Junto ("june-toe") is sponsored by Franklin Street, a branding and full service advertising agency specializing in health and wellness. We call the blog Junto in homage to Benjamin Franklin, who created the first "Junto" brainstorming group, which established the first American public hospital.
Our own Stephen Moegling has been invited to speak at the annual WHPRMS (Wisconsin Healthcare Public Relations and Marketing Society) conference this fall and we hope to see you there! The conference will be held October 6-8 in Wisconsin Dells.
Stephen will be hosting a session on marketing to women, giving attendees pointers on creating loyal relationships with female consumers, best practices for involving physicians in advertising campaigns, and ROI-friendly, female-focused marketing tactics.
To learn more about the conference, visit whprms.org, and under the “educational” tab, choose “annual conference. If you can’t make it to Wisconsin Dells, check back in the fall for a copy of the presentation deck!
I am a mother of two and have high expectations in the healthcare providers I choose for my family. Despite working in marketing, I’m skeptical of advertising and rely on the recommendations of friends. For me, choosing a doctor is akin to finding a good mentor. It’s about building a relationship. The first visit is the final test. From the moment I step up to reception I’m asking myself, Can I trust you? Will you listen to me? Do you know your stuff? Will you make my life easier? I study how the staff interacts, assessing the paperwork I’ll have to complete, and counting the number of people that are ahead of me to see the doctor.
In many ways, appealing to women and mothers has more to do with how you operate your business than how you market it. Fundamental shifts like when Mobile, the gas station, allowed mom’s to pay at the pump rather than drag their kids inside the station, create more impact than putting a female face are on the face of your advertising campaigns.
In 2008, the American Academy of Family Physicians polled 1,193 American women who defined themselves as primary health care decision makers for themselves and/or their family. They shared frustrations on filling out redundant paperwork; having to tell one doctor what another had recommended or diagnosed; and getting contradictory recommendations from different medical providers. Solutions that were most important included:
Better Access: same-day appointments for unexpected health concerns
Dedicated Doctors: who are informed on their family medical and can manage chronic illnesses
Technology: for easier communication between doctors and patients, a faster flow of information between providers, and prescription fulfillment to pharmacists
Healthcare providers that are able to deliver on the above will draw patients, and moms will be right in the front line.
We all know women are the primary healthcare decision-makers. (Along with almost every other purchase decision in the household.) Healthcare brands have naturally pursued women. But has this sole focus on women come at a price of gaining share of market?
Recent trends suggest that healthcare brands should adjust their campaign strategies to appeal to men. 80% of all the jobs lost in this economic recession were held by men. The number of stay-at-home dads has doubled in the last ten years. Today’s dads spend 22 hours a week on childcare-related activities — double what it was 30 years ago. The fact is, men are more vested in household decisions than ever before — including healthcare.
The Internet has created equality in the search for healthcare solutions. 74% of all men and 74% of all women use the Internet for information and entertainment. For healthcare searches, younger women do use the Internet more than men. But, for the high valued age cohort of 55-64, prime users of healthcare, men use the Internet equal to women for healthcare searches.
There are four truths in marketing anything to men, including healthcare:
Offer men the lure of control – men respond favorably to brands that promise control, such as GPS systems. Hardee’s demonstrated this truth with its hilarious spot for a spicy burger.
Stereotypes are encouraged – unlike women, men relish their stereotypes – for example, men will do anything for beer.
Market to the man, but sell the woman. In other words, make your brand appealing to men but ensure that you also validate the woman. Dove has done this well with their new Men’s line of skin care. Dove’s campaign appeals to men but caters to the woman who will most likely buy the product for her hubby.
Start with the brain to win a man’s heart. Despite cultural shifts in acceptance for men to express their feelings, many men, especially older generations, are tight-lipped about how they feel. In healthcare advertising, use facts about the quality of your services to appeal to men. This gives men the opportunity to embrace your brand. Then, make an emotional connection. A recent campaign we developed for a health system’s cancer centerutilized this strategy with great success.
Obviously, most hospital services appeal to men. But the top service lines to market to men are:
Cardiac
Colorectal
Prostate
Diabetes
Orthopedics
Sleep Apnea
Stroke
Sports Medicine
Weight-Loss Surgery
Emergency Services
Hospitals in need of new patient volume are greatly benefiting from marketing their emergency services to both men and women. A recent campaign we developed features Mark Martin, NASCAR driver, and his wife, Arlene, in an amusing slice of life moment reminiscent of many marriages.
Hospitals’ community magazines are also great drivers for connecting with male audiences. Memorial Health Care System in Chattanooga, TN develops a quarterly magazine that has won international awards for its quality. Recently, the system produced an all male-focused issue, which relied on the third truth — market to the man, but appeal to the woman – to drive new patients to key services. A downloadable PDF of the magazine can be found here.
Other ideas for marketing healthcare to men include:
Hosting physician lectures at your local home improvement store (go where your audience is!).
Partner with a local car club and host a car show and screening event (a hospital in Indiana does this every year and has thousands of men attend the event).
Create a Man’s Guide to Doctor’s Visits –– include healthcare terms and good questions to ask the physician. Men are notorious for not asking their physicians follow up questions.
Offer a couple’s screening package for services like cardiac disease and stroke.
Men should not be overlooked as a key opportunity for driving volume and share of market for healthcare brands. Yes, they won’t stop to ask for directions. But following a few simple rules, men can become advocates of your brand and users of your services.
In May, Franklin Street’s Senior VP of Client Services Stephen Moegling spoke at the Georgia Society for Healthcare Marketing and Public Relations about the benefits and best practices of marketing healthcare services to men. In preparation, Stephen chatted with Reyn Kinzey, a friend and partner of Franklin Street with over 20 years of qualitative healthcare market research experience, to get some insights on gender differences when it comes to marketing healthcare.
Stephen: What have you noticed are some differences in the way men and women interact with healthcare?
Reyn: When it comes to healthcare, like many other things, men and women sometimes seem to come from different planets, or as I like to say, they were born in different hospitals.
Ultimately, men and women want the same things from healthcare. They want to be cared for and healed by doctors and health care workers who are competent and compassionate and who care about not only them as patients, but also for their families. The differences, then, are in the ways men and women go about getting those things from their healthcare providers.
Women are very involved in their healthcare, seeing it as a work-in-process that can always be improved. Our research clearly indicates that women want more information, more explanations, and more choices. They, much more than men, seem to want to understand the mechanics of a disease and all of the ramifications of treatment.
In contrast, I have often found that men, particularly if their situation is not life threatening, can take a very cavalier attitude towards their own treatment. Some men clearly do not need to feel like they understand what is going on, and reflect more of a “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” attitude.
Stephen: Do men & women interact with their doctors differently, too?
Reyn: They certainly do. Women often say that they need to have a “relationship” with their doctors (men blush at the word), and relationships, for women, often demand more time in conversation than men do. No one – male or female – likes to talk to a doctor who has his or her hand on the door knob, but women are much more likely to be offended (“you’re not listening to me”) than men.
Women tend to use conversation much more to build rapport and develop relationships, while men much more often simply use conversation to relay information. In some ways, this probably reflects men’s greater acceptance of heirarchal roles. Rather than feeling like they need to be a part of the decision-making process, men just tend to want to feel sure that the doctor understands what is going on (“he’s the doctor, not me”).
Stephen: Does it make a difference if you conduct mixed focus groups as opposed to single-gender groups?
Reyn: Most of the time, yes. The differences in the ways men and women look at health care justify separating focus groups into all male and all female groups and, whenever possible, matching the gender of the moderator to the gender of the participants.
The reason I said most of the time is because we have found that men with chronic illnesses, or who have children with particular problems, often know a tremendous amount about the system and are very involved in their own, or their child’s, care. Further, by the time men and women enter their 60′s, the differences in involvement with the health care system tend to fade.
Stephen: What happens when the groups are mixed?
Reyn: If you conduct mixed gender groups, it is as though the men had just been reminded by their Boy Scout Master not to show any emotion. They will say ridiculous things, such as “I couldn’t care less about a doctor’s bedside manner. All I care about is how good a doctor he is.” However, if those same men are in an all male group, in fifteen minutes they are all consoling one another because their doctors didn’t tell them that the prostate surgery might leave them impotent.
Even women tend to get more rationalistic in mixed group discussion of health care, which is seldom where moderators want to go. We are taught to look for the less rational, more emotional feelings underlying what participants say because, as all marketers should know, rational reasoning is often not the way we make important decisions.
Stephen: It is generally thought that healthcare organizations need only to market to women, as they are typically the decision-makers in the household. Do you think this is true?
Reyn: Considering the gender differences and exceptions discussed earlier, hospitals may rightly conclude that women may make up their primary market, but they should definitely not overlook the growing importance of the male market as well.
