Healthcare Marketing

I have talked about it a few times here.  Healthcare marketing lags the industry.  We don’t use technology creatively.  We don’t traditionally think outside the box.  We are risk adverse.  We are historically focused on business-to-business (B2B) not business-to-consumer (B2C) sales.  We don’t have sophisticated data mining.  This has certainly been validated for me when I go out to meet with payors and find out that the person I am meeting with just came from a consumer products company.

Today, the World HealthCare Blog talks about a healthcare marketing model.   It talks about possible models to apply.  It suggests the automotive industry as one rather than financial services or service industry.  I think financial services is a good model since people view their financial data as confidential like their health data.  I think the service industry is relevant since it is about the experience and support which for many patients is how they experience healthcare.  The automotive industry doesn’t work for me.  It is generally a luxury good with lots of variability.

The challenge in general is that healthcare marketing is selling a product that people don’t understand and don’t want to people who believe they are generally entitled to it.  Not any easy problem to solve.

“Until providers expand their horizons to see their “products” in terms of life meaning and impact, health care marketing will be mired in myopia, focused on features and attributes, or rare and episodic encounter experiences.”