The sheer speed at which technology, media, marketing and medicine are changing is bringing new hope, new opportunities, new possibilities…and so many new distractions.
In fact, what it often feels like is that we live in an Age of Congestion—where just breaking through and earning a clear lane of attention can feel impossible.
How do some brands break through while others are overrun by the noise and competition for time and attention?
That’s important because [insert your healthcare brand here] likely does not think of Starbucks as a competitor. But it’s companies like Starbucks that are actively shaping people’s expectations for how a company should behave and engage with its customer base.
In fact, your healthcare customer’s expectations are constantly being reshaped, rewired and remodeled by new and innovative experiences with brands, media, peers and technology. Brands that don’t deliver experiences that meet or exceed these rapidly changing expectations are increasingly being ignored, brushed aside or deemed irrelevant.
If we want to keep pace with our audiences, we need to accelerate our thinking and evolve our tactics. Learning from leading brands in healthcare and far outside of it is how we start. Dig in.
The appetite for information is quickly filled; the appetite for hope is bottomless. People facing a health challenge go online to look for information. There’s a wealth of it there. But once people have fulfilled that transactional need, they look for hope. Brands are building entirely new ways to fuel the human capacity for resilience and confidence against every odd.
Pfizer’s This Is Living With Cancer was borne of two insights: People with cancer want to live, not be defined by an illness, and they want support—they know they cannot do it alone. At the center of the program is a documentary; nine people, sharing stories about what it’s like when you get the first, second or third diagnosis, and the everyday ways they heal, cope and live on. The stories are honest, powerful, sometimes funny and full of the personal inspiration needed to fuel what the rest of life can be.
A new media platform and television show is coming to Fox: one all about the real lives of the people others call patients. Unbreakables is a branded entertainment platform that tells stories about people who have overcome or addressed a challenging health event. This program propels healthcare storytelling into a new era of entertainment. They’re already following 300 stories and experiences from cancer to sports injuries. That rich depth of content will let Fox tailor each show to the brand it’s attached to.
A life-altering health challenge is nothing to laugh about. Until there’s nothing left to do but laugh, that is. For years, healthcare marketers worked to perfect empathy and understanding of four of the five most overwhelming feelings and emotions: shock, fear, grief and denial. But they stayed carefully away from the fifth: laughter. Laughter for relief, human connection and simple recognition or understanding. This year, healthcare started to crack a smile.
Takeda’s research found that people with depression often use self-deprecating humor to talk about the condition and their daily symptoms or challenges. They laugh to overcome the stigma and the discomfort. Lighter Blue joins them in that dry humor. He’s a little blue character with a cat companion who breaks down stigma and delivers you-get-it cartoons made for social media. Lighter Blue talks about symptoms, coping mechanisms and feelings in a very human and often funny voice. He appears on the website and in inboxes and feeds to keep the discussion going.
People living with diabetes regularly have to check their blood by pricking the tip of their finger with a needle. Needless to say, few enjoy the prick. Dexcom’s new product is able to monitor blood with no needles. So, they had a little fun with wordplay. The ad tells a story about @RYANANDSUZIEGLOBALTRAVELLERS, a couple just back from a package getaway. That status update is followed by nearly 20 increasingly obnoxious hashtags (#GetYourBeachOn) and ultimately paid off with, “The world is already full of pricks. So we made a glucose monitoring system for diabetics that doesn’t have any.”
The new competitive advantage is collaboration. Healthcare leaders are opening up their doors and their databases to new ideas and new interpretations. Makers, scientists and innovators are leaning in to be part of creating new treatment discoveries and new ways to connect
with and support people. This second wave of open innovation is made more powerful by clearer metrics, structured challenges and a fast-growing community of consortiums and collaborators.
GSK’s consumer innovation team invites scientists, developers and designers to answer specific health product challenges in categories like digital health and packaging innovation. Each challenge comes with a brief about what GSK wants to accomplish and what stage they’d ideally like to collaborate in. When a match is identified, the innovator has access to the development and commercialization resources of GSK, opening doors to sophisticated R&D labs, deep consumer insights, and expert sales and marketing teams.
Strava is one of the most popular activity and exercise tracking apps in the world. It works with most phones and favorite wearables to let runners and cyclers record their data and then go deep into what it means + how it compares. Strava has made anonymized versions of its massive data sets available to researchers. City planners have found cycling routes and challenges; scientists have better understood heart rate. Oh, and, fun fact, students found scandal: An Australian student used the data to reveal possible military and covert operations sites based on activity (like patrolling a perimeter).
Motivation is fleeting. Most advertising and marketing is focused on drawing someone toward something. But behavioral science shows us that we can’t just turn that interest on and trust that it will stay on. This year, we’ll see more teams focused on constantly refilling the motivation
bucket with context and consistent support/reminders that will help turn that interest to action, action to commitment and commitment to resilience.
Adherence has been called the last mile of medicine. The problem and costs have been understood and analyzed for years. Recently, a number of hospitals and healthcare innovators have started to leverage principles of behavioral science to fuel motivation and resilience. For example, Penn Medicine’s Nudge program is building incentive programs designed to increase patient willingness to follow through on behavior change, and treatment based on each individual’s motivation style. The Nudge team is incorporating motivation as part of a holistic data-driven precision medicine commitment that combines the science of medicine with the science of behavior.
Johnson & Johnson created the Health Partner platform to help people prepare for and recover from knee, hip or weight-loss surgery. The toolset is designed to ready people both physically and mentally. It includes an educational website, an app that guides users through surgery prep and recovery, and a real-time portal that lets the patient collaborate with the care team. All the elements of the program include opportunities to understand and activate underlying motivations. Health Partner content and prompts evolve and change over time to give each patient just
the right kind of support and encouragement needed for individual success.
The mental health of healthcare providers is coming into sharp focus as we enter 2019. Two-thirds of U.S. physicians report that they’re burnt out, depressed or both. Physician suicide rates are double that of the general public. Doctors say they’re overwhelmed by the stress of the
job, the constant influx of information and the endless administrative tasks. Advocates and partner brands are looking for new ways to ease their burden.
&Me (#AndMe) was created by the Doctors’ Support Network because many people in medicine face mental health challenges but few feel able to speak out due to perceived threats to their authority or even their careers. The &Me campaign seeks to show strength in numbers by asking people to stand together, support each other and ultimately challenge the stigma. Through events, articles and social media, many senior healthcare professionals have already stood up and shared their stories with the goal of making being open and seeking help easier for a new generation of doctors.
Wayne Sotile and Gary Simonds, MD, teamed up to write a new survival guide for their peers: The Thriving Physician: How to Avoid Burnout by Choosing Resilience Throughout Your Medical Career. The book starts with understanding the natural stressors of the job, from the rigor of medical school to the drudgery of multitasking and data entering. Then it introduces new strategies for coping in this new era of medical practice. Sotile and Simonds also give doctors difficult questions to consider and reflect on as they reshape their approach to their profession.
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