All The Marketing That’s Fit To Print

The original title of this post was, ‘23 Reasons Healthcare Needs A Makeover.’ Since nobody wants to sit through having to read 23 of anything, I’m going to try to make this easy for each of us.

These are a few of Roemer’s Healthcare Axioms:

• Axiom 1: Nobody knows what it costs to acquire a patient.
• Axiom 2: Nobody knows what it costs to retain a patient.
• Axiom 3: Nobody knows what it costs to prevent leakage — heck, nobody even knows if someone leaked; before treatment, after treatment. Leakage is one of life’s great mysteries.
• Axiom 4: Patients and members, both new and existing, will tell you that healthcare marketing has zero impact on who they choose as their provider and payer.
• Axiom 5: Providers and payers will continue to play a zero-sum game, spending money on marketing campaigns that do not resonate with anyone outside of marketing.

So, here’s how I got to the number 23 (you can come up with your own number using this same approach).

I started thumbing through this month’s issue of Philadelphia Magazine, and I was gobsmacked by the number of full-page healthcare ads, so much so that I felt the need to count them. By the time I reached page 66, I had counted 23 ads.

Four providers and two payers paid for those 23 ads. Doing the math — four plus two, divided into 23 — indicates that each organization marketed to the magazine’s readers about four times in the first 66 pages.

I took some time to reach each ad, and to ask myself if there was anything in any of those ads that would compel me to take action. There wasn’t.

It is worth noting that all of the ads had the same look and feel. It was almost as though all of the marketing departments, independent of their firm, operated from the same marketing omnibus of acceptable healthcare marketing strategies.

The only difference among the ads was the name of the institution doing the advertising. The ads each pictured one or two animated and healthy people having the time of their lives. The people were frolicking, picnicking, biking and jogging. They were carefree.

I suppose the ideas behind the ads were that even if you had cancer, that if you brought your cancer to one of these organizations, you could be frolicking by the time you finished reading the magazine. The ads do not show someone with no hair connected to an IV dispensing cisplatin. Perhaps the thinking is that ads about frolicking are preferable to ads about cisplatin.

The same kinds of ads are on billboards and on television. They are in your mailboxes and mine. If every healthcare organization is pitching the same message, is the effect on consumers the same as if they had pitched no message? I think it is. I think consumers think the same thing.

I am willing to bet my neighbor’s BMW that not a single reader of the October issue of Philadelphia Magazine will be influenced one iota about who to choose as their provider or payer based on a magazine ad, a billboard, or a television commercial.

If you want to get my attention, tell me that you designed a tool that will help me manage my care and wellness. Don’t give me frolicking. Give me care, and then I will care.