Health care marketer Chris Bevolo has strong opinions:
“Joe Public doesn’t care about your hospital.”
“Hospitals, when they think about marketing, talk about ‘benchmarking.’ That means: ‘The hospital down the street is doing that—we should do it, too.’”
I’m making him sound like an irascible old geezer, a Tareyton wobbling irritably from the corner of his mouth. In fact, Chris Bevolo is an affable, thoughtful Gen-Xer. He runs Interval, a Warehouse District marketing and branding firm whose clients are primarily hospitals and clinics, mostly in the Upper Midwest. He also speaks and writes extensively on health care marketing. (Founded in 1999 as GeigerBevolo, a more traditional graphic-design and branding shop, his company became Interval in November 2008, a couple of years after it chose to focus on health care marketing.)
So, um, Chris, you still have clients? He laughs: They’ve heard it. In fact, he wants them to hear it. And apparently, it doesn’t deter them from working with his firm.
When 150–year-old St. Joseph’s Hospital in St. Paul, which had been doing major renovation, wanted to show that it had undergone a transformation, Interval created a series of patient documentaries positioned to resemble first-run movies. During the first month of the campaign (seen on the sides of buses and on billboards), the word “hospital” didn’t even appear. The campaign has since won numerous health-care marketing awards.
But the projects that especially appeal to Interval are those where marketing intersects with how a hospital or clinic interacts with patients.
In 2004, North Memorial Medical Center opened its new heart-care clinic for women. Heart screening is typically not covered by insurance. So how to encourage women not only to get screened, but also to improve their heart health?
Interval developed personalized journals entitled “MyHeart Book” that include the results of each patient’s tests, educational information, and specific ways to improve, like dietary tips and stress reduction techniques, as well as encouraging them to follow up with staff. Patient response to the program was so strong that North Memorial soon expanded hours and staffing. And the MyHeart journal helped convert a scary or at least unappealing prospect into a positive experience.
(An Interval project on the guy side, designed to get more men to sign up for organ donation—Half the Men.)
Why do hospitals and clinics resist improvements in how they operate? You could ask: Why do organizations in general resist real change? (Some thoughts on that here.) In the health care world, Chris believes, an additional roadblock is that medical staffers are swamped. Being pushed to change the way they work can add more stress to what is already a high-blood-pressure vocation.
Hospital and clinic marketing staffers are more likely to “get it,” Chris observes. But there aren’t many opportunities for them to push for it. Most are encouraged, even required, to stick with traditional mass-comm messaging, typically resulting in a mushy snack cake with a mysterious cream filling, liberally sprinkled with glittering generalities. Examples from Chris: “We’re a hidden gem.” “If patients only knew our story.” “We really like our nice new heart wing.”
In other words, many health-care providers seem to believe that they, not patients, control how they’re perceived.
But as Chris notes, people don’t particularly want to go to the hospital. And if they’ve had an unpleasant experience, if staffers have treated them like downed cattle, then all the shiny-happy-people images from all the stock-photography CDs in the world aren’t going to change what those patients tell their friends.
“Fifty percent of health care marketing is wrong,” says Chris, also noting that health care is a highly complicated industry, where suppliers generally control demand, and people typically can’t “shop around.” It doesn’t follow business-to-consumer rules.
So why should its marketing follow the same rules? His point exactly.
BTW: I won’t be able to attend The Show, the Minnesota Ad Fed’s awards gala the evening of Friday, October 23. But I can dig its Web site, and do. Augmented reality, mind-bending colors, the Hamm’s bear (drinking Summit?)—it’s all there. How shall I praise it? As an all-night rave for the eyeballs. An interactive acid trip, without the pesky side effects of real LSD. Both good things, by the way.
The credits: Carlson Marketing’s Door C division for the site design, Analog for the augmented reality, Brent Schoonover for the illustrations, and Ratchet for the behind-the-scenes technical that’s on beyond Flash.
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