Is there a formula you can follow for healthcare marketing?

By Geoffrey Cooling

What if there was a simple formula for advert deployment in your healthcare marketing that would reach successive generations of our prospective Patients? What if it was actually as simple as looking at the psychology of formulation of awareness of general advertising? Let me explain, the story starts a long long time ago, hey I am thinking of going into children’s fiction, you think your kids are traumatised now? But in any way, the story does start quite a while ago, I was involved with a retail hearing healthcare business. The business did some AB testing on news media advertisements to metric return on investment rates.

One of the adverts was modelled on legacy adverts, adverts that looked like they would be at home in a late fifties early sixties news paper. I believe I called it the fifties reject. The second advert had the same call to action but was deployed in a sophisticated modern manner. Guess which advert won the test? You got it the reject from the fifties. I considered why for quite a while, the adverts had exactly the same call to action, exactly the same wording. But one did much better than the other?

After much thought, I came up with a hypothesis, a hypothesis that I would like to share and hopefully debate with you. I considered our demographic, the people we were trying to entice and indeed the people who responded to the advertising. They were obviously of a certain age and a certain generation. What interested me though was that the female responders tended to be younger than the males. First I considered that perhaps women habitually take care of themselves in a much better way than men. They often attend a healthcare professional for an issue long before a man would.

But that did not really answer the question as to why more were spurred to answer one advert over the other. Than I thought about the age of the people who responded, that’s when I began to have an idea. It was the age disparity between the men and the women that did it. Men I feel become aware of advertising during their middle to late twenties. Before that time men don’t necessarily really take notice of advertising in general. However, women tend to be earlier consumers, they take notice of advertising at an earlier age, perhaps in their late teens.

I know these are generalities, but bear with me, when you become aware of something as powerful as advertising. The first period involves the formulation of your ideas around that subject. In other words what is a good advert and what is a bad advert, what type of advert stands for trust and quality and what doesn’t. What if it is that simple, what if all you have to do to attract a particular generation is research good general advertising from the years when their ideas were formulated? Then deploy an advert in the style of adverts that were judged to be good adverts? The style of advert that stood for trust, quality and professionalism?

What if it was that simple, what if you could deploy your healthcare marketing to a formula. Thank you for accompanying me on my navel gazing. I promise to warn you of any other such adventure in the future. But I would appreciate your feedback on this one.

Regards

Geoff