Is it really marketing if the consumer is not at the table?
I recently sat in the audience at a regional health care marketing conference listening to an agency strategist share their process for developing consumer marketing messages. I couldn’t help but be discouraged by what was being presented, and endorsed by the conference, as best practice.
So, what did this presenter share that had me so discouraged?
The agency strategist walked us through a process totally driven by internal stakeholders. There was no attempt to reach out to consumers. The entire process hinged on asking the internal stakeholders to speak on behalf of the consumer audience.
During Q&A I couldn’t help but ask if the agency ever directly included consumers in their process. The answer? No. I followed up by asking if this was because of limited budget. The answer? No, we believe the internal stakeholders who interact with patients know them best.
Perhaps more discouraging was watching many in the audience eagerly scratch down notes and snap pictures of the presentation slides as if they had discovered marketing gold.
We just have to do better.
Relying solely on internal stakeholders to produce understanding and insights about the consumer audience is not best practice. It does not make you patient-centered, consumer-centric, human-focused or whatever we call it these days.
This approach breaks the most fundamental rule of marketing practice: market orientation. Once you become part of an organization, you are not the customer. Certainly internal stakeholder input is important but it cannot serve as a stand-in for the consumer perspective.
What doctors, nurses and techs see from their side of the bed or MRI often differs immensely from what the customer sees from their side. The views can be remarkably different. And it’s somewhere within that difference that game-changing insights sit waiting to be discovered.
The biggest risk of marketing diagnosis to the singular lens of the internal stakeholder is not necessarily getting it wrong. It’s that you risk not getting it right enough. When we include the consumer in our diagnosis, we open the door to sobering functional and emotional truth. And that truth takes you to real consumer-oriented messaging, products and experiences.
One of my many favorite books is Jon Steel’s “Truth, Lies & Advertising: The Art of Account Planning.” In it he tells the story of how getting close to the consumer unlocked the secret to marketing milk. You’ve all likely seen the famous “Got Milk?” campaign. It would have never happened by talking only to the people responsible for producing and selling milk. You see, they were all about milk. Consumer research led them to realize that milk is about complementing cookies, peanut butter sandwiches and cereal.
Clay Christensen, the father of “the job to be done,” often talked about how McDonald’s struggled to grow its milkshake sales. After failing to lift sales by changing the shakes’ thickness, adding flavors and other actions, they turned to Clay and his team. After observing and talking to McDonald’s shake buyers they found that a large number of consumers bought shakes as they set out on their morning commute. The milkshake gave them an easy to handle, filling, long-lasting breakfast for their commute. McDonald’s leaned into this segment and their “job to be done” to achieve greater sales. Who would have guessed?
Several years ago Prairie Dog was asked by the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) to help them reverse a declining membership. At the time, the AAFP served its members by providing continuing medical education. The key to flipping the membership slide was not improved curriculum and new ways to access CME. Family physicians needed AAFP to help them accomplish something much more important: respect. Today, AAFP actively champions its growing membership via advocacy in business, government and payer circles. Getting close to AAFP’s consumers revealed insight that has transformed their business model, positioning and growth.
Here’s one last example. My good friend Bryan Cush, co-founder of Tidal Health Group, and I share our commitment to market orientation. Bryan’s group is among the very best at building online authority for health care brands. One of the reasons is that he doesn’t determine his keywords by relying on physicians. He listens to what consumers call symptoms, conditions and procedures. Surprise. Consumers don’t talk like physicians. They use everyday words – the words that make health care brands easier to find.
At the end of the day, marketing is all about connecting your organization to your audience. There is so much we can learn by listening to the consumers we want to choose our brands.
So, please, be like Milk, McDonald’s, AAFP and Bryan and invite your consumer audience to the table. Whether a formal survey, ethnography, one-on-ones, focus groups, social monitoring or even conversations in the local beauty salon or coffee shop, give it a try. Your brand will benefit and so will your career.
Jerry Hobbs is a marketing strategist and the president of Prairie Dog, a health care marketing group headquartered in Kansas City.