Where is the “Why” of Well-Being…?

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Frank Hone

The other day one of my customers sent me a newsletter with an article on strategy that featured the following section:

“Businesses are realizing the importance of developing a compelling Purpose that resonates to its consumers – indeed, not just being about the “What You Sell” or the “How You Do It” but the “Why” (see a great Ted Talk by Simon Sinek for examples of why we actually buy iPhones and why Polaroid missed their golden opportunity by not defining the WHY).”

The_Why_of_Well-BeingSounds smart, right?  Well, Simon’s TED Talk is worth viewing.  It is thoroughly enlightening, yet stunningly simple.  His recent book, “Start With Why” offers insight about perhaps the most essential element in business:  why we do what we do.

 Simon’s talk also provided me a true “aha” moment on a topic that I’ve been wrestling with for some time.

 Where is the “Why” of Well-Being…?

A couple years back, while working as Director of Sustainable Engagement at Healthways, we were looking to take a leadership position in the well-being market and had put together an impressive strategic platform.  The company had:

  • Co-created the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index
  • Published a significant body of research on correlations of well-being to health
  • Developed and marketed their Well-Being Assessment as a “new and better” HRA

But what always got me was that we weren’t doing enough to convince people to participate.  I would say that we need to provide more “context” for them.  That was my word – context – and I’m not sure it really conveyed my issue.

Watching Simon weave his message on strategy and purpose and “why”, however, provided the perspective that was missing.

Where is the “Why” of Well-Being…?

We all know by now that corporate well-being has passed “The Tipping Point.”  No longer are internal advocates having to pitch management on the rationale for promoting health improvement and wellness solutions at their companies.

We’re there.

Some 87% of Buck Consultant employer survey respondents said they believe managing worker health to be their role, up from 75% two years ago.

We all know there is tremendous opportunity for employer-delivered well-being programs

But the Engagement Gap continues to fester, despite higher-level, incentive-driven participation figures.  The problem is that too many people are just “checking the box” – doing what they need to do to get their rewards.

This participation may or may not lead to better outcomes. And most sponsors just don’t know – that same Buck Survey found that only 36% of employers measure the outcomes of their well-being programs with:

- 68% saying they don’t have the resources, and 34% saying they don’t know how

So, what’s missing?  We are focused on the WHAT and the HOW, but not on the WHY.

Why should employees care about well-being?

We haven’t done enough to educate and inform then; to provide relevance and rationale; and to deliver the compelling story about the why well-being should be adopted as a core personal value.

We believe that by filling this gap, both engagement and outcomes can dramatically improve.

But it will take more than a head nod.  It will take the hard work of getting to WHY.

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Don’t Just Hope For Change, Engage with Purpose

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Frank Hone

With more and more companies putting emphasis on employee wellness these days, we’re seeing a wide variety of program approaches and an equally wide array of results.

The good news is that employers are doing this and are hoping to change health behavior, drive down costs and raise the levels of performance.

hope_for_health_behavior_changeThe bad news is that too often, initiatives rely more on hope for change than on sound business strategy.

To achieve successful in developing an effective wellness initiative, it’s important that it be purposefully designed to meet business objectives, fit the population dynamics, and smartly activates and engages participants.  It should also encourage sustainable engagement and promote personal accountability for health and well-being improvement.

In helping to design and refine initiatives for customers, we see the following “Four Ps” as key components for delivering successful wellness solutions:1. Purpose.  Begin by outlining a clear set of well-defined objectives that incorporate both your high level strategic mission and the specific and detailed well-being program aims. The objectives need to be measurable and realistic, and will need to expand in scope year after year.

2. Process.  Fully address and consider the various activities and programs intended to move individuals along a spectrum toward better well-being.   There needs to be some sort of sequential path that includes “gating” or “qualifying” events and triage to get people into the right buckets and into experiences and interventions relevant to their individual situations.

3. Promotion.   Communications planning around well-being programs has gotten better, but there’s room for further progress.   We’ll help develop or refine a complete plan that reflects the full calendar year and make sure there is a balance of awareness-building and action-driving messages and that the story has sufficient reach and impact.

4. Performance.   Measurement criteria need to be set up in advance, so that we can know whether and when to amplify promotional levels if participation is below expectations.  We’ll want to keep a close eye on the data as it comes in to help ensure that your program performance is helping to address workforce performance.

The industry is beginning to evolve toward performance-oriented well-being strategies. This should help accelerate adoption of greater business discipline and deepen long-term commitment, necessary budget levels and appropriate levels of support staff and resources.

This is an important time for change in health and healthcare, and a time for purposeful engagement.

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Selling Engagement

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Frank Hone

Vendors and health plans that provide health and well-being improvement services are always looking at new and different ways to increase participation and engagement. Too often though, they emphasize program innovation or refinement, rather than how to better pitch their offer and “sell” their services to their audience.

selling_engagementThis focus on “supply side” solutions is actually endemic throughout healthcare, and usually leaves consumer insights and basic needs out of the equation.

We know that individual lifestyle and health behavior choices contribute to about 75% of our nation’s healthcare bill and that the programs being offered are intended to change that, so why don’t we do more to fully engage the individual…?

Most of our colleagues in the industry would agree that the interventions and interactions generated by vendors and health plans are generally quite good, and that the missing piece is participant engagement.

We see consumer marketing as the missing element that is needed to stimulate the demand side, and “convince the buyer” that we have something of interest that has value to them. Ironically, we’re not asking them to pay, and in fact frequently offer them cash or rewards if they do take part. In borrowing from consumer marketing strategy, we see the following five areas as essential to “making the sale.”

1. Identify the clear benefits. We all know the reasons why it is good to take part in health and well-being improvement programs, but don’t do a good job at framing the relevant consumer benefits, and providing context for the story.

2. Serve up the story. This requires more than a series of e-mails or flyers. A more complete communications campaign is needed to deliver key messages designed to get attention and build interest. It takes repeated exposures to a message to penetrate the target audience.

3. Make the sale. Awareness must translate to action. Incentives help, but there also needs to be intrinsic receptivity to the offer. It must have relevance and strike a chord within.

4. Reinforce the buying decision. Avoid the “trier-rejecter” pattern. Find ways to strengthen conviction through direct messages, portal postings, internal advocate support, peer influence and pats on the back from coaches as well as colleagues.

5. Reward them over the long term. Health behavior change is difficult and part of a lifelong journey. Build in financial or benefit-oriented advantages for individuals that have made the right choices and done the hard work to overcome challenges to create new and improved healthy lifestyles.

It often takes a different mindset to rethink conventional approaches to wellness promotion, but by looking at the overall program from the consumer perspective, you may be surprised at how much opportunity for improvement there can be.

So, be a marketer, and convince the buyer…!

Having smart and effective fundamentals is a strong first step. What we’ve outlined above is not rocket science. It is basic and must be done to achieve success. We hope this perspective is helpful for your efforts in the wellness arena. The bottom line key is to be able to achieve effective participant activation and sustainable engagement.

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Why Employers Need to Own Engagement For Health and Well-Being Improvement

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Frank Hone

In recent years the American consumer has become a much more active participant in her own health and well-being. She’s generally better focused on nutrition and exercise and is more knowledgeable, proactive and aware of prevention and treatment options.

But even as she has taken on more personal responsibility, her role is still too often minimized in the broader world of healthcare as we know it.

It’s hard to make broad generalizations, but if we consider the dynamics of the major players that comprise the “medical marketing model” – pharmaceutical firms, health insurers, hospitals, pharmacies and physicians – they often tend to operate as though the consumer is not even part of the picture.

They make up the supply side of healthcare and rely on their interrelationships for business stability. Nearly all of the “reforms” we’ve seen in the recent past focus on trying to engineer incentives or policies to make the supply side more efficient and more accountable.

And consumers, representing the demand side, are generally forgotten, despite the role they could play in using the system more appropriately and by taking measures to be more diligent about their health. They are too often viewed as pawns that get moved around to generate revenue for the medical marketing model. While harsh, this does represent reality for many individuals across the country.

Contrast this to the experiences of consumers from another era, and in other buying circumstances.

During the great economic expansion that began in the 1950′s, brand marketers found unique and creative ways to promote to their target audiences. Slick television commercials and glossy magazine ads combined with eye-catching billboards and well-positioned sponsorships helped to drive sales of packaged goods, health and beauty aids, electronics brands, financial services, and so much more.

Consumer demand for goods and services created unprecedented economic growth and prosperity. In this golden age of marketing, consumer was king. Ad agencies flourished and worked creatively to create successful and sustainable brands. Market research uncovered consumer insights and explored buying habits. David Ogilvy famously challenged the industry to be more thoughtful in pitching brands, stating, “The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife.”

We can all recall some of the iconic ads and jingles from our youth which may have shaped brand perceptions and preferences and influenced our own buying habits.

In healthcare, however, consumer marketing is not nearly as well developed. Over the past two decades, we have seen prescription drug manufacturers turn to direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising to stimulate interest and demand for their brands as one sector that did try to embrace the consumer.

Many brands such as Viagra, Nexium, and Plavix did generate billions of dollars in sales by stimulating consumer demand, yet they also experienced challenges in creating long-term consumer preference. Formulary restrictions, multi-tier co-pays, and generic competition all conspire against long term brand loyalty. Most pharmaceutical brands that invested in consumer advertising did not actually achieve a successful return on their investment, and the ads tended to lack the warmth or humor of memorable campaigns.

In fact, it’s a lot harder to do good advertising in healthcare, where we need to be thinking a little less about advertising – though the principles apply – and a lot more about consumer engagement.

How then, can consumers become more engaged to become better and smarter participants in their own health care?

We believe that employers are the business segment that truly stands to benefit from effective engagement. They actually have the most to gain and the most to lose in this game, at least in the private sector. Their health benefit costs have risen and will continue to rise. And if they don’t address health risks and system utilization, they face productivity shortfalls.

Most employers have begun to realize that they can and should play a proactive role in improving the health and well-being of their workforce.

It is in the employers’ best interest to provide relevant support – both directly and through vendor relationships – to engage their workforce with initiatives that help manage conditions, reduce health risks and promote improved health and well-being.

Many good vendors and capable health plans have designed smart programs that help encourage proper decision making, provide relevant interventions, and promote healthy habits and lifestyles. The problem with most of them is that they don’t get enough employee participation. There is a definite Engagement Gap.

Since this challenge with engagement is recognized as a top industry issue, we are beginning to see gradual improvement. Even though most employee benefits people are not marketers, they are learning more about what it takes to get their workforce to pay attention, understand, and take action. We see that the major elements of a successful employee engagement program should include:

1. Leadership that is committed and that cares about the people
2. Clear and well-articulated objectives, both to management and to the population
3. Smart and well-designed programs that promote accountability and reward effort
4. A team of wellness champions to help implement and guide
5. Effective communications that deliver key messages across multiple media
6. Elements of gaming, competition and achievement that activate peer influence
7. Measurement that is frequent, accurate and transparent

Those employers that make a serious effort to implement programs with these elements in place should see real results and positive outcomes.

We believe that employers can and will take a leading role in engaging their people to be more accountable and productive healthcare consumers. In doing so, they will go a long way to challenge supply side healthcare dominance and begin to tip the scales a bit more toward the demand side.

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Wellness from ACOs…? How They’re Poised to Displace Employers

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Frank Hone

Even though Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) are in their relative infancy, most observers believe they offer real promise for substantial and sustainable change in healthcare delivery and positive patient outcomes from their formation and eventual growth.

This new model, that more seamlessly aligns hospital systems, providers and health insurance with a promise to provide care for their defined population, also has a real incentive to promote wellness.

Their overall business challenge is to strategically determine what interventions to provide to which individuals, and to be smart and effective in care delivery so as to maximize outcomes with the most efficient interactions.

This puts a premium on knowing more about population health status, risks and improvement opportunities. Compared to employers, who currently dominate the health and well-being improvement space, ACOs have some distinct advantages to succeed in the wellness arena:

1. Context. In many employer settings, the full wellness story is missing. There is not enough of rationale about why individuals should take pay attention to the message and the interventions. Physicians are able to cut right to the point and offer a clear and succinct message, and they have the facts and the credibility.

2. Participation. If your provider or health system asks you to complete a Health Risk Assessment, you’d be far more likely to do so – after all, you fill in the clipboard more times than you need to without asking questions. And there would be no issue over blood draws for biometric screens.

3. Incentives. There would be no need to put out cash or reward points to gain program participation. The idea that you can stave off health risks or complications should be incentive enough. Most patients will accept recommendations of telephonic clinician support, activity regimens, nutrition plans, etc. from their physician’s office. In fact, research has shown that a health coaching call from your doctor’s office is far more likely to be accepted than one from a third party.

4. Engagement. Should be a non-issue with ACOs, as patients are far more accountable to their physicians than their employer when it comes to health issues

5. Metrics. Health outcome measurements are a big part of what already physicians do, so appropriate data are far more attainable in the ACO setting.

It’s still early very early in the game and ACOs have higher-level priorities at the moment. But once they get into the rhythm of their patient cycles and start their marketing efforts to their patient populations, they will be identifying smart and effective ways to help promote health and well-being improvement.

Web and mobile interactions combined with telephonic and email communications will become the norm for many patients, and if done well, they will fit the bill for a good portion of the population.

This will all take some time, and while employers will be keeping up their wellness efforts in the near-term, ACOs will be picking up the pace and roaring forward by this time next year…

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Sustainable Engagement Stinks: 5 Reasons Why and What You Can Do About It…

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Frank Hone

For years the health promotion business got by with relatively low engagement figures, partly because their core audiences were small by definition – those with chronic disease or targeted and modifiable health risks – and partly because vendors tended to be measured in aggregate cost savings, not by individual adherence.

As the industry has moved more toward population health management and as wellness has blossomed, the need to positively influence large portions of the workforce has increased. Incentives have been seen as “engagement drivers” for many, but paying for participation doesn’t translate to meaningful and long-lasting behavior change.

That’s just one of the reasons that sustainable engagement stinks these days.

From our work in strategy development and program refinement – having come out of the world of consumer healthcare advertising (and having served as Director of Sustainable Engagement at Healthways) – we see a number of problems with engagement at employer companies today.

Here are five major reasons engagement is what it is (lousy), and ways that we can help you make it better:

1. Not Aligned to Human Capital Strategy. Because wellness typically starts out as a low-key, insignificant step-sister to other sorts of company initiatives, it hasn’t been fully integrated as a core component of total rewards or performance reviews. This has begun to change, but having a more cohesive connection represents a big and important opportunity for many large and mid-sized companies. Workforce performance is rising as a key strategic imperative, and with better alignment to health and well-being improvement, the better chance it has to drive effective employee engagement.

2. Lack of Business Discipline. Even though many say that “wellness is a business strategy”, wellness is not treated as a line of business within organizations. But, with a clear set of strategic objectives, a defined process and meaningful measurement, programs can have a far greater chance to be seen as an essential element of people development in organizations.

3. Marketing is Substandard. As marketers, we may have an over-bias in this direction, but if companies were able to “market” health and well-being improvement as well as advertisers promoted their goods and services, people would respond better. Smart marketing and consumer advertising principles can really drive engagement, and the use of CRM techniques can help sustain it

4. Context is Missing. Few companies do enough to tell their story to the workforce. There is a lack of transparency on the business strategy, and a dearth of good educational context that can help individuals understand the essentials of health and well-being improvement. We didn’t learn this stuff in school and don’t get it from our doctors – employers have a real opportunity to be educators in the framework of these programs.

5. One Size Fits All Does Not Fit All. Every company has a different culture, different aims, and different population compositions. Then why do vendors insist on delivering the same program for all customers? Employers need to challenge their vendors to create solutions that fit their individual situation – and hold the vendors to deliver against their objectives. Unfortunately, too many vendors are stuck with inflexible technology platforms, but that’s their problem, not yours. Make sure you design what is right for your world.

These challenges and opportunities represent our company’s sphere of work in engagement strategy and marketing consulting. We would be delighted to hear about situations you may be facing that could use a new perspective and new solutions. Please do reach out if some or all of this resonates with you. Our aim is to better connect well-intended initiatives with the people and populations they are designed to help.

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Measurement for Wellness: Essential to Strategy and Success

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Frank Hone

The teachings of Peter Drucker echoed in the room earlier this year at the Hilton Hotel in East Brunswick, NJ when CitiGroup’s new CEO Michael Corbat announced to his troops that “You Are What You Measure,” stating that measurement and scorecards will be the new standard for performance evaluations.

Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker

Peter_Drucker_measurement_wellness Drucker, of course, was a management consulting giant and his business philosophies led many companies to profit greatly from his wisdom and advice.

His views on measurement (You can’t manage what you can’t measure) have real relevance to employee health and well-being initiatives, and should be heeded.

ROI For Wellness…?

One of today’s hot topics in the field is ROI for Wellness. Our recent post “ROI for Wellness: Does it Matter” was informed by Bob Merberg’s insightful piece “Wellness ROI: A Dollar Spent is not $3.27 Earned”, in which he debunks the widely cited “proof” of ROI data published in the Health Affairs.

ROI is important for many organizations, but no matter where one sits on that debate, it is fair to say that corporate investments in wellness do need to have positive and measurable impact on the population to be sustainable. It is not enough to justify efforts because it’s the “right thing to do.”

For true success, wellness leaders need to specifically define the objectives they aim to achieve. These can include enrollment stats, participation levels, measurable actions and other data points.

There will certainly be many other outcomes that are more difficult to quantitatively assess, such as cultural shifts, attitudinal adjustments, commitment to change, etc., but they are a by-product of achieving the stated goals.

Goal-Setting

One key to goal-setting is for them to be realistic and achievable. We need targets to aim at, we need to have near real-time information to see whether we’re on pace, and we need to have the ability to modulate our promotional “pressure” up or down to meet the desired levels.

In the advertising business, it’s common to set Reach and Frequency goals for TV commercials and print ads, and then monitor the media plan to ensure effective delivery. Advertisers would generally have some budget flexibility to fund additional advertising if necessary achieve their campaign goals.

Similarly, if we can determine our end goal and then design an “adoption curve” that shows a projection of how that participation or action level can be met – say, on a week by week basis – we will have insightful information on which to base relevant additional promotional “pressure.”

As noted in the LinkedIn Group title, Wellness is a Business Strategy, and those us that support wellness initiatives have the opportunity and the responsibility to inject more business discipline and smarter consumer marketing approaches. In doing so, we will be able to have more to measure, and that should lead to being able to better manage our efforts.

This view on measurement provides a flavor of why it is essential to be able to collect meaningful data on a near real-time basis.

Unfortunately, many customer today are stymied by vendors that have inferior reporting. This is unacceptable. No other industry would allow the type of investments being made in wellness to be done so on the promise of expected future outcomes.

We need to challenge those that provide services to also deliver timely measurement and data that enable for actions to be taken to improve program performance.

Program measurement should not be hard to do, but doing it well and coordinating efforts of all involved parties does take a collaborative approach and consistent efforts.

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Patient Engagement is Key to ACO Success

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Frank Hone

Over the past few years, the promise of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) has been heralded as the next great evolution in healthcare delivery. Most observers believe that ACOs represent a potentially significant improvement in how the supply side of healthcare can work more collaboratively to serve patients.

By definition, an ACO is a network of doctors and hospitals that shares responsibility for providing care to patients. Those under Medicare oversight have agreed to manage all of the healthcare needs of a minimum of 5,000 Medicare beneficiaries for at least three years.

By early January, more than 250 had begun formal operations. Oliver Wyman has recently reported that some 25 to 31 million members are already enrolled in an ACO. Both of these figures are certain to grow by the end of 2013.

The power source and connective threads of ACOs are electronic data flows, and in particular, the Electronic Medical Record since the ability to exchange health data is a foundational element.

Similar to the strategy of many employers today, their focus will be on population health management. ACOs will be using patient registries and other tools that can help automate the routine work of care management, care coordination, and patient engagement.

Ah yes, patient engagement. So here is another parallel. The need to better engage consumers in their own health and well-being is a central theme for both ACOs and employers.

In an effort to help guide ACOs in this area, the National eHealth Collaborative (NeHC) has just released their proposed Patient Engagement Framework.

The framework outlines a five stage evolution for patient engagement through the use of electronic tools and resources, with increasing complexity, ranging from informing, engaging and empowering patients to partnering with patients and healthcare communities.

They expect that improved patient engagement will result from delivering better provider information, e-tools, forms, patient-specific education, patient access to records, and patient-generated data.

According to NeHC, “The Framework is the result of nearly a year of collaboration and vetting by over 150 top experts in healthcare, technology and human behavior, and is designed to assist healthcare organizations of all sizes and in all stages of implementation of their patient engagement strategies.”

While we give them credit for their well-intentioned efforts, as there is a lot hanging in the balance if quality of patient care does not increase and meet the agreed standards, the end result unfortunately bears all the hallmarks of a committee effort.

Patient engagement needs to be considered first and foremost from the user’s perspective, not just from the view of the supply side, which is all too common in healthcare.

There are already innumerable rational and emotional barriers on the patient decision pathway toward better health and well-being adherence. Electronic messaging and many other great technological advances should bring better supply side collaboration, but engaging the end user takes another level of insight and recognition which is that consumers take on information and behave differently from one another and from providers.

We have a lot to learn in this area, and while credit is due for the efforts put forth already to help drive better engagement, there is a long road ahead – for ACOs and employers alike.

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How’s Deming’s Work Supports Customer Engagement and Patient Activation

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Frank Hone


Deming’s Focus on Process Excellence

Let’s take a trip back in time and imagine the immense job of trying to rebuild a devastated Japan after the Second World War. That’s where W. Edwards Deming found himself in the early ’50s.

W. Edwards Deming

W. Edwards Deming

Deming was a statistician by training who believed that quality was the result of having appropriate inputs to a defined process and implementing that process on a correct and repeatable basis.

He taught the Japanese to treat manufacturing as a system rather than “bits and pieces.” He advised them to include the supplier and the customer in the system and to use feedback from them to continually improve products, services and processes.

While Deming is best known for helping Japan emerge from the post-World War II defeat by introducing quality concepts and process flow methods to their manufacturing companies, his approach to business as a system also has relevance in health and well-being improvement.

Customer Engagement

Consider the way that many health and well-being improvement programs are pitched to customers – too often through intermediaries and through electronic exchange of documents and proposals – without really getting to know the buyer, their population, and their specific needs.

The marketing development and prospecting process gets short-changed.

A better scenario is for customers and vendors to be able to align their needs and capabilities in a more systematic and collaborative way to address the culture, aims and demographics of individual organizations.

This can be better accomplished when vendors are not “all things to all people” but have a clear and distinct Marketing Platform and Strategic Positioning. This enables their story to have greater relevance and their delivery to be more accurate.

We see the use of a Customer Engagement system (below) as being able to provide a more robust approach to business development and long-term relationships.

Customer_Engagement

Participant Activation

On the participant activation side, there are many process flows that go into employee engagement. In “mapping out” all the engagement process, the array of flows include:

– Participant screening and assessment that leads to various intervention options
– Communications efforts to guide individuals to the interventions
– Incentive design and delivery
– Collection of metrics to determine program impact

These elements together represent a giant puzzle of moving parts that need to be coordinated for best impact and optimized to achieve continuous improvement.

Each of the various inputs and outputs can be enhanced and organized into smart and efficient process flows.

One way to look at the whole picture is through our Participation Activation Framework, seen here.

Patient_Activation_Framework
These examples and many other lessons from Deming’s work can help inform and improve the ability to market services and move employees along the continuum toward improved health and well-being.

Our industry has many opportunities to advance and to help change many more lives as it continues to evolve. Using strategic marketing and quality methods can help accelerate change and produce greater efficiency and impact.

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How’s Your Healthcare Marketing Platform..? Stronger is Better.

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Frank Hone

As healthcare business trends continue to move in the direction of greater individual accountability for health and well-being, an increasing number of new and improved services are hitting the market.

Health plans, wellness vendors, technology start-ups, gaming and social media apps and other players are all seeking their piece of this growing market. They are pitching to employers, health systems, ACOs and other payers. They all have a story to tell, and some do it better than others.

Those who are more likely to succeed tend to either have existing customers to leverage or have a strong Marketing Platform.

Marketing Platform

Even for those with existing relationships, having a solid Marketing Platform for their offer is essential to effective promotion and successful selling. A smart and well-constructed platform provides a strategic framework from which to operate. It is contains the elements of the basic blueprint that all consumer packaged goods use in creating their advertising and promotion.

The objective of the Marketing Platform is to establish a competitive and compelling
positioning, create effective packaging and story, and define appropriate prospects to target and cultivate for promotion and to ideally begin to build long-term “win-win” customer relationships.

1. Positioning
All relevant services have many important features and components, but to effectively market them, a positioning statement serves as the basis for message development. The program may offer many things, but to get the buyer’s attention – and stay focused – it is important to distill it down to a simple and crystal-clear statement.

The format for a positioning statement typically goes like this: “For (target audience), (brand name) is the (frame of reference or category) that delivers (benefit/point of difference) because only (brand name) is/has (reason to believe).”

To fill in the blanks, the following questions need to be addressed:

– Who is the target customer?
– What is the defined category in which we compete?
– What is our point of difference?
– What are the supporting features or benefits that make this credible?

2. Targeting
On the payer side of the healthcare market, there are numerous potential buyer categories, decision-makers and influencers. It’s not enough to define the target as “employers” – consider the industry, size, demographics, experience base with similar services, buyer sophistication, budget levels, etc. There should be a “bulls-eye” target – the perfect candidate, and then a slightly larger group that relaxes one or more of the characteristics.

3. Packaging
Once the positioning and targeting are identified, it’s time to build the overall story and message points along with how best to put it all together in various formats – email outreach, brochures, presentations, demos, webinars, in-person meetings, etc. Determine the best sequencing and ensure that the flow has content consistent with the positioning.

4. Promotion
Here’s where you establish the strategy for promotional outreach. There ideally should be a multiphase promotional plan that can include some testing to see what resonates best with prospects. The key is to recognize that this is a process. No one buys on the first call, so don’t try to complete the sale at the outset. Work with the buyer through your defined process, building confidence, mutual respect and a genuine desire to meet their strategic needs. Consider pilot programs to ensure “proof of concept”, and then see how to broaden appeal over time.

Marketing is to sales as fertilizer, sun and water are to a beautiful green lawn. You need to do the right work up front and then let it grow and look gorgeous. Please feel free to call on us for more information on ways we can help you develop your Marketing Platform and prepare for a strong and effective selling process.

With the Marketing Platform in place, next comes the Prospecting Engine which outlines a clear and defined process for gaining interest and building trust. More on that in an upcoming post.

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