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, second and third stories in the series.
Bias and lack of diversity are deeply baked into health care organizations. They aren’t bugs; they’re features.
Zooming out from health care to the data underlying marketing efforts, it is fundamentally flawed because of a lack of representation in clinical research. Socioeconomically disadvantaged populations and ethnic minorities are underrepresented and have been historically excluded from studies or ignored outright.
The Institutional Research Board’s federal regulations designate racial and ethnic minorities among its vulnerable populations, which tacitly acknowledges that, in the past, these groups experienced great harm as research participants.
Both health care and marketing leaders are predominantly white. Not only that, but too often these decision-makers sit in corporate bubbles, detached from the customers they’re trying to connect.
“They don’t have a spectrum of diversity in their office,” said Albert Thompson, managing director of digital at full-service ad agency Walton Isaacson. “They don’t even know what it looks like.”
Health care organizations need to embrace fluidity and experimentation if they want to market to the diverse US population they rely on to survive.
“I don’t think the sector has woken up and realized, ‘We are the problem,’” he said. “They always say, ‘If you want to sell more product, design the next consumer.’ All these health care companies have product, but they didn’t design their future consumer, who was largely someone of color.”
Thompson spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: How do you approach race-based targeting in health care marketing in a nuanced, respectful way?
ALBERT THOMPSON: You can do third-party research. You can do ethnographies. It comes through somewhat in clinical trials and brand health studies. You can partner with media companies that already cover those audiences and do a study to really understand how [underserved] segments identify.
Marketing is about consumer intimacy and knowing who you’re dealing with. Consumer marketers have to start spending more money on research and less on product development and placement. The starting point is understanding the consumer, and that could take years. You have to spend the time; you have to do the work.
How do you segment audiences? How granular can you get?
The persona is usually the first route. Once you get to the persona mapping and tying that to product lines and services, you start to understand who’s emerging.
Personas really get you into the psychological tracks of how people think. Sometimes it cuts across [ethnic groups]. The persona may evolve into a journey map or patient pathway. If you don’t understand why somebody makes the decision to pursue therapy treatment around a disease class and how they make the decision to ultimately buy, I don’t know if you can do segmentation very well.
How can influencer marketing be useful for pharmaceutical or health care marketing?
Influencers carry the currency of one-to-one validation and credibility. Influencer marketing plays on all the moments of truth the way traditional marketing never can. That’s how human beings work. Most of the people we speak to and trust are in a very close circle, and brands typically are not part of that circle.
What can health care marketers learn from other industries?
No one in health care is stealing lessons from each other. In other industries – like fashion, entertainment, music, film – people look at the successes and they mimic it, or they reboot old stuff because it will do well. Automotive does an amazing job of mimicking its competitors.
There’s also an underutilization of health care’s gateway categories. Health care doesn’t sit on an island. Physical fitness is a gateway to preventative medicine. Insurance is a sister category; your level of health has a lot to do with what degree you’re insurable or whether you get certain types of insurance. Other verticals have tethered themselves to other industries. Health care doesn’t do some of these basic tenets at real scale.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
For more articles featuring Albert Thompson , click here.
