Branding
Warning: not all direct-to-consumer advertisers will experience the same results.
Often, those in hospitals and health systems who are looking for a quick fix to a business challenge such as outmigration or dropping market share will call for increased consumer advertising, arguing in part by pointing toward how pharmaceutical companies have gained success over the past decade advertising direct to consumers. The prevailing wisdom has been that given the mass amounts of money spent on this strategy ($4.7 billion in 2008, according to TNS Media Intelligence) and the ongoing complaints of physicians dealing with this phenomenon, drug companies must have been wildly successful with this tactic. But a study cited in this week’s BusinessWeek article titled “Ask Your Doctor If This Ad Is Right for You” throws some cold water on the notion that direct-to-consumer advertising has been successful for drug companies. Read the rest of this entry »
Hospital awards – the madness continues
For those of you who follow this blog or have heard me speak, this will be a beating of a dead horse. But I can’t help myself, given a conversation I just had with a healthcare marketer who told me of two new hospital awards her organization had received, two of which I had never heard. The question is, will this madness ever end? Read the rest of this entry »
Price positioning possibilities
Last week we profiled a new healthcare pricing web site, the Healthcare Blue Book. This week I had a great conversation with the company’s CEO, Dr. Jeffrey Rice. Read the rest of this entry »
Embracing inbound marketing in healthcare
I had the weird experience recently of stumbling upon a piece of jargon I hadn’t heard before, but which described a concept I knew quite well. The term is “inbound marketing.” (I’m told the concept is close to Seth Godin’s “permission marketing,” but I stopped reading after his 37th book, so maybe that’s why I missed it.) Read the rest of this entry »
