

I always wanted to use that famously trite RfTH screamer. Now’s my chance, because if you read Sunday’s Houston Chronicle you may have noted the sub-head in the Charles B Parks Business-section article:

Area hospitals are expanding their services to meet the needs of an older and increasingly obese population.

This article’s whip-round of some Texas Medical Center talking heads reveals how some hospitals are focusing their marketing on their targets – which would be us.

Thankfully the American Marketing Association is on the job! Come to the Houston chapter’s Healthcare SIG event this coming Friday and you could learn if diet is your marketing destiny. Maybe it’s genetics or economics. Or policies coming out of Washington and Austin.

The event panel’s brief: to discuss and present actionable insights into marketing strategy-setting and execution. The panelists come from hospitals, medical technologies companies and healthcare informatics, to help attendees explore “which audiences to target” and what “business segments are ripe for marketing.”

As attendees of previous Healthcare SIG events know, bariatrics (the study and treatment of obesity) can be one very effective marketing strategy. Managing diabetes is another. It does seem as though more flexibility is required today.

Be driven by opportunity – the chance to hear from Jackie Dryden, Jean van Soelen, Bruce Blausen and Kristeen Jones. The chance to participate with other healthcare marketing colleagues. Even the chance to ask why Signalwriter can’t take a decent photo with his first-ever iPhone, since I will be moderating the morning’s panel.

I’ll have a copy of the Parks article with me at Houston Baptist University on Friday. I’m big enough to say thanks to the Chron for providing me with this timely crib. I hope you will join us (because otherwise it’ll be lonely in the Dillon Room…with just five of us). Sign up right here, right now.

I Wrote This – Fortunately, Great Clients and Designers Were Involved.

In 2010, I participated in the BP wellness calendar and it came out very well – you can read about that excellent project here.

Now the 2011 Calendar is in play, titled “I Can.” It is described in the most recent post on the Prism Design blog.

Whole different year now. But same great team of people, same fine clients. Thank you very much, everyone, for the chance to be involved again.

Strachan on Surveys Offers “Tool” and “Fuel” for Thought Leadership.

How many of you think a good survey lets your company uncover stakeholders’ issues or answer key questions like how does a physician select one wireless medical device and provider over another. Hold up your left hand. C’mon, raise them up there…left hand only.

Now. Whoever thinks that a good survey can provide you and your marketing team with data that can itself be subjects for marketing, raise your right hand.

On the left hand, research (and particularly, a good survey) is a tool your operations or marketing teams use. On the right hand, survey answers can provide the fuel for building marketing programs. The correct answer of course is both hands raised.

Using surveys in thought leadership applications was what Thomas Strachan, vice president at eCardio, talked about last week at the American Marketing Association-Houston’s B2B SIG about “Thought Leadership Marketing.”

In Strachan’s view, the idea that surveys provide both tool and fuel in this kind of marketing starts as soon as you envision the survey, by creating criteria for analyzing, and then using, survey results.

Is data or aspects of the data interesting to our target markets? Can we build a marketing program or event around the overall results or any aspect of the data? Are there PR opportunities – will aspects of the data be attractive to key media outlets?

Purposing surveys for Thought Leadership means answering Strachan’s questions in the affirmative and then executing on those answers. First, gain an understanding of the concerns that your company (and only your company) can address. Second, create an external and internal Thought Leadership Marketing program around your key results. Strachan continued:

For your external stakeholders, consider all options to communicate value-add results: white papers, “survey” pages on your website, email links to download the survey. Invent and deploy web-based and live events. Advertise the report results and use them in sales collateral; build a PR initiative around them.

For internal groups – employees are critical and very often overlooked – Thought Leadership Marketing can raise the company’s profile inside, plus generate internal interest and support.

I take this last point to mean that the more you involve employees with expert knowledge in the creation and maintenance of Thought Leadership materials, the more you will get inside buy-in.

One expects eCardio is practicing the Thought Leadership Marketing that Strachan is preaching. The Houston-based company aims to be a leader in “remote cardiac monitoring products and services,” an intensely competitive market.

Frost and Sullivan reports:

Technological advancements such as wireless technologies and algorithm advancement also provide growth opportunities for those who utilize them...This coupled with the high degree of competition restraining potential market growth is causing market participants to look for other methods of gaining a competitive advantage.

And in fact, Mike Damon of Damon Medical Communications, who works in the cardiac pacing field, feels that there are a lot of at least regional and maybe even smaller providers in this ECG and Cardiac Monitoring Products market. So eCardio needs every tool at its disposal – and all the fuel available – to gain and retain its competitive edge.

Here’s where Thought Leadership Marketing ought to pay dividends. To build such a program and run it successfully, Strachan on Surveys has one revelatory piece of advice:

Start at the place you want to be at the conclusion of your survey program and work backwards.

Leadership calls for foresight. Planning ahead is its secret ingredient.

Five Reasons to Measure Your 2011 Wellness Program’s Marketing.

This is not about bottom-line results. Not about the contribution of wellness efforts to company health benefits cost-cutting. It’s about quantifying how your internal wellness marketing is doing – the top five reasons to be measuring.

Reason #1: So management can tell stakeholders the good ROI news about wellness.  Even though you’re thinking, “This one’s a no-brainer,” setting up metrics to deliver hard evidence that your firm’s growing investment in wellness programs is paying off is Marketing 101. Whether you’re a marketer or not.*

Writing in Managed Healthcare Executive last March, Kimberly Bonvissutto reported a survey that found 27% of companies do NOT measure the outcomes of their wellness programs. And 65% have no measurable goals for their wellness initiatives.

Without measuring, how are you going to know how you and your program are doing? Proof of performance is seriously important whether you call what you’re doing wellness promotions, or marketing, or just plain “my job.” Fine. Maybe it is a no-brainer – but you still have to work at it.

Reason #2: So you can learn which incentives worked – and which failed miserably. Incentivizing participation does work wellness wonders. It’s been noted that, across a variety of large and small company programs, incentives run the gamut:

…from lower deductibles and copays, which can move a population toward healthier behaviors in the long run, to cash or gift cards, which might drive short-term, immediate behavior, such as participating in a seminar or challenge.

Prove to management that some incentives performed better than others and you’ll have the opportunity (in theory) to keep fine-tuning…and build better participation.

Reason #3: So you can tell people you told ‘em. Several clients have told me that employees occasionally complained, “…the company didn’t tell me” about this or that element or requirement of a wellness program. These clients keep track of the frequency of employee communications about wellness in great detail. So they were able to quote exactly when the complaining employee got communications. And in what formats, too: online communications, print, audio-visual, seminars, and so on.

Do not underrate the self-satisfaction value of told-you-so!

Reason #4: So you can convince people that change is possible. This is the dream goal. The biggest roadblock to employees’ adopting wellness activities is their unwillingness to change their behavior. Of course, this is connected to a lack of commitment by employers – employees will know this. There’s more to measurement here than numbers. Prism Design principal Susan Reeves says:

It's a long process to effect change of people’s behaviors. We need examples, stories to help us marketers, and employees understand realistic results.

Without quantified results, though, you can’t demonstrate change…and changed behaviors is how you prove [3] to everyone that this marvelous wellness thing can in fact be done. Here the stakeholders are both employees and company managers or owners.

Reason #5: So you’ll have something to show for your own efforts. Certainly, as one of the people responsible for promoting your firm’s wellness programs to employees, it’s your goal.

*It’s possible marketing is not actually in your job description – you could be a Human Resources professional or a Corporate Benefits administrator. But demand for program measurement is growing. Maybe my five reasons will give you grounds to add marketing metrics to your wellness roadmap...and pat yourself on the back.

Graphic: Wiki Commons, with thanks.

Wellness Centers of America Launches – Using Blue Sky (and Wong and Me)…

With its first retail location opening soon, Wellness Centers of America reached out to Blue Sky Marketing for the go-to-market strategy and point-of-sale programs that’d power its initial launch and deliver success.

Blue Sky principal Michelle LeBlanc has focused on independent marketing strategic planning and business development. That’s just what she brought to the new program for Wellness Centers of America (called WCOA for the rest of this post). At the same time, LeBlanc had to meet the retail launch deadline with plenty of marketing communications executions, including TV, point-of-sale and marketing handouts.

For these, LeBlanc tapped Betty Wong Creative (Betty Wong) and Signalwrite Marketing Communications (c’est moi: Richard Laurence Baron) to develop initial graphic design platforms and copy positions.

I’ve been working on wellness projects and programs for the past 20 years. Only very recently have strong figures and trends been available to underscore the value of what some people describe as “the positive health of an individual as exemplified by quality of life.” The last time I covered wellness on this blog, I noted:

…wellness needs to be marketed as effectively as possible, from the aging of the American workforce to our cultural search for the Fountain of Youth.

This is under way with WCOA: effective wellness marketing at retail. I’ve had the opportunity to work under Blue Sky’s direction on WCOA branding and key selling points from the outset. You can see some of the POS expressions created by Wong and me at the top of the post.

There’s more: Dave Henry of iFilmProductions created TV in time for the Grand Opening, using personal-approach video storytelling to convey WCOA’s “Five Pillars of Wellness” offer.

The TV spot’s now running in the Atlanta area. The initial WCOA location is open in Deerfield Place Shopping Center – that’s in Alpharetta, GA, a northside ‘burb. And the entire effective retail marketing effort is supported by bright, fresh creative – including Wong’s sunny new logo mark.

Thanks to LeBlanc, Wong, Henry and WCOA for letting me play a role in this new retail effort. Believe me, promoting wellness is worth it.

Think Marketing to Physicians Was Complicated Before..?

Friends – and you are all friends – you need to be at “Marketing to Physicians: Winning Game Plans for an Industry in Flux” on September 24. [Just click right here for details.]

Because you’re trying to market to medical and dental practices, or the physicians and dentists themselves. Because your CFO or CEO or Practice Director demands that you show measurable, dollar-delivering results from the marketing/communications budget.

Because – as the handy visual above demonstrates – our healthcare markets have become more puzzling, confusing and baffling than ever.

AMAHouston’s Healthcare SIG has announced the seminar at HBU this way:

More rigorous government regulations, practice changes, financial concerns and shifting demographic dynamics have all dramatically changed the health care game.

You think? Almost every element of a medical or dental practice is no-more-business-as-usual. So things are pretty tough at the “marketing rock face” these days. One active Healthcare SIG member, Winnie Hart of The H Agency, just returned from the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development Conference in Chicago. This conference, too, focused on the “tactics, and solutions you need to successfully navigate today’s complex and complicated environment.” Hart listened closely to Conference presenters and told me:

The question was what brings in more money – marketing to the consumer or marketing to the physician? Several hospitals presented and shared percentage changes in consumer-vs-physician marketing, from 90 (consumer)/10 (physician) to 60/40, and from 70/30 to 50/50. All reported higher marketing dollar percentages dedicated to physician marketing. So many hospitals are reorganizing departments and reallocating resources to focus more on physician marketing.

On 9/24 you get your own panel of experts in practice marketing and business development, all ready to share information and ideas – their organizations’ hands-on experience.

Your choice. Come to the seminar and help yourself develop best practices for the hard(er) marketing and communications work ahead. Or stare at the chart until your Medicare coverage kicks in. Really, signing up for the seminar is better. Ta…

NOTE: Today’s visual is “the first chart illustrating the 2,801 page health care law President  Barack Obama signed into law in March.” Although it “displays a bewildering array of new government agencies, regulations and mandates,” it in no way reflects Signalwriter’s opinion – at this time. Check back with me in a couple of years to see how everything has worked out. Special thanks to the H Agency. Ta…

On Friday, AMAHouston Seminar Shows Intangibles Strategies.

When it comes to marketing and advertising intangibles there are several flavors. Services is one - banking services or accounting services. There are intangible products too; employee healthcare insurance, for example. Your written policy is a form of physical proof that you are insured; you can’t buy insurance by the pound.

Marketers have spent years, decades, transforming intangibles into various forms of reality so that a wide variety of stakeholders can grasp them. In these cases, it’s not about the purchase but the buy: Stakeholders buy into these intangibles in a number of ways, accepting them into their businesses and their lives. There is a requirement for mental acceptance which is, or should be, brand-driven.

“Selling the Intangible: B2B Service Marketing Strategies” is quite tangible: Three hands-on experts are going to make everything real for you at Friday’s B2B Special Interest Group seminar, from our chapter of the American Marketing Association. Just click here to register if you haven’t already.

Join us at the House of Blues and get fresh insights about bank marketing from William Trout, BBVACompass Director of Internal Communications. Hear about thought leadership as a marketing tool for employee health benefits from Katrina Drake Hudson, Regional Marketing Leader at Humana. And see a first-hand how-to on rebranding accounting services from Christa Gerlovich, Practice Growth Manager for Weaver, LLP.

Oh - you can market insurance by the pound, sort of, with commodity futures contracts*. One particularly successful example (if I say so myself) is this three-dimensional direct mail program sent to hundreds of US ingredients buyers. The campaign promoted commodity contracts on the Chicago Board of Trade. Of course, a futures contract is only mostly intangible. If you screw up the “virtual” becomes intensely physical and you could enjoy 5,000 bushels of soybeans delivered to your driveway.

There’ll be no soybeans at the House of Blues’ Bronze Peacock Room this Friday morning. Just successful strategies from Trout, Hudson and Stranhoner. Since I will be the moderator, I hereby offer you tangible benefits (including a light breakfast) and say “Come on down!”

*Commodity futures are agreements of contracts that are used to purchase or sell a specified amount of a given commodity – in the case of this campaign, corn, rice, soybeans and soybean oil which are used as ingredients in various food products. The Chicago Board of Trade – CBOT – is now part of CME Group. Direct mail campaign created and produced “back in the day” by The Quest Business Agency, Houston, TX. Creative Director/copywriter: Yours truly. Art Director: Jim Prejean. Production Manager: Beth Palmer.

Copywriting for Wellness: Turning Whimsical Makes a Winner for BP.

Few marketing copywriters ever get to write a line like “Listen to your inner asparagus.” Even fewer see the line in print. But I’m the lucky one thanks to an outstanding wellness marketing program at BP.

Among other projects, I was tasked to write the 2010 BP Wellness Calendar, in support of this year’s “Becoming a healthier you” employee benefits campaign.

The campaign itself is spearheaded by Janelle Ewing, who is Manager of Benefits Communication at BP America; and seconded by Bonnie Hargett, BP Benefits Communication Consultant. It’s been supported on the graphic design side by Prism Design – the Prismatics created the look for the internal campaign that includes this terrific 13-month calendar.

I created a “voice” for the calendar that went outside the lines a little – taking the month-after-month appeals from the pretty ordinary self-health advice column to the somewhat provocative, maybe-even-laugh-out-loud category. So, March, for example, starts off with “Get around to eating smarter” and continues:

Come on, you’re smarter than that pizza. Start cutting the intake of “stupid” foods while you build up your intake of smart foods like fruits and vegetables. Fact: Most women who eat five or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day can cut their risk of developing cancer by up to 50% compared to those who only eat two or three servings a day. Fact: Men can use at least nine servings to reduce their risk of cancer, heart disease and other illnesses.

We backed up month-fulls of wellness tricks and tips with our sources for that data. We included appeals to participate in health advisory programs and earn reward points every month from the beginning of 2010 through the first month of next year. The calendar became a thorough compendium of wellness support, from the health benefits of working out to stress relief to back-to-school immunizations (“Invaders from inner space,” another great line.)

Look, wellness is a product: A proactive and preventive approach designed to provide optimum levels of health, emotional and social functioning. But selling wellness has been overlooked by common marketers. The “approved” definition of marketing itself leaves out a major group of stakeholders that’s hugely influential on each major corporation – the company’s employees.

In terms of their effect on revenue, profitability and long-term customer relationships, it has been proven that the improved physical and mental health of employees has substantial positive impact on both the cost of healthcare provided by the employer and the cost of doing business generally.

The BP benefits team fulfilled this marketing-inside function, along with the insight that a successful Employee Wellness Program has to be broad enough to meet the needs of all employees, regardless of their current level of health.

Ewing’s and Hargett’s more-than-ordinary communication effort has been crucial to getting employees to participate in greater numbers in the BP wellness program. The calendar is one component of a tight mixture of communications pieces and appeals – an internal marketing program which has been successful in generating high numbers of sign-ups.

Pretty cool that I got to participate in this, along with Prism designers Terry Teutsch and Stacy Allen. Thank you, BP, for the opportunity to deliver great work – with whimsy added.

McKee Comes Back for AMAHouston SIG and Dirkes Reviews His Book.

Laying pipe. It’s what this post does. Laying pipe for our February 26 Healthcare SIG seminar. Attendees will get plenty of advice and examples about “outside the box” marketing and ad campaigns – some from Steve McKee. Who has a book that’s more about management than marketing. Let’s start with this. (A later post will highlight the seminar itself.)

Aubrey Dirkes, who recommended McKee for this event, provided this review for Signalwriter.

Typically when the president of an advertising agency writes a book, the pages are filled with tales of glory about their special pixie dust. Hire their agency and you too will have memorable television ads. When Growth Stalls by Steve McKee, the president of McKee Wallwork Cleveland, isn’t that book. In fact he doesn’t mention a single ad by his agency, and the promotion “P” isn’t mentioned until the last 15 pages of the book. Luckily, he’ll be sharing his agency’s work at the Houston AMA Healthcare SIG meeting on February 26.

When Growth Stalls is really more like a series of executive coaching sessions for your management team. It is part “Good to Great,” part “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” and part personal diary all intertwined with recent editions of The Wall Street Journal. The result is a well-researched book that is timely and not only gives us the solace of knowing that every company stalls, but the hope that accompanies a step-by-step method to get growing again. Reading it reminded me of one of my favorite scenes from “The West Wing,” about the support a friend can provide.

The book acknowledges the reasons we blame for our company’s stall – the economic downturn, disasters, and other market forces that, in truth, our competitors face too. It then dives in to the real reasons that organizations of all sizes stall. This is a fitting discussion for the Healthcare SIG because of its direct correlation to the treatment of symptoms v. curing the patient’s problem. Both business and healthcare practice evidence-based approaches, and just as patient #1’s cancer is different from patient #2’s, the growth challenges of GE are different from those of Home Depot or Chrysler, and their treatment must take into account the individual or the result is disastrous.

The book identifies four reasons for stalling: A lack of consensus from leadership; a lack of focus; a loss of nerve; and inconsistent marketing. When the ground shakes, any one of these can cause an organization to stall. Worse, the failure of one can lead to the slippery slope that results in the failure of all four.

In the book there are great, real-world examples from different industries on how each can lead to stall. In your very real-world environment, where every aspect of the healthcare world is up for debate, I encourage you to give careful consideration to these factors before it is too late. (In my own experience I have had clients suffering from one or all with expensive repercussions.)

The subtitle of the book is How it happens, Why you’re stuck, and What to do about it. About half the book is dedicated to the last of these. It goes beyond the Mission/Vision/Values you all hang in your lobbies to define what success looks like, providing a measurable objective and a timetable that leadership can agree on, get behind and operationalize. After all, business, and healthcare, is about the acquisition and retention of customers. This will lead you to discussions about the importance of your people as the delivery devices for your brand and the compounding impact of your customers’ opinions and experiences. Then you are off to the races.

In reading this, you may say “obvious.”

I say “revolutionarily obvious” because the book will reaffirm the impact you can, and may need to, make within arms’ reach that will make all the difference.

Aubrey is a Philadelphia-based marketing consultant who creates successful customer acquisition and retention programs, brand experiences and award winning creative for hospitals and retailers nationwide. He plays 3x3 basketball in a barn built in the 1700s and refurbished in the 1870s. He interrupted shoveling 2,300 cubic feet of snow and helping four cars stuck in the snow on his street to send this book review to me. Steve, I hope you appreciate his sacrifice.

Asked and Answered: Blausen Medical Closes the Loop.

Is a couple of billboard executions all it takes? Apparently so. Three weeks or so back, Signalwriter asked:

Coming to the AMA Healthcare SIG event, [Bruce] Blausen and [Mike] Hensgen have a slightly different challenge. Can they envision (and communicate to SIG attendees) how an institution might combine its use of the Human Atlas with its hospital-wide iPhone platform – and then market the combination to its stakeholders?

The SIG event went off yesterday (at the Houston Zoo, thank you very much) with more than a hundred healthcare marketing professionals in the audience. During this extensive, five-speaker seminar, Bruce Blausen answered the question I posed above. The key to his presentation, “Driving Business with Mobile Apps,” was identifying what today’s most effective patient education tool is, in his view: narrated animation on a mobile phone platform.

Then, for the close of his talk, he created and displayed a quartet of speculative billboards (two shown here) that tie “Human Atlas” mobile app and iPhone into single, brand-oriented messages on behalf of prospective hospital users.

That famous “picture worth a thousand words” thing can hardly be demonstrated more clearly than these boards: the answers to my questions, at least. Well done, Blausen.

Concepts courtesy of Blausen Medical. Some elements may be properties of stock photo houses – all rights reserved to element owners.

Blausen Human Atlas – Next Step in Intimate Medical Marketing?

Today we consider a dramatic iPhone app from Balusen. But can it be marketed?There’s probably no conscious connection between the next American Marketing Association-Houston Healthcare SIG event and its venue…the Houston Zoo. Still, synch up your calendars now for Friday, September 25 – the SIG presents “Healthcare Marketing via Emerging Technologies.” Read all about three-hour event (including networking and a bite of breakfast) right here.

To be clear, this seminar’s not about those technologies themselves, which I am sure are quite excellent. This group of people will talk about how you might use some of the technologies to market to broad groups of customers – patient groups, physicians, nurses and so on.

The presenters will cover the marketing capabilities inherent in data analysis software (which should be challenging), and how hospitals are using e-marketing. Since I’ve helped create the program, I hope to hear some fresh ideas.

I have the biggest expectations of all for the Blausen Human Atlas and its iPhone application, especially after talking it over with Blausen Media CEO Bruce Blausen and Account Director Mike Hensgen. Blausen will be doing the presenting.

Why the high hopes? Well, who do you know who doesn’t have an iPhone yet? (Besides me, I mean.) According to blogger Greg Kaiser at the end of April, Apple had sold 21 million of them and that was before new models caught on. Big deal stuff, especially when you consider the iPhone can be a pretty amazing marketing implement.

But it’s not about the smartphone, it’s about the Blausen app on the smartphone. The “Human Atlas” lets users manipulate superbly detailed medical illustrations and animations at the touch of a finger. There’s a zoom feature that provides the ability to explore different body systems.

Blausen points out that a click of a button helps explain a complicated medical problem or diagnosis. Seeing the problem in pictures helps doctors (for example) relieve fears and concerns for all kinds of patients. Hensgen says that the individual experiences with the application are stunning: Learning and understanding are speeded up dramatically.

In selling the application, Blausen wants to leverage both the iPhone and web-delivered versions to give hospitals a competitive advantage in terms of communications. The hospitals’ medical and nursing staffs can take the educational opportunity right to the point of care, and deliver a patient experience that’s superior to any other.

Hensgen demo’d the Human Atlas on his iPhone for me; it’s dramatic. The tool also just got a perceptive nod from iPhone Medical App Review: …this is an app that could change the way physicians and providers communicate with patients. We've been using this application on a daily basis with our patients.

Coming to the AMA Healthcare SIG event, Blausen and Hensgen have a slightly different challenge. Can they envision (and communicate to SIG attendees) how an institution might combine its use of the Human Atlas with its hospital-wide iPhone platform – and then market the combination to its stakeholders?

To paraphrase Harvard professor Theodore Levitt: Marketing is different than selling. Marketing views the entire business process as a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse and satisfy customer needs.

The implication (to me) is “user intimacy” – the inherent opportunity to bring customers much, much closer to a brand. Register for September 25. We’ll find out together how “technologies” like the-palm-of-your-hand Human-Atlas-plus iPhone combination will take us to the next level of healthcare marketing.

A big thank-you to Bruce Blausen and Mike Hensgen for helping me think ahead on this topic. Photos courtesy of Blausen Media.

“Live Life to the Youngest” with the RealAge® Test? Nah...

I’m on Facebook – some of you know that. I use very, very few of the hundreds of Facebook apps but I confess, for example, to recently nominating my “Top Five Movies.” The rock-bottom fact is, there’s a damn huge amount of personal information about me on the Worldwide Web.

I admit to being an active participant in life online. What I have NOT done is join RealAge and Mehmet Oz so I can “live life to the youngest.” I have not taken the RealAge® Test.

That, in my view, turns out to be a good thing. Mike Damon of Damon Medical Communications sent over a New York Times article, “Online Age Quiz Is a Window for Drug Makers” by reporter Stephanie Clifford. RealAge is fuzzing up the fact that it’s selling participants’ personal, medical information to drug companies…your basic invasion of privacy, not to mention maybe (just maybe) being against the HIPAA rules. Those are the rules that the government has set to protect intimate health-related information.

The article says: RealAge’s privacy policy does not specifically address the firm’s relationship with drug companies, but does state, in part, “we will share your personal data with third parties to fulfill the services that you have asked us to provide to you,” and it adds test results to its database only when respondents become RealAge members. Some critics, however, charge that consumers do not have enough information when they join.
Unlike certain media outlets, I don’t have an automatic bias against pharmaceutical companies. I even wonder if the New York Times would have even looked at this story if it did not involve “drug companies.”

Okay – 27 million people have taken the RealAge quiz. They are (as a group) not very concerned about what happens to their intimate health information. As a marketer, though, I think there’s an ethical problem here. Despite RealAge protestations, my sense is that the website has not been completely transparent in its business relationships with the drug companies.

Will people get upset about this particular issue? I bet not – not when it involves a doctor who regularly appears on Oprah. After all, it’s not AIG bonuses.

Knowable, Noble

Three days after an outstanding AMA-Houston Healthcare SIG seminar at Rice University, Houston pediatrician Dr Ana Malinow wrote in the Houston Chronicle about treating a six-year-old girl in a public clinic:

When I saw her, her hand was swollen to twice the normal size, purple, tender and warm to the touch, with a red streak (signifying an extension of…infection…to the bloodstream)…she was uninsured and had been sent home with a prescription that her mother tried to fill but was unable to afford. How much did the antibiotic…cost? $500.

The four speakers who addressed “Marketing Healthcare under a New Administration” were effective and humorous. Passionate. Completely engaged with almost 100 attendees. Each one lit up a different facet of the American healthcare system in crisis…a phrase that’s still stabbingly relevant as Malinow’s op-ed letter makes clear.

The nature of this blog makes it difficult to condense two hours of presentations and QAs into a few paragraphs. Still, I’m revisiting the event because of the high quality of the presentations.

Dr Lewis Foxhall, President of the Harris County Medical Society, delivered the overview and laid the foundations of the case, quickly but effectively covering present circumstances.

Memorial City Medical Center’s Tim Schauer addressed policy issues and made the case that pay-for-performance will never work because medicine is still a “practice.” He also spotlighted the nature of special interests.

Houston Wellness Association president Jonathan Lack portrayed wellness as key player in prospective solutions, emphasizing that workplace wellness is a productivity tool. He vividly revealed portrayed the challenges of community and public health. Lack contends that today’s medical center is a sick-care model and it’s considerably overburdened.

Yaffe Deutser’s President/COO, Brad Deutser, concluded with what might be called the “capitalist model” of marketing healthcare: The state of the economy isn’t going to change the number of affluent people but will change what the affluent people buy from doctors and dentists. He suggests that marketing effectiveness will still be an organizational survival mechanism, targeting more profitable prospects.

In presenting, Deutser unconsciously set the tone for my morning. One of his premises was, all target prospect information can be found – “Today, everything is knowable.” What I heard the first few times Deutser said this is, “Today, everything is noble.”

Compared to healthcare in some parts of the world, America has arguably progressed only slowly to noble. The most valuable transformation under the new administration in Washington, then, is redefining how our people deserve and receive healthcare.

My big takeaway from Thursday’s marketing seminar is that marketers can take more of a role, a noble role, in fostering improved healthcare access.

In an issue with so very many stakeholders (doctors, community activists, “ordinary” people, to name only a few), I want us to make it more. Don’t ask me how, yet. It can’t be just about the ads – or the brands. It’s can’t be just about knowing.

A survey’s being conducted now – if you’re invited to participate, fill it out please. I’ll report the results. Extra thanks to the quite large number of people who made this SIG event a success. Event photos by Suzanne Jarvis at Shutterfly. Graphic courtesy of Aceofhearts1968, Wikimedia.

Deutser Preview

Talking in advance of this Friday’s AMA Healthcare SIG seminar, Brad Deutser thinks the new administration approach to American medical care is going to require a fundamental shift in how healthcare institutions communicate with – and market to – their customers.

“But we don’t know yet what the new policies will be,” he says. “The immediate challenges are underinsured and uninsured customers…more proactive recognition of this fact will lead the greatest value while serving a given institution’s mission.”

You can hear his take on what’s ahead when you join us Friday at Rice University. Click here for registration.

Photo: David A Farias/Houston Business Journal.

Healthcare Change?

In 1957, Parke, Davis felt that public perception of the high cost of a prescription was so negative, the drug company created and ran ads like this one. The dad on the left is shocked – shocked – that his buddy “…paid $9.00 to get that one prescription filled? Wow!”

Today, if you can get a prescription filled for $9, you feel like you’ve hit the jackpot. Today, we get a new administration in Washington that’s pledged to “do something” about healthcare in America.

So next week, AMA-Houston’s Healthcare Marketing SIG is putting on a big seminar: “Marketing Healthcare under a New Administration.” If you have anything to do with marketing, selling or advertising healthcare services and products, you better be signing up here.

The day and date: Friday, 27 February at 7.30 AM – the SIG’ll have a coffee-and-pastry bar set out for you. The location, Rice University’s Anderson Family Commons (Rice Blvd and Main, Entrance 20), is exactly the right venue for what we hope’s going to be a provocative mixture of marketing and public policy.

The seminar panelists include marketing executive Brad Deutser of Yaffe Deutser; Houston Wellness Association president Jonathan Lack; Lewis Foxhall, MD, President of the Harris County Medical Society; and Tim Schauer, Memorial Hermann Healthcare System. They are going to help us envision the policy changes and marketing challenges that healthcare marketers will have to face in the next four years.

One point we made in the event’s write-up is that American medicine is a business (the Parke, Davis drug ad underscores that). But it’s a business that’s significantly affected by national healthcare policy. Marketing is “downstream” of policy; it’s critical on an operational or tactical level. You don’t think so? Check out Parke, Davis’s ad copy: “…you appreciate what good value you’re getting.”

That’s a hard, hard case to make 50+ years later. Today, nobody feels they’re getting bargains. Sign up now. Maybe you’ll find out how to change your prospects’ thinking.

Parke, Davis & Company is now a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Ad #MM0340, Medicine and Madison Avenue On-Line Project, John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History,Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections. Thanks.

Texas Oncology

More than 60 healthcare marketing people turned to at Memorial Hermann yesterday morning. They came from across the street and from as far away as Austin.

The in-betweeners had the toughest time getting into Texas Medical Center today, as usual. Still, despite the traffic, the AMA-Houston Healthcare SIG threw attendees a balanced seminar on Community Marketing: Expanding your brand outside your backyard. (I’m on the SIG steering committee; I’m not disinterested and I previewed the presentation here.)

Appealing to the “ad guy” part of me, the star of the show was Les Mann presenting the rebranding work on Texas Oncology, part of the US Oncology family. An example’s above – and here’s how the website describes the campaign:

The Texas Oncology “I Can” campaign was launched in 2007 throughout the state of Texas. It includes magazine and newspaper ads, radio and television spots, billboards and other marketing pieces. The campaign not only provides thousands of Texans with information about superior cancer treatment, technology and research, it inspires hope.

I’ll make two points about what Mann presented; then I’ll sign off for Saturday.

First, Texas Oncology has been thoroughly rebranded and smartly marketed. The campaign is active, not passive: Its bold but human face portrays a collection of independent medical practices as a coherent, focused assembly of like-minded treatment centers, working with their patients to beat cancer.

The marketing does NOT leave the organization’s brand for various stakeholders groups to define – it is clearly and strategically spelled out. Way to go.

Second, Mann conscientiously credited his advertising agency, HCB in Austin, for its part in formulating new strategies and creating strong advertising. HC&B received plenty of attention during his part of the seminar and rightly so. (Mann also credited his PR agency, Fleishman-Hillard, with vigorous community outreach.)

Good work ought to be recognized. Not every client thinks to do this. Hats off to Mann and his team for the work and for presenting it to us.

That’s my 22¢ (adjusting for 4% annual inflation) - don’t you forget to vote on Tuesday.

Expanding Branding

We could have called it “Manifest Destiny,” I suppose: This upcoming AMA-Houston Healthcare Special Interest Group seminar. We could have stressed the potential value of brand expansion with a title like, “The Promised Land of Brand Expansion.”

Still, here’s your chance to register early for the SIG’s 26 September seminar which is really called, Community Marketing: Expanding your “brand” outside your backyard. (Think of the railroaders and teamsters in this mural as role models – political correctness aside – taking your healthcare brand out into the wider world.)

Look at this from our SIG programmers’ POV.

Healthcare marketers can’t expect patients to come to a central location any more. We’re moving beyond the need for marketers to think outside the Texas Medical Center, to move providers and facilities outside that geographic box. In fact, even “early expanders” are losing patients to sister facilities newly established in farther suburbs, according to gossip heard among professionals in one of the suburban hospitals.

We believe your brand has to be effectively transported as well. The more stakeholders you involve deeply in your brand the better, whether it’s a local, a regional, or even a worldwide effort. Your hard-won brand facets help carry your value propositions beyond your original facility’s doors.

So we’re willing to put our seminar where our thoughts are. A panel of “expansion experts” from three different healthcare practice areas to discuss the marketing value of expanding your brand outside of your own backyard.

Come that Friday morning at The Health Museum (the SIG’s fortunate home base), you can hear from Edgar Vesga, International Attaché at Texas Children's Hospital; Les Mann, US Oncology Vice President of Marketing; and Suzanne Jarvis, Executive Vice President of healing sciences organization Esocen.

Each professional has a different brand; each has a different set of challenges expanding outside their core markets. You’ll have the opportunity to see how each story applies to your own challenges – and how to measure the success of your brand extension efforts, too. Sharon Lore of UTMDACC (which knows a thing or two about branding) will moderate.

Here’s a few good guides to help get you to where you need to go brand-wise…without a lot of mishaps. We aim to help show you the way come 26 September. So sign up now and avoid the rush, because this past year the Healthcare SIG’s managed to pack the trains for every trip. And O Pioneers! There’ll be a light breakfast for you, too.

State Capitol Mural by Charles Banks Wilson. Photo By David Fitzgerald with thanks.

Elective Surgery?

Charles Halliman went searching for a definition of elective medical services – like surgery. He’s a good researcher: he’s written and spoken about Business Intelligence for the medical community for more than a decade.

He discovered the job wasn’t quite as straightforward as the Healthcare Special Interest Group (or I) imagined.

“My research,” he says, “focused on how experts described bariatric surgery (for example), with respect to the word ‘elective.’ I wanted to see how often the word ‘choice’ was used in conjunction with the surgery. I didn’t find the word ‘choice’ very often. I found the words ‘necessary’ and ‘urgent’ more often. And I felt that saying that a patient can make a ‘choice’ to have the surgery may be misleading since strict criteria are used to decide when to do the surgery.”

Elective medical procedures aren’t life-threatening. They’re not always considered cosmetic, either.

Instead, an elective medical procedure can improve a sufferer’s quality of life. Bariatric services are just one field of “elective” practice that leads to better life quality. So are certain gynecological services (like pelvic reconstruction) – an area I’ve never considered and shame on me.

You and I are going to find out more about how these quality-of-life options are marketed on Wednesday June 20, 2007.

A specializing physician (Dr. Ginger Cathey, MD, FACOG) and a pair of highly skilled marketing professionals (Mary Beth Robinson and Kimberly Taylor) will present “Marketing Elective Medical Services” at a special lunch-time event.

Elective medical procedures involve complex issues like patient need, motivation, and awareness, not to mention insurance and financial constraints. Marketing these so-called “electives” is sometimes very tricky. We’re not talking botox injections here.

We’ve been promised some case studies about marketing tactics plus the importance of physician communication to grow the practice.

So if you’re a marketer from any Houston-area healthcare organization, or you have healthcare-related clients for your advertising, PR or design practice, get the details and register on line here.

Your reminder’s right there on the clipboard. The place is the Hilton Houston Plaza, 6633 Travis Street in the Medical Center. (I’ll probably take the train.) The marketing event has been put together by the American Marketing Association chapter’s Healthcare SIG. We’ll start at 11.30AM on the dot.

You can choose to miss out on a presentation that may improve the quality of your skills. Or elect to come to the luncheon and learn something necessary, even urgent.

Tuesday thank-yours to Prism Design, Inc., Medical Journal Houston and XL Films for the extra support.

Morris’s Exemplar

If you could drive your “customer base” up 500%+ in three years, you’d be pretty pleased with yourself, right? Right.

You may have been one of the 50 marketing professionals who watched Annetta Morris pack so much punch into her presentation this past Wednesday. You heard her speak about the integrated Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center (GCR) marketing program, Commit For Life.

Morris was the star (but not the only cast member) of our Healthcare SIG’s spring event. Reviewing our lunchtime presentation taught me four valuable lessons…maybe they’ll help you, too.

Morris was forceful. Funny. And pretty humble about the achievement that’s made GCR the exemplar of blood donor programs in the US. (EXEMPLAR n. One that is worthy of imitation; a model.)

Donations of blood are down nationally. But the Houston-based non-profit organization delivers almost all the blood that’s needed throughout our region…thanks to a program that keeps donors coming back again and again to donate: once a quarter, every quarter, year after year.

We collected post-presentation surveys from just over 50% of you (which is great all by itself). Then 85% of you respondents rated the presentation’s relevance and quality “Excellent.” And 88% thought Morris herself was equally “Excellent.” Want some actual quotes?

“Great presentation. Annetta is fantastic.”

“Great speaker.”

“Wonderful!”

But enough about her. Back to what she presented and you can learn (as I did).

1. The Commit For Life program is a tightly woven tactical set that keeps “touching” the audiences (external and internal) continuously and meaningfully. But it didn’t happen all at once…didn’t spring full-blown into the world. It’s taken GCR three long years to get every cylinder firing and help it reach its goals. So, in your case, are you and your executives giving your marketing programs enough time to work? Or are you changing strategies and tactics every month or every quarter?

2. Everyone in the organization has to be on board. Has to. Nothing would have happened without GCR’s recognition that “business as usual” meant failure to reach its goals – and no blood for our hospitals and emergency rooms. That means changing the paradigm (terrible cliché). Now you should be asking yourself: if what I’m doing isn’t working, why do I keep doing it?

3. Morris made it clear that executives, marketers, staffers and vendors all participated thoroughly in the process of changing the GCR marketing program – and she gave appropriate credit to each of them: the people at the top, the phlebotomists that escort their patrons into the donor’s chairs, the partners with whom GCR cooperates in the rewards program, the vendors (like TCB Specialties and NextLevelThinking) who think and act in support of GCR. Qs for you: Do you get everyone on board with your program? Does everyone who touches a customer or a patient or a patron understand what the marketing program is trying to accomplish?

4. Back to “time.” GCR asks its patrons to take the time to donate. Morris was quite pointed about this: Time is an element much more valuable to donors than blood – though people don’t often think of it that way. In healthcare marketing (as in many other segments), we are not necessarily asking our prospects and customers to change their minds, or their brands – we’re asking them to take the time to consider our message, the time to think about a new software approach, the time to visit a clinic. What do you think? Does your marketing program help make your prospects think their time is worthwhile?

FYI, our SIG learned a few things as well – which will we apply to future events. That’s what an exemplar is all about: something worthy of imitating.

Thanks to Annetta Morris and the entire GCR team; our sponsors, XL Films and Medical Journal Houston; and the AMA Houston Healthcare SIG-folk: you know who you are.