We recently published Franklin Street’s Sixth Annual Health Care Marketing Trends Report where we identified five trends impacting health care brands:
- Radical Convenience
- Everything is a Prototype
- Making Stories that Matter
- The 99 Percenters
- Addiction is the New Cancer
Our approach to trend spotting is to look for those trends that:
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- Are big enough to impact all health care brands
- Have actionable opportunities to leverage the trend
After all, it’s one thing to spot a trend. It’s another thing to leverage a trend to positively impact your organization and brand.
In this year’s report, we added a series of questions to help you identify ideas and actions to use these trends as fuel for your strategies.
We believe in the power of asking great questions at Franklin Street. Great questions can inspire great insights.
In addition to the questions we included in the report to inspire your ideas and actions, here are two universal questions you can use to leverage these trends.
1. Who is driving this trend and what is driving them?
2. What are the possible negative consequences of this trend for your audience and how might your brand help mitigate or soften the negative consequences?
In the 2017 Health Care Marketing Trends Report, we share the trend of Everything is a Prototype.
The gist of this trend is that modern marketing is about inviting your audience to iterate your campaign.
Engaged audiences help shape the campaign by informing what messages, art and calls to action are most meaningful to them.
In other words, the campaign you launch on Day 1 might not look anything like the campaign on the last day of the campaign cycle.
If we look back at the first question—who is driving this trend—the answer is simple: your audience.
The second part of the question is, What is driving them? In this case, what’s driving the audience is their desire to control the content that reaches them.
Today’s health care consumers are dictating what messages reach them. Our content and advertising is only a thumb click away from being banished or basked with engagement.
Audiences today want content that inspires, informs, influences and entertains them.
So the trend of Everything is a Prototype embraces the fact that marketing, branding and advertising is a two-way street: brands build a story and audiences build on that story (or shun it).
Let’s look at the second question: what might be the negative consequences of this trend?
For our audiences, the negative consequences might be overwhelming. We live in an “Always On” society: always checking Facebook, always responding to texts, always clicking, swiping, tweeting and sharing.
That’s why so many people feel overwhelmed, anxious and drained. The writer Simon Sinek shares in the book Leaders Eat Last that every time we hear a new text message come in, our brains get a hit of dopamine—a feel good chemical—which we crave.
But too much of a good thing is a bad thing, and now our audiences feel stress and overload to maintain constant stimulation.
So how can your healthcare brand help mitigate against this negative consequence?
You might share content on how to detach from devices, how to “power down” and unwind before going to bed, or how to adopt healthy, stress-relieving behaviors.
You might also remind your audience of your organization’s ancillary services that appeal to the mind and spirit of patients, in addition to your expert physicians, technology and quality.
At Franklin Street, we find that asking great questions can often produce great insights. As you read our 2017 Health Care Marketing Trends Report, we hope you’ll ask yourself the questions we’ve included in the report—or ask yourself new questions. You might just inspire a whole new way of achieving your goals.
