Strategy

When Healthcare Professionals Receive the Wrong Diagnosis

I just received a forwarded email that was sent by local ad agency to their opt-in list, and was moved to write about it.

The ad agency distributed the email to their opt-in to self-promote the creation of a series of TV commercial spots for a healthcare insurer.  Rather than focus on how the agency helped the client generate sales leads, it instead used four paragraphs of text copy to showcase the agency’s “vision” — naming the Creative Director, production Director, production house, and concluded by only briefly mentioning the impact on client lead generation before naming the awards won as a result of the client funded commercial(s).  It was unclear to us how much “vision” is required to interrupt people in the age of social media marketing and struck us as a squandered opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership to a captive audience.

From the information available, it appears that the healthcare insurer wanted to communicate a wellness and prevention message to potential enrollees to create inbound leads for their Medicare Advantage health plan.  Predictably, the agency’s diagnosis was to produce a series of commercials and buy broadcast media.  There’s only one problem — according to research broadcast media has shown little influence on consumer choice of healthcare providers.  Similar research documents factors influencing consumer selection of healthcare plans — here again, peer referral is key (not ads).

So how did this happen?

Because companies continue to confuse advertising for marketing and hire the former instead of the latter (see our 2009 posts on selecting/rating ad agencies).  Advertising creates awareness — but awareness is only one of three steps in the Purchase Funnel (the others being Consideration & Purchase).   Ironically, among “awareness” options — advertising continues to rank low in terms of its impact in influencing consumer decisions to select a product or brand.

In another example, our team became aware last week of a local physician group planning to spend over $100,000 on outdoor billboards despite less than 4% of consumers using such mediums as an information source for physician selection.

We’re going to reach out to these medical providers to offer a research-based diagnosis and begin their rehab back to good health.

Tags: advertising, healthcare marketing