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

Your health brand customers can buy reliability, efficiency and convenience just about anywhere.

But what they’re increasingly looking for is the ability to buy from brands that have a healthy heart. Brands that provide other reasons to buy – and create greater value for themselves and others – beyond price and quality.

Signs of a healthy brand heart include appealing to higher values of community, causes and advocacy. Helping people reinforce their own meaning and purpose and helping them achieve what they can’t on their own. When customers align with these brands, they become a statement for what they themselves believe.

Here are four key characteristics of heart brands, along with some examples:

1. Be true to who you are. Your actions must resonate as sincere with your customers. Which means they must already be reflected in your brands’ story and ambition and backed up by your organization’s actions. Luxottica Group’s OneSight Foundation, is a family of charitable vision care programs dedicated to improving vision through outreach, research and education – which grows out of the company’s values of “protecting the eyes of men and women all over the world…to maximize their well-being and satisfaction.”

2. Help customers themselves do more. Help them be proactive, through their purchases, in ways they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do so. Purchasing from The Body Shop allows customers to affirm their commitment and support to the values that guide the company and their everyday lives – Activate Self-Esteem, Against Animal Testing, Support Community Trade, Protect Our Planet, Defend Human Rights.

3. Be selective in your stand. The legitimacy of your brand territory can only extend so far. So better to go deep and make a significant difference through your efforts than try to be everything to everybody. Humana’s CrumpleItUp innovation initiative, exists to come up with creative ways to help people be healthy while having fun.

4. Don’t fake it.  Today’s info-empowered consumers will not tolerate lip service. At some point, too, you always get caught. Unless you’re willing to demonstrate real commitment, transparency and accountability – take a pass. Rather than out one of these brands, I’ll focus on a positive role model. Since 1997, L’Oreal has raised more than $18M to fight ovarian cancer, the deadliest of all gynecologic cancers – thanks in part to sales of charitable products such as those in its Color of Hope cosmetics collection.

Give your customers something to believe in. Everyone wins.

There are a new set of rules for connecting your brand to your employees, caregivers, communities and patients; and twelve guiding principles for creating a connecting versus campaigning organizations.

Here is a link to my article Stop Campaigning, Start Connecting, which just ran in the December issue of Healthcare Marketing Report.

What’s the story here? Are there no healthcare brand upstarts or stalwarts setting the pace for innovation and getting results – right now? To that, I say….

The 11/16 Ad Age includes a feature on America’s Hottest Brands – “meet the upstarts and the stalwarts who have found the upside of the downturn; setting the pace for innovation – and getting results – right now.”

These brands run the gamet – from Jameson, to Jetblue, Digiorno, Panera, Subaru, Bing, Barnes & Noble, Diapers.com, Five Guys, Ped Egg and 30 others.

I went through each one of the stories and synthesized the magic behind the results (of course, the key criteria for inclusion on the list). Just some of these include:

• Managing to get consumers psyched about their category/their brand again
• Creating partnerships to help change the nature of conversations
• Using social media and customer service as marketing tools
• Recognizing that it’s not about your product, but about their lifestyle
• Knowing who we are and speaking of things relevant to customers
• Engaging the people within our community
• Creating mobile apps to generate new revenue streams and sales channels
• Engaging folks during a period of time where it can be mayhem; and building a whole mission around providing help during these times
• Having a connection and a closeness with customers that no one else can rival
• Not talking at our consumers, but rather challenging them and supporting them

I know healthcare brands (pharmaceuticals, healthcare systems, hospitals, home care, medical devices, etc.) are typically not included in Ad Age’s list. But I don’t care. I say it’s time to look beyond traditional consumer products boundaries.

Because in healthcare – from blogs to online communities to business models – there are many upstarts and stalwarts setting the pace for innovation and getting results. In fact, these results often translate to saving lives. And it doesn’t get much hotter than that!

So to Ad Age, I say, we’ll make our own list of America’s Hottest [Healthcare] Brands. The brands that save lives. The brands that contribute to healthier, stronger and happier lives. The brands that actually allow each of America’s hottest brands to have audiences healthy enough to participate in theirs.

To strive for perfection is admirable. But when it comes to social media, it’s a waste of time.

While your efforts need to be grounded in goals, strategy and the social media practices of your health brand audiences, it’s pointless to strive for perfection. Because unlike developing an ad, putting it through focus group testing, and then tweaking to get your “sell and tell” story just right, truly open dialogue is hard to control. Nor do you want to try. Because this means you’re probably lecturing rather than having a conversation.

With social media, take the attitude that you’re always going to be learning, always growing, always adjusting. Follow the lead of your customers. They’ll let you know which content is relevant, and how best to engage them. And how best to facilitate conversations between them.

So, while you consider whether you have a firm enough grasp of the territory, are comfortable with your transparency, wonder whether you’re compelling enough for customers to care about your offerings, don’t contemplate too long. Because the advantages of participating in social media far outweigh the negatives of waiting for “perfection” or not participating at all.

Women (your primary healthcare influencers and decision-makers) tend to be far more active in social media than men. This was the finding from BIGresearch’s 2009 survey of 22,000 consumers asked about their usage of text, blogs, twitter and social networks.

With the exception of business-focused LinkedIn, women are heavier users of the six other social media vehicles measured through this survey. Text leads the way at 61.7%, followed by Facebook 59.8%, blog readers 56.2%, blog posters 52.5%, MySpace 51.6%, and Twitter users 50.8%.

Given that this survey was conducted in June, the rankings might well have shifted a bit. But the more important news for health brand marketers is that these social media vehicles are effective in engaging your primary female audiences in more meaningful and trusted dialogue.

I wrote a post yesterday providing ten tips to get your health brand engines going. One of the tips was “What’s Your Story.”

This presentation from Kevin Dugan – What’s Your Story? Storytelling’s Link to Social Marketing Sucess – provides great insight into the power of story for health brand marketers.

I think the most important takeaways from his presentation about the power of stories is that they:

• are easier to remember than facts
• are contagious
• bring people together and build loyalty
• can be used to start the conversation, change the conversation, humanize brands, create brands and communities
• have a beginning (a problem or antagonist), middle (solution or hero/awareness) and end (results, transformation)
• online, are told through social media channels, and contributed to by participants, who then share/discuss, comment/link, friend/follow, connect live, support, provide feedback to, reply/rt

All great brands are built on great stories. Stories that have no boundaries. Stories that you know well and stories that will grow in importance over time – Virgin, Apple, Southwest Airlines, St. Jude, Jones Soda, Mayo Clinic, Life Is Good, (RED), Pret Manger, Womenheart, Zara, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Nike, Cirque du Soleil, One Laptop Per Child, 23AndMe.

Their stories engage us in ways that facts and figures can’t. They help create emotional connections that transcend the pervasive and often ignorable messaging around functionality and quality. They reflect who we are or want to be, and help inspire and guide us to do more and achieve more than we could on our own. In turn, they help you stand out from the crowd.

Importantly, every brand has a story. Sometimes it’s right there ready to be told. Other times, you need to search it out. But it’s worth the hard work. Because ultimately, your story is a powerful means to creating enduring customer connections and sustainable competitive advantage.

What other brands would you add to the list of those who tell a great story?

So you feel like the wind might finally be at your back (at least a few days out of the week). Your CFO is easing off the brake pedal. Competitors and customers are showing signs of life. The Board is once again focused on top-line growth rather than cost savings.

It’s time to restart your brand engines. Here are 10 tips for how to proceed:

1. Revisit your customer. Listen unbiasedly to understand their pain points, priorities, practices and unmet needs. Spend time walking in their shoes. Don’t be you being them. Become them.

2. Sharpen your story. Use these insights to help determine where and how you most meaningfully improve customers lives; and do it differently from others? What do you (ultimately) help them achieve that others can’t; or aren’t?

3. Be ambitious (this is actually part b of number 2 above). Beyond where you are today, what can you be in the future? If status quo wasn’t an option (it’s not for customers), what would you want to achieve?

4. Get the juices flowing inside. Brand-building really does start inside the company. If employees are educated, if they’re believers, if they’re inspired, can walk the talk, and do it consistently, customers will come along for the ride (and bring their friends).

5. Deeds versus words. Brands used to be built through imagery and messaging. But those days are just about over. Today’s power brands are involving and dynamic, deliver great customer experiences, are mechanisms for connections and community and for more meaningfully improving our lives.

6. Co-create value. Harness the collective intelligence of audiences to create greater and new value for your customers and company; along the way, creating stronger relationships, greater advocacy and deeper loyalty.

7. Tag team. An inspiring and brand-engaged CEO, coupled with a talented, imaginative and respected CMO is a tough team to beat.

8. Deliver happiness. Happy customers are happy to spread your word. And with multiple channels at their disposal, they certainly will.

9. Extend apologies. If you screw up, admit it. Trying to hide behind it doesn’t make much sense, because you can’t.

10. Execute brilliantly. Success is in the details. Which means your whole brand house needs to be in order. Every facet of your brand expression – from behaviors, to communications, environments and products – must reflect and extend your story.

Any other tips to add to this list?

Are you leveraging your opportunity to become one community of practice?

This video highlights the benefits of using collaborative tools to share best practices and expertise across the Rio Tinto group. According to Mark Bennett, principal advisor, a community of practice is a group of people who share a passion for something they know how to do, and who want to interact regularly to learn how to do that thing better.

These collaborative forums are changing the way the company works. People aren’t scared to ask questions. A lot of people are willing to give answers. The end result is a significant shift to become more interdependent. To being one Rio Tinto.

Sounds a lot like the opportunity we have through social media. And isn’t this its ultimate benefit? To create a community of practice. Community collaboration that creates greater value for both customers and companies. Extracting the knowledge, insights and imagination that we each possess, and unlocking it through collaboration.

I just came back from the e-patient connections conference last week. The power of this concept of communities of practice was reinforced through many important and powerful examples. Just a few of these included:

• Mayo Clinic’s Patient Stories, told by those who are honored to share their stories and who understand the power they have to help others
• Kerry Sparling, from sixuntilme.com, who said that for diabetes patients, finding emotional support online is everything
• Lisa Tate (CEO Womenheart) and Robert Schumm (Marketing Director Bayer Healthcare) who talked about their Facebook Strong@Heart initiative

So, how are you helping to create, for your customer and for  your company, your “community of practice.” Please share your story.