When marketing healthcare brands, achieving top-of-mind awareness is good. Most preferred healthcare brand is even better. Most likely to return and to refer to others -- fantastic. But how about love for your healthcare brand? Read more »

Cardiac services is one of the most popular services for hospitals and health systems to market to consumer audiences. For good reason. Cardiac services is often one of the hospital's most profitable service lines. (Even if you're a non-profit, remember the maxim, No margin, no mission.) Consumers "get" the need for advanced heart care. There's no need to "sell" the average person on why expertise is important. Read more »

Adapted from Franklin Street's Healthcare Marketing Trends Report. A new form of self-help in healthcare and health and wellness is emerging. Brands like Nike are embedding "feedback loops" into their products, allowing people to get real-time reactions on their activities – while reaping brand loyalty and profits in the process. Call it Do It Yourself (DIY) Healthcare or "Help Me Help Myself." Read more »

Our experience in healthcare marketing tells us that health audiences are generally open and willing to embrace conversations about heart care and joint care. Cancer services, however, is still a taboo topic, which means health audiences are more likely to close the door on the conversation before our advertising and other communications strategies can break through. In "Buyology" Martin Lindstrom, explains that "...emotions are the way in which Read more »

The New Year means the chance to embrace change, and to grow. Here are our resolutions for the healthcare marketing community, which we are grateful to be part of. We wish you a bright and prosperous New Year.Resolution No. 1: We will do less and accomplish more.We will say no to those activities that do not solve our organization's business challenges. As Lisa McCluskey, VP of Marketing Communications at Memorial Health Care System says, Read more »

In earlier posts, we identified 3 easy ways to segment male healthcare audiences, great examples of non-healthcare brands getting marketing to men right, and 4 key trends that indicate why marketing to men is the right thing to do for your healthcare brand.Just as men and women are different, so is the style and delivery of how to calibrate messages that respond best to men. Here are 5 best practices to grow male engagement with your healthcare brand:Offer Read more »

We all know women tend to be the primary healthcare decision-makers in the home, yet recent trends indicate men are becoming more knowledgeable and engaged with healthcare decision-making.When we develop branding and service line marketing campaigns for our clients, we use primary research to get insights into the hearts and minds of our audiences, segmenting by geographic area, income levels, co-morbitity factors and psychographic qualities. Read more »

Recently, there's been an increase of ads targeted towards stay-at-home dads... and for good reason. Gender roles are shifting and Michael Keaton isn't the Mr. Mom anymore. Several brands aiming to win dad over have been spot-on. We find this advertising smart, humorous, and doesn't follow the stereotypical "dumb guy" routine. We also find that winning over dad isn't enough – it's important to win mom, too. These ads get it right.1.Google's Read more »

This spring, members of our Franklin Street team will be presenting a discussion on marketing healthcare to men at the Virginia and the New England healthcare marketing conferences.It's a fun presentation with lots of examples of great healthcare and non-healthcare marketing to men.httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1qW7Po-1KIBut it does beg the question: why would you want to market healthcare to guys?After all, women make most of the Read more »

We know women make 80% of healthcare decisions...but what about men? Don't they count in healthcare? That was the question we asked ourselves as we developed our newest trends presentation, which debuts April 19th at the Virginia Society for Healthcare Marketing and Public Relations Spring Conference.Kenya Gibson,Director of Client Services, will be presenting Homer Simpson, Frasier Crane, and The Fonz: A Case for  Marketing Healthcare to Men Leo Read more »