Healthy Conversations
Imagining & Creating New Value For Health Brands & Consumers

Innovation is a better way to deliver value. Often it doesn’t require inventing anything new, just recombining existing capabilities in new ways. These are Paul Kaplan’s words from his Shuffle Up and Innovate post on BIF. 

The post contrasts the (success) story of CVS with the (not so successful) story of Blockbuster. The difference between the two, as Kaplan points out is that CVS explores new ways to deliver customer value even if it requires doing business in a different way, e.g. expanding its thinking beyond a drugstore chain to imagine how to deliver value to their customers as a leader in the healthcare industry. This is what led them to acquire MinuteClinic and to merge with Caremark Rx. 

On the other hand, Blockbuster didn’t look beyond its current store operations (or simply dismissed the opportunity to do so) while Netflix recombined existing capabilities to deliver new value to Blockbuster’s customers.  The outcome is that Blockbuster is listed on U.S. News and World Report’s “15 companies that might not survive 2009.”

Innovation must be a constant. And as the CVS example points out, it’s often just a matter of looking at your business with a fresh set of eyes. Taking apart the puzzle and putting the pieces back together in new ways. Fact is, if you’re not thinking beyond your current business model, others are.

As a concept, Healthy Conversations is both a point-of-view and a practice. It is the means to an end, and the desired end result. 

Healthy Conversations create a two-way street (in contrast to messages) in which brand and customer dovetail into each others story. It is about brands feeding customers, and customers giving back to the brand.  It is the recognition that co-creation is the new reality of how brands and customers win. 

Those brands that embrace and participate will succeed. Those that don’t will slowly fade into the background. Ultimately, it will be a case of engage or die.  

Healthy Conversations are about building relationships. Relationships that are:

• between brands and people
• between people as enabled by the brand
• open and honest
• based on respect 
• inside, and across, organizations
• taking place across all channels (both traditional and new) 
• not reliant on technology 
• improving people’s lives
• helping customers succeed in business
• engendering trust 
• not budget-dependent
• adding value back to brands 

Healthy Conversations are the future of marketing.

During the downturn, the brands that help people live healthier, more fulfilling and longer lives (the brands that do good) have an upper hand versus their non-essential counterparts.

Here’s a checklist to help you make sure that your health + healthy lifestyle brands do more than simply survive these tough times:

1. Make customers the center of your universe (if they’re not already)
- listen to them, respond to them, converse with them (don’t abandon them)
- ensure relevance and emotion are front and center (starting with your positioning)
- collaborate and co-create with them
- know their priorities, and deliver on them through your experience
- break down all silos to insure all departments are cohesive in delivering this experience
- and that all employees understand, are motivated and armed to deliver
- engage them in ways they value and want

Pretty short checklist, I know. But if you do #1 really well, everything else should fall into place.

There are many different brand models.

But there are common characteristics that distinguish ALL great (different) health and healthy lifestyle brands from others. They see their world, and that of their customers, differently. Which lets them think and do different things – to challenge conventions, hypothesize alternatives and explore new possibilities.

Based on principles of Blue Ocean Strategy, a proven framework for guiding companies to create new and uncontested market space, these include:

• looking across alternative industries, knowing that their products and services compete with companies outside their traditional market
• looking across strategic groups within industries, based on customers’ decision-making practices
• looking across different buyer (customer) groups, knowing there are those directly and indirectly involved in purchase decisions
• looking across complementary products and services, to break free from accepted boundaries of competitive offerings
• looking across the spectrum of functional or emotional appeals to buyers, to create new bases of appeal
• look across time, to shape (rather than adapt to) external trends over time

Are you one of these great brands?

To learn new things and to get information needed to improve their lives. 

This was, in my mind, the most important finding of a recently conducted MarketingProfs survey among 432 highly involved Twitter users (average of 2.7 hours per day on Twitter). Not exactly reflective of the typical Twitter user, but interesting findings nonetheless.

The survey set out to find- why do they use Twitter?  How do they feel about common practices on Twitter? How do they view their experiences? Highlights of the survey appeared on Mashable.

This one finding has to do with the most important motivations for using Twitter. So what are the implications for health and healthy lifestyle brands:

• people crave interaction
• because the tools exist to provide it, they expect it
• brands are ideally suited to help people learn these new things and get the information they need to improve their lives

The brands that succeed in doing this will thrive (consider the social media efforts of Mayo Clinic) – as both consumer and brand energize one another.

Healthy conversations take many forms. In this case, they’re conversations that are taking place based on the shared passions of a community.  In this example, it’s a community of runners. And the brand (Nike +) serves an important role as a conduit for personal growth and expression [rather than trying to take center stage]. 

When a brand provides a platform to help its customers achieve their goals, its value is similarly advanced. It creates a cycle for each to continue to grow into the future. A win-win situation all around. 

Amidst all the lies and deceit, we yearn for the truth. Because our trust has eroded. And without trust, nothing else matters. It’s an intangible that overrides the importance of any product, service or experience. It’s the foundation and one of the most desired qualities in a relationship. Alas, truth is behind every great brand. 

In fact, TRUST just might be the biggest differentiator, the most sustainable competitive advantage that companies can now secure. And the funny thing about telling the truth, about earning trust,  is that it doesn’t require any significant expenditure. Yet the payback is enormous, and lasting. 

Mountains of articles provide advice for weathering the downturn. Marketers are advised to seize new opportunities, focus their resources, integrate their marketing, stay close to their customers, exploit digital channels, become more social. But none of it matters if you don’t level with people.

So I would add another strategy to all these lists about pressing on through the downturn (as well as the good times):  Tell The Truth. Because nothing else matters.

What do you think?

I came across this presentation: BlogWell Chicago Social Media Case Study: Mayo Clinic on Slideshare, given by Lee Aase, Manager, Syndication and Social Media Mayo Clinic. It’s a “clinic” [not only for healthcare organizations] for how to evolve a company’s social media practices and for cost-effectively building trust and preference through outreach and providing platforms for sharing. 

A few interesting facts from the presentation: 

• the top two sources of information influencing preference for Mayo Clinic are word-of-mouth (84%) and stories in the media (57%); with advertising ranking a distant fourth at 27%.
• Mayo top-of-mind preference among U.S. consumers (based on being able to go anywhere in the U.S. for treatment of a serious medical condition which required highly specialized care) is three times that of hospital #2. 
• At Mayo, Social media (while facilitated by a small team) is everyone’s job.

Simple skin care asks its customers to join in to have their say in all things Simple – from trying new products before anyone else to inputting about the Simple brand and product range.  Ultimately, letting go to gain more is a win-win for a brand and its customers.

Simple is an excellent example of a smart healthy lifestyle brand opening up communication channels with its customers to allow for more of their input and participation with their brand. It is evident that the company understands: 

• people are willing to invest their time in the things they’re passionate about
• they’re also willing to expend their time to increase a products (their products) value 
• sometimes they care enough to become a brands advocate; particularly if it’s a skin care brand that plays an important role in their daily lives 
• the act of letting go of their brand and listening and responding to their customers helps grow trust and loyalty 

Do you have additional examples of brands letting go by participating in social media? If so, please share them in the comment section below. 

I found a great example of a company that understands how to be social. This blog post from healthy lifestyle brand The Body Shop – Tips For Staying Safe Over Spring Break has very little to do with the company or its products. Rather, it’s cautioning its audience to take simple safety steps so they come home safe from their spring break getaways.
It indicates to me that The Body Shop understands: 
• What it means to be social
• Credibility is based on transparency, building trust and authenticity 
• Success is based on engaging clients in conversations that are relevant and valued 
• Providing content that encourages interaction among customers makes for a win-win situation