Medical marketing from CPGs to CRM. Health scare tactics?

  By Gonzalo López Martí Creative director, etc. / lmmiami.com

• Good advertising – or good marketing for that matter- is all about putting a pebble in the target audience’s shoes.
• Inserting a little blip on their radar.
• Adding a mental note in their to-do list.
• In the marketing & advertising business we tend to believe that CPGs is where the action is.
• The big budgets, the big thinking, the new technologies.
• At some point, Silicon Valley gave us a run for our money: they didn’t even bother reading our Madison Avenue playbook.
• They wrote their own.
• The proverbial “growth hacks”.
• Y’know who’s on the brink of stealing our thunder too?
• The healthcare industry.
• That’d include insurers, big pharma AND providers (as in hospitals, clinics and doctor’s practices).
• Let me tell you: healthcare marketing professionals are learning the ropes and the tricks of the trade.
• They are fast learners.
• For one thing, they are intense CRM and social media users.
• “Have you gone for your annual dental cleaning?
• It is fully covered by your healthcare insurance plan!
• How about a teeth-whitening session?
• Yup, you must pay it in full out of pocket but it is only $199.”
• There always is an upsell of some sort.
• The medical professional has borrowed a page from Quick Service Restaurants.
• Mind you, being marketed to by the healthcare industry can feel a bit crass at times.
• Preventative medicine, however, is a great concept that saves time, resources and, specially, lives.
• Getting periodic cancer checkups certainly beating treating a stage 2 tumor.
• Better safe than sorry.
• Not to be confused with defensive medicine: physicians who are so scared of misdiagnosing and get their rear ends sued that they just prescribe CT scans by default.
• Thus piling up the bills.
• Stacks of them.
• Is there a way to do medical marketing without looking like a greedy healthcare huckster?
• Sure, the trick is to calibrate the message in such a way that it doesn’t turn potential patients into hopeless hypochondriacs.
• To be continued.