category / innovation

Jul
03

Health brands creating new value: Allina Hospitals & Life Time Fitness

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Here’s a good example of two health brands collaborating to create new, and important, value for communities and patients.

Allina Hospitals & Clinics and Life Time Fitness are launching a new partnership to advance preventative health and wellness initiatives and awareness. It includes the introduction of Life Time’s myHealthCheck at Allina.

The collaboration will focus on several elements:

– Life Time plans to provide its comprehensive health and wellness assessment, and health promotion program, myHealthCheck, to Allina physicians, nurses and staff as a first step towards integrating health and wellness with health care

– Allina physicians are expected to be connected to Life Time destinations in Minnesota in order to provide medical education and counseling to Life Time members and staff, and medical services for Life Time endurance events

– The organizations plan to explore innovative opportunities to inject health and fitness expertise into traditional health care delivery

– Allina and Life Time will partner to provide integrated community health and wellness programs to the community with the goals of reducing overall health care costs and improving access to preventative health and wellness education and services

You can read more about the partnership here.

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May
10

6 tips for creating new health brand & customer energy

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I found these six great tips from Drew Boyd at Innovation in Practice. They’ll help you maximize your limited time, money and human resources around the most productive innovation initiatives (which can be applied to any product or service).

Here are the six tips, a quick explanation and an accompanying example (Drew has others in his post):

1. Your value drivers: What activities across your business model create the most value? I think of innocent, whose drinks are always completely pure, fresh and unadulterated.

2. Your core competency: What skill sets create strategic assets; and sustainable competitive advantage? Consider PatientsLikeMe, whose health data-sharing platform lets patients share their real-world health experiences to help themselves, other patients like them and organizations that focus on their conditions.

3. Your potential acquisitions: Actually using innovation methods ahead of the deal-making to clarify and enhance valuation. What is Microsoft contemplating as they consider acquiring Skype?

4. Your customer’s processes: Map the customer experience with your product or service; and then reinvent how they seek and derive value. Consider health care provider Carena, which added ultra-convenience to their services menu.

5. Your brand reputation: What are you most known for in the industry and in the minds of your customer; which you can then use to strengthen and reinforce brand loyalty. Consider Mayo Clinic’s partnership with DoApps.

6. Your strategic capabilities: How does your company win in the marketplace? What is its “source of authority?” Consider lululemon, which stands apart from all other like retailers, because it’s much more than just a retail brand. I’ve written why, here.

Once again, you can read Drew’s complete post here.

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Mar
21

Inspiration for health marketers: Polaroid and Apple

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“You always start with the fantasy.”

These are the words of Edwin Land, inventor of the polarizing filter and the Polaroid Land Camera. They’re from a good article over at Fast Company – Polaroid and Apple: Innovation Through Mental Invention. The article is excerpted from a new book written by Erik Calonius called Ten Steps Ahead: What Separates Successful Business Visionaries From the Rest of Us.

When “visualizing” the elements of the instant camera (in the time span of about one hour), Land stated that “you always start with a fantasy. Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with experiments you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components.”

40 years later, Lands agreed to meet with Steve Jobs (who idolized Land), with John Sculley sitting off to the side. When describing the Polaroid camera, Land said “I could see what it should be.” It was just as real to me as if it were sitting in front of me before I had ever built one.” Jobs responded “yeah, that’s exactly the way I saw the Macintosh.”

Later, when driving home, Jobs told Sculley, “It’s like when I walk into a room and I want to talk about a product that hasn’t been invented yet. I can see it as if it’s sitting there right in the center of the table. It’s like what I’ve got to do is materialize it and bring it to life–harvest it just like Dr. Land said.”

Sculley drove on, stunned. “Both of them had this ability to–well, not invent products, but discover products,” he wrote later. “Both of them said these products have always existed, it’s just that no one had ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them.”

I like the idea of starting with the future perfect picture of something, then working backwards and deconstructing it to make it a reality. Now I’m trying to think of health-focused products and services that might have been brought to life this way. Any ideas?

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Sep
28

Insights for health brand marketers: IBM’s Global CEO Study

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Here are two major findings and associated recommendations that are relevant to health brand marketers – based on 1500 face-to-face conversations with CEO’s, general managers, and senior public sector leaders worldwide – representing different sizes of organizations in 60 countries and 33 industries:

Creativity is the most important leadership quality. Leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, encourage others to drop outdated approaches, invite disruptive innovation, find new ideas, and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.

The most successful organizations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes. Globalization, combined with dramatic increases in the availability of information, has exponentially expanded customers’ options. CEOs said that ongoing engagement and co-creation with customers produce differentiation. They consider the information explosion to be their greatest opportunity in developing deep customer insights, and have made customer intimacy their number-one priority.

Recommendations (partial list from study)

a. Creativity

Reach beyond silos. Pull creative elements of your organization out of compartments and integrate them into the mainstream. Proactively exchange knowledge and cooperate with internal and external stakeholders, eliminating every communication barrier to improve your ability to handle the unknown.

Exemplify breakthrough thinking. Practice and encourage experimentation at all levels of the business. Forge ahead with rule-breaking innovation that sets your organization apart from the crowd. Study and question what others do — scour technology and customer trends. Build scenarios to plan responses to a range of possible futures.

Act despite uncertainty. Fight the natural urge to wait for clarity and stability; taking calculated risks — while others hesitate — can pay off. Find a creative way to turn complexity into an advantage. Rely on deeply felt values and a well-defined vision to provide the confidence and conviction to exploit narrow windows of opportunity.

Borrow from other industries’ successes. Learn from and be inspired by creative achievements from outside your industry. Regularly discuss case examples from other industries in your management team meetings. Stay abreast of customer and technology trends that are transforming other sectors and consider how you could apply them.

Use a wide range of communication approaches. Supplement top-down organizational communication with less formal, more innovative channels. Accept that for customers and employees alike, blogs, Internet presence, instant messaging and social networking are more credible — and often faster — than traditional top-down communication.

b. Customer Value/Co-Creation

Establish an unprecedented level of focus. Starting with the CEO, every employee in the organization must be hyper-focused on customers. Make customer value your number one value. Ensure every employee is responsible for and assessed annually on a customer satisfaction or customer value metric.

Heighten customer exposure. Make it easy for customers to connect with the right person in your organization. Every employee must have the information needed to engage with customers appropriately and effectively. All employees must understand the link between the work they do and the value it brings to customers.

Measure what customers value. Genuinely know what motivates current and potential customers to choose your product or service. Surpass today’s standards to proactively verify that you are providing what customers want and delivering it in ways that matter to them. Understand your customers’ business goals and help them succeed.

Make customers part of your team. Enhance customer relationships by finding new ways to communicate, new roles they can play, new questions to ask them, new ways you can listen, new ways to evaluate their feedback and leverage what you learn. Make — and deliver on — customer commitments.

Solicit customer wants. Engender loyalty by directly involving customers in defining emerging needs. Constantly tune offerings to their rapidly changing preferences. Make sure you are providing what customers want tomorrow, instead of what they wanted yesterday.

Co-innovate and interact with customers in new ways. Collaborate across different channels to create new products and services. Maintain a running dialogue that includes face-to-face and social networking interaction. Involve customers before and beyond the sale, including care and service.

The full study can be found here.

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Sep
21

Huggies: enriching customer health one innovation at a time

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Kimberly-Clark is working with their core customer, and the fastest-growing sector of entrepreneurs – women – by investing in their incubating innovation ideas.

Twelve entrepreneurs, chosen from 400 submissions, now make up the first class of Huggies “MomInspired” grant recipients, receiving $15,000 each to fund their “unique baby or childcare product ideas that address unmet parenting needs and make life easier for moms and dads.”

According to Steve Paljieg, Senior Director, Corporate Innovation for KC "our most important consumer is mom, and we felt the launch of Huggies MomInspired delivered on the brand's mission of providing simple solutions to help parents enjoy each and every day (beyond diapers or hygiene) and also encourage the business success of moms by giving them access to educational and financial resources."

Here why this program creates new value for both brand and customer:

– it delivers on the brand mission
– helps create a bigger brand idea (and potentially new revenue streams) beyond diapers and hygiene
– creates a more meaningful kind of brand-customer relationship beyond Huggies' core business
– connects women (and men) together, through Huggies, around their most important agendas
– engages and ignites pride on the part of those who work on the Huggies brand
– generates great PR and positive word-of-mouth for Huggies and KC; and
– ultimately builds loyalty and (presumedly) more Huggies sales

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Jul
13

Creating new value for health brand customers: 10 lessons from Apple

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Can you be the Apple of (fill-in your health segment here)?

There’s good learning here for marketers to take away from Fast Company’s July cover story – Invincible Apple: 10 Lessons From the Coolest Company Anywhere.

After speaking with former employees, current partners, and others who have watched Apple for many years, the article’s author states the answers to Apple’s phenomenal success center around discipline, focus, long-term thinking, and a willingness to flout the rules that govern everybody else’s business.

Here’s Fast Company’s excerpted report on the Apple playbook:

1. Go Into Your Cave: translated as set your own agenda.
2. It’s Okay To Be King: Jobs and his team know exactly what they want, so everyone knows what the plan is. And from the likes of it, it’s working.
3. Transcend Orthodoxy: Despite all the noise about Apple’s closed ideology, the company adopts positions based on two simple conditions – whether they make for good products and good business.
4. Just Say No: Jobs’s primary role at Apple is to turn things down. Every day, he’s presented with ideas for new products and new features within existing ones. The default answer is no. “I’m as proud of the products that we have not done as the ones we have done,” Jobs told an interviewer in 2004.
5. Serve Your Customer: When Apple devised its retail strategy a decade ago, the company had a single overriding goal: to launch stores (and associated service) that were unlike anything that customers associated with the computer industry.
6. Everything Is Marketing: Apple’s most effective marketing is built into its products, i.e. iPod’s white earbuds, the Mac’s startup sound, the shape of the MacBook’s back panel. Apple understands the lasting power of sensory cues, and it goes out of its way to infuse everything it makes with memorable ideas that scream its brand.
7. Kill The Past: No other company reimagines the fundamental parts of its business as frequently, and with as much gusto, as Apple does.
8. Turn Feedback Into Inspiration: Apple believes that people can’t really envision what they want. So he uses customer ideas as inspiration, not direction; as a means, not an end.
9. Don’t Invent, Reinvent: To use a musical analogy, Apple’s specialty is the remix. It curates the best ideas bubbling up around the tech world and makes them its own. It’s also a great fixer, improving on everything that’s wrong with other similar products on the shelves.
10. Play By Your Own Clock: Jobs knows he’ll never be fired, so he can devote years, if that’s what it takes, to attain Apple’s high standards. Of all the points covered here (according to this author), Apple’s willingness to go long is perhaps its greatest strength.

After reading this article, I begin to think about innovative, game-changing health organizations like Mayo Clinic, PatientsLikeMe, Sermo, Walgreens (Take Care Clinics), Intuitive Surgical (da Vinci robotic system), 23andme…

What others would you add to this list?

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Jun
23

Co-creating new value for health brands

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What is the next generation of crowdsourcing (of customers and companies working together to create new value)?

Clinton Booner answers this question as the author of this guest post Crowdsourcing: Beyond the Basics, over at Jay Baer’s Convince and Convert Blog.

Clinton offers his 3c’s of next generation crowdsourcing: Co-Creation, Constant and Control:

1. Co-Creation. Allowing consumers to contribute in a number of ways to product and service enhancements.
2. Constant. Multiple initiatives happening in parallel and offering the user a constant stream of new involvement opportunities.
3. Control. Brands viewing open innovation strategies as not ‘giving up creative control’ but rather understanding what this really is – co-created market research that is more accurate – ultimately offering remarkable ways to help deliver happy, impassioned, and loyal consumers.

Would you add any C’s to this list?

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Jun
01

Humana Games: a healthcare brand helping you play your way to better health

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I’ve posted before about Humana – specifically, its CrumpleItup initiative, a dedicated group inside the company focused on coming up with creative ways to help people be healthy while having fun.

Now comes Humana Games For Health. Part of the Innovation Center within Humana, this team is driven by the belief that playing video games keeps your mind and body fit. So they’re helping people of all ages play their way to better health by getting them off their seat and on their feet.

Here’s some brand-building learning from Humana Games:

1. Actions speak louder than words: You can tell people all day long (as most benefits providers do) that they should live healthier lives. But provide them with an enjoyable and sharable experience, one that fits nicely into their daily lives, and their practices will start to change.

2. Experience alongside image: Advertising will always play a role in the marketing mix. But these messages are increasingly being rejected. So seek out the bigger role that your brand can play in customers lives. Be their advocate, and bring your marketing to life (as Humana Games has) with involving, interactive experiences that actually add value to their lives.

3. Build a community beyond the transaction: These games give participants the ability to become a member of the Humana Games universe. They also build valued interactions among game participants. Participants of different ages and stages of life (from kids to seniors).

4. From innovation silo to group think: Humana Games’ concepts (first developed by an inside/outside multidisciplinary team that includes a target audience and intended health outcome) are then taken to the prototype phase, where a working model of the idea is created and tested by consumers to get valuable feedback and determine efficacy.

5. Use of social media to build engagement: Participants can invite their friends to visit Humana Games. Get updates and meet other players on Facebook.

Any comments you’d like to share?

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May
25

What CEO’s, and your health brand customers, really want

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According to a new survey of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM’s Institute for Business Value, CEOs value “creativity” as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future.

That’s creativity—not operational effectiveness, influence, or even dedication. Coming out of the worst economic downturn in their professional lifetimes, when managerial discipline and rigor ruled the day, this indicates a remarkable shift in attitude. Until now, creativity has generally been viewed as fuel for the engines of research or product development, not the essential leadership asset that must permeate an enterprise.

As they step back and reassess, CEOs have seized upon creativity as the necessary element for enterprises that must reinvent their customer relationships and achieve greater operational dexterity. In face-to-face interviews with IBM consultants, they said creative leaders do the following:

• Disrupt the status quo. Every company has legacy products that are both cash—and sacred—cows. Often the need to perpetuate the success of these products restricts innovation within the enterprise, creating a window for competitors to advance competing innovations. As CEOs tell us that fully one-fifth of revenues will have to come from new sources, they are recognizing the requirement to break with existing assumptions, methods, and best practices.

• Disrupt existing business models. CEOs who select creativity as a leading competency are far more likely to pursue innovation through business model change. In keeping with their view of accelerating complexity, they are breaking with traditional strategy-planning cycles in favor of continuous, rapid-fire shifts and adjustments to their business models.

• Disrupt organizational paralysis. Creative leaders fight the institutional urge to wait for completeness, clarity, and stability before making decisions. To do this takes a combination of deeply held values, vision, and conviction—combined with the application of such tools as analytics to the historic explosion of information. These drive decisionmaking that is faster, more precise, and even more predictable.

Taken together, these recommendations describe a shift toward corporate cultures that are far more transparent and entrepreneurial. They are cultures imbued with the belief that complexity poses an opportunity, rather than a threat. They hold that risk is to be managed, not avoided, and that leaders will be rewarded for their ability to build creative enterprises with fluid business models, not absolute ones.

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May
14

Insights and ideas for health marketers: interviews with CMO Of The Year nominees

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Every year, The Chief Marketing Officer Institute awards their “CMO Of The Year.” Nominees are evaluated in several categories of performance, including market orientation and customer intimacy, accountability for results, commitment to innovation, and overall contribution to the success of their company.

Here (on COM.com) are interviews with each of the 10 finalists for 2009, who discussed the strategies and tactics employed to achieve their success with the editors of CMO Journal. The interviews are interesting and informative, and certainly relevant to your health brand business.

Finalists include:

From large organizations ($250M+ revenue): Jeffrey Hayzlett (Kodak), Allen Klose (ACE Cash Express), Richard Marnell (Viking River Cruises), David Mitchell (Open Solutions Inc.), David Norton (Harrah’s Entertainment)

From small to midsize organizations (less than $250M revenue): Timothy Gilbert (Campus Mgm’t Corp), Tim Kopp (ExactTarget), Terrie O’Hanlon (Manhattan Associates), Curtiss Porritt (MasterControl Inc.), Thomas VanHorn (Application Security Inc.)

Enjoy the interviews. I hope there are insights and ideas that you can take away to create new value for your health brand customers and your business.

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