Choosing the White Hat and Standing in the Sun
At Cannes, PulsePoint launched the #IChooseHealth campaign alongside a health marketing credo as a rallying cry for anyone hoping to help people find answers, solve challenges, and get better. It’s a declaration of commitment to being the best health marketer that one can, to succeeding the right way, to following 5 core values:
Insight: We will know our customers and what they need, truly and deeply. For without this, we can be no help
Respect: We will respect our patients’ and physicians’ unique circumstances, and mold ourselves to seamlessly fit their lives.
Inclusion: May we reach every person our targets describe. For whomever we miss could be gravely at risk.
Speed: We will strive to serve our patients and providers sooner. For the more quickly we can be in market, the more quickly they can heal.
Safety: May our brands stay trusted and our audience secure, for we have taken every measure to safeguard their data along with their health.
What I love about this credo is that it forces us as health marketers to hold every business decision, every choice up to the lens of this “do no harm” manifesto. But is that enough?
A former colleague and friend used to tease me by calling me “The Olivia Pope of Clinical Trials” because inevitably I would be the one assembling a small team of misfits to “rescue” a clinical trial effort gone astray. I always loved that reference (I mean who wouldn’t want to be compared to Kerry Washington’s fierce character in the television series Scandal?) because one of the themes of the show is about facing down hard problems and putting on our white hats and standing in the light.
So I would posit that we have to do more than just seek to do no harm, we need to seek out the hard problems we are facing and shine some light. Here are three tangible ways we can all do this today:
Don’t just listen to patient advocates, amplify their voices. I have many dear friends who have become advocates because a disease took them or a loved one to the brink and instead of battling the disease on their own, they took the higher calling and are fighting for everyone past and future who will face the same health challenge. They do it through their personal stories, they do it on their own dime, and they give the gift of participation in clinical research so that others may benefit. Yet, despite the push toward patient centricity, many are still treated like the bra burning feminists of the 60s - a minority of rabble rousers with an “out there” perspective. This is because because these stories are hard to hear. It’s hard to know that commercial aims are often getting in the way of how rapidly a treatment is developed or that someone close to them died because they couldn’t get their own medical records in time for a second opinion. Listening matters, but it is not enough. We need to become true allies.
Seek out the hard problems. GDPR, CCPA, keeping up with data privacy regulations will pale in comparison to what’s really coming when the data ownership conversation gains more momentum (#My31), yet we are in a business that relies more and more on data for targeting the right patient or physician to deliver the right message. It’s enough to make any healthcare agency, ad tech or Pharma company lay down in a dark room with some Advil. Turn the light back on. We can take the lead of our patient advocate friends and surround ourselves with this problem like data misuse is our disease. We can look for new ways to do business in an ethical manner that respects consumer data. To truly stand in the light on this topic, we must do it for ourselves but even more than that we must be willing to bring our partners, our data brokers, and our customers along- helping them adapt and co-create new solutions.
Address the root cause issues. Stop with the band-aids already, let’s start the real healing. It’s time to stop throwing money at one-off clinical trial microsites and drug campaigns dressed up as disease state education. Let’s use content to engage patients and then let’s stop to listen to what they have to say. Their very engagement with that content becomes their voice. A longer-term approach to education that includes foundational content to inform health literacy, disease management and treatment choice is the key to engaging with patients on their terms. These are the only terms that matter and the only terms that can drive quality ROI.
If you want to talk more about this, and the other topics we are wrestling with as health marketers, contact me (aradcliffe@pulsepoint.com) for an invite to our Radical Health Personalization event from 2:00- 7:00 pm, September, 13 in NYC with a special keynote from renowned speaker and author Seth Godin.