This piece is part of a series on targeted health care marketing, highlighting stories from people in the trenches throughout the industry. Read the first story in the series.
People are notoriously bad at doing what’s good for them, according to Andy Semons, founder and strategic planning partner of communications company IPNY.
Health care marketers are often in the business of reminding consumers of their diagnoses and getting them to change their behaviors for their own good. IPNY works with neuroscientists to design persuasive, relatable health care communication materials. When it comes to applying neuroscience to motivate people, empathy looms large.
The company once developed a campaign encouraging current or former smokers to go in for lung scans. With smoking, “you’re dealing with a disease state where people just don’t want to hear it,” Semons said. “Smokers know that smoking isn’t good for you. The real issue is they’ve got an addiction, and treating an addiction is hard.”
Eschewing a scolding tone and shifting the burden of guilt away from smokers were critical. It was also important to acknowledge smokers’ healthy habits, such as managing their diets, going for walks or following exercise routines.
And because there is a higher incidence of smoking among communities of color, who have a long history of justified distrust of the medical establishment, IPNY developed case histories featuring “empathetic characters” to represent the population they were targeting.
A campaign around Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody treatment during the pandemic also rolled out in a similar “peer-to-peer way,” framed in a positive tone, among different ethnic communities, Semons said. “It was never the medical establishment saying, ‘You need to go do this.’”
Semons spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: Health care marketing, like marketing generally, is not very representative of the general US population. Why is that a problem, and what should marketers do about it?
ANDY SEMONS: You are preaching to the choir. We talk about the populations we assess, and we want to understand how to overcome their biases. But one of the things we have to do a better job of collectively is examining our own biases.
An example is the LGBTQ+ population. As a gay man who has been out forever and is now very happily in his 60s, I get very tired with the way marketers have looked at our community.
Something that nobody has acknowledged is mistrust of the mainstream medical establishment. As someone who grew up in New York, a major urban center, I discovered very quickly that I wanted to have a gay doctor. There was this terrible fear of being judged. And even among youth when I’ve volunteered, there is still a perception that a mainstream doctor cannot have an ongoing relationship with a gay patient.
Nothing is further from the truth; there are tons of wonderful, skilled doctors. But that’s something that has never been confronted in issue-oriented advertising.
And a good chunk of the LGBTQ+ population is rural. [Many are] facing retirement, family loss, mental health issues that have nothing to do with sexuality or going on PrEP. Our lives are as complex as everybody else’s lives.
What I’ve seen more recently has been an awakening of marketers getting a little smarter, throwing in that same-sex couple in the furniture store or something like that. But it still doesn’t mirror who I am or what my life is like.
Why is culturally sensitive marketing important?
You have to achieve a certain level of authenticity. Nothing kills a good product faster than bad advertising. To be effective, you need to be real. Insights aren’t because of what somebody who’s sitting behind a desk thinks. They come from firsthand knowledge of the community.
If you come up with an idea that truly is based in what your target market is thinking, whether it’s a Hispanic market, an Asian market, an African American market or whatever else, and you find what that stumbling block is and devise a way to get over it, then it should become fairly self-evident as to how you need to communicate.
And then, on the back end, we test it. You don’t just put it out there, because there may be something that even in our wisdom, we have completely not paid attention to.
How do you ensure positive outreach that’s tailored to different communities?
An agency has to put [tailored communications] together artfully. You can’t ever make assumptions without input from a health care consumer. We do a lot of work before the creative is ever developed to validate the strategic direction.
That’s usually done via qualitative research. We do focus groups and in-depth interviews and have the perspective of a trained psychologist to do the analysis. Very often, the insights are observational in nature. That would be phase one.
Then we would develop some of the communications outreach, and we would test it among the community to make sure it was true, it was authentic.
What does the testing process look like?
You bring the work out in unfinished form. You’ll expose the concepts and have a rough script for dialogue, and you’ll obtain reactions. Is this authentic? Is this a situation you find relatable? Is this something that can motivate you to think about something differently or act differently?
In health care specifically, so much of it is about changing behavior and eradicating whatever biases people have. You need to be fairly sure that people will change or be receptive to learning something.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
For more articles featuring Andy Semons, click here.
