Health Care Marketers Belong at the Bigger Table.
I’m a big believer in Clay Christensen’s jobs to be done thinking. We use it every day at Prairie Dog to define brand opportunities and campaign messaging. And, yes, also to help guide product and patient experience efforts.
Here’s the thing. Too often health care marketers are limited to the narrow lane of “advertisers” or “communicators.”
We can do more.
If we want respect as true marketers, we have to step into the full discipline. Not just Promotion. All four Ps. Especially Product.
Christensen’s Challenge
Christensen’s approach shines here. It demands that we look beyond what organizations think consumers want and discover the job they are really hiring a product, service or experience to do.
That mindset is gold in health care. It shifts the room from an internally driven, expert-driven view to something far more powerful: a market orientation.
And that’s exactly what health care organizations need.
The Marketing Process Is the Way
Diagnosis. Strategy. Tactics. Measurement.
That’s our process. And it doesn’t just apply to advertising campaigns. When you bring it upstream into service design, product development or patient experience, you suddenly become invaluable to the conversation.
Because your diagnosis doesn’t come from sitting in a boardroom. It comes from listening. From watching. From understanding the functional and emotional jobs to be done.
My Lesson in Women’s Services
When I first started in health care, I was appointed service line director for Women’s Services. As a male, I knew almost nothing about what women wanted from their care. That turned out to be a gift.
Because my marketing discipline had to kick in.
We built a nationally recognized women’s service line. Not by asking women what they wanted, but by listening to their stories. Their frustrations. Their emotions.
The job to be done in breast health wasn’t just screening. It was reducing dread. Easing anxiety.
So we hired mammography techs with the gift of conversation — people who could distract patients from their worries. We redesigned sterile hospital spaces into warm, welcoming environments. And, most importantly, we gave women their results before they left their appointment. No more waiting days for a phone call.
That was marketing at work. Not advertising. Marketing.
Bottom Line
If health care marketers want more respect, we have to earn it. And we earn it by stepping beyond communications into the full practice of marketing. By inserting ourselves into the process of shaping products, services and experiences that better meet the real jobs to be done.
Advertising may get you noticed. But marketing — real marketing — changes the business.
It’s time for more of us to get to the bigger table.
Jerry Hobbs is a marketing strategist and the president of Prairie Dog, a health care marketing group headquartered in Kansas City.
