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.

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.

Every Day in Every Way, Wellness Marketing Gets Better and Better.

Boy, have we come a long way since Wellbee was the spokesinsect for the Centers for Disease Control – in practice if not in theory. The wellness concept has been around a long time. (The CDC poster dates to 1964.)

Selling people on wellness, though, has always been more challenging. That’s been particularly true of not just one but two company stakeholder groups: employees and executives.

Today, sayeth the Wellness Councils of America, more than 80% of America’s businesses with 50 or more employees have some kind of health promotion program, like exercise, stop-smoking classes or stress management. A lot of employers offer wellness programs because they have finally discovered that the benefit is worth the cost. But business leaders continue to wonder: how can they get more employees committed and involved?

When you practice the highly focused form of “internal wellness marketing,” you know that only worksite health promotion stands out as the long-term answer for keeping employees well in the first place. That’s an insight that you have shared with your management, and transmitted to everyone inside your company via employee communications programs like the one I blogged about here.

It’s an insight that drives five outstanding presenters at the next AMAHouston Healthcare SIG seminar, “Marketing Wellness Inside.” You should be there on Friday, June 25.

See, hear and learn about new and effective practices for internal wellness marketing from Mark Poindexter who manages wellness programs in the US for Shell Oil; Health and Wellness Director Andrew Lowe of the Frost Insurance Agency; Michele Nelson-Housley, the program coordinator for employee health and well-being at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center; and Human Resources Generalist Shellie Perez from Mustang Engineering.

The event moderator is Jonathan Lack, who brings his own set of employee-marketing experiences to the show as Executive Director of the Houston Wellness Association.

A bit of imagination will tell you that classic marketing, applied with creativity and power, can work just as well on the inside as it does on the outside. Research will show you the reasons why 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. (I’m hoping for a great tan post mortem, myself.)

And perhaps most important is that this Healthcare SIG seminar will prove to you, once again, that marketing is a profession that encompasses all kinds of industries and markets.

Forty-five years ago, Wellbee promoted everything from washing your hands – sound familiar? – to booster shots…even “oral polio vaccine” if you remember what that was. Register today. So next week you can discover how we’re marketing wellness better than ever. And why it’s so necessary.

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.

Christmas Promotion: How Zytrel XP® Becomes the World’s Official Santa-tizer.

Of all the health-risky hands-on occupations during this H1N1 flu season, the top job’s got to be America’s professional Santa Clauses…the Christmas holiday laps for thousands if not millions of kids. That must turn the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention utterly white.

As of today, though, there’s a fun and public-spirited holiday promo, sent as a “special to Signalwriter” from Jack Goldenberg at Biodefense Solutions:

For as long as anybody can remember, Santa Claus has been the world’s greatest gift giver. We think it's about time that Santa got a gift. This holiday season, if you’re a working Santa Claus in the NY tri-state area (NY, NJ, or CT), we’d like to give you a gift, a free bottle of Zytrel XP®, the world’s first extended protection hand sanitizer.

The Zytrel Santa-tizer opportunity came along (like a lot of promo concepts) at the intersection of several events. This is where you envision me holding up my fingers in sequence, right?

One. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been vigorously advising clean hands as one of the best ways to prevent infection in the face of regular flu and H1N1 viruses this year. CDC even says, “Remember: If soap and water are not available, use alcohol-based gel to clean hands.”

Two. No less a group than AORBS called out the dangers of Swine Flu at a early-November conference in Philadelphia. The AORBS – Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas™ – is a genuine organization, founded in 1994. In Philly, the professional Santa group lobbied for priority in getting H1N1 vaccinations plus urged its members to use hand sanitizer. Read all about that right here.

Three. Biodefense Solutions thinks those Santas need extra protection and according to everything that Goldenberg has sent me, Zytrel XP delivers exactly that. Traditional alcohol-based sanitizers, like J&J’s Purell product, don’t seem to offer Santas (or other users) long-lasting protection because they only kill germs until they dry, about 15 seconds. The alcohol is part of the problem: Once these older-formulation sanitizers evaporate, they’re done.

Zytrel XP has what its makers calls an “Active Defense Period” of up to four hours – it not only kills 99.99% of germs on contact, it keeps on killing germs for the entire four-hour period.

I’m no Santa. Biodefense Solutions has sent me a bottle of Zytrel XP to try anyway. I’ll report back on my observations, even though there’s a certain amount of faith involved: I’m not going to be lab-testing my hands every day. More important though, the company extended the offer of a free bottle to the pro Santas of the AORBS. The two outfits have shaken hands and Goldenberg emailed me:

I am proud to announce that as of midnight tonight, December 10, 2009, Zytrel XP is the Official Santa-tizer of the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas.

That’s a neat seasonal promotion. If Zytrel XP helps keep America’s Santas germ-free and healthy, it’s a gift that’ll keep on giving.

Top photo: “Department Store Santa circa 1956.” A Christensen in Santa's Lap – when nobody had even thought of marketing a hand sanitizer. From Wikimedia.

“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.