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Healthcare Strategies Institute 2010

 - April 22, 2010 by Beverly Ingle, Healthcare Account Director

On April 14-15, 2010 the healthcare strategy team at GDC attended the Healthcare Strategy Institute's Customer-Based Marketing Strategies Conference in Atlanta. In addition to learning everything we could from other healthcare innovators, we also delivered the presentation below.

Conference Recap

With nearly 300 healthcare marketing professionals gathered from across the country, the conversation was intensely focused on the changing healthcare landscape and marketing communications’ role within the industry. Here’s a brief recap of the highlights as we saw them:

Consumer Engagement

With the continuing evolution toward consumer-driven healthcare, understanding why and how to connect with consumers gains increasing significance. Bob Isherwood, formerly the global creative director for Saatchi & Saatchi and now partner in i.e. healthcare, teed up the importance of marketing directly to consumers. Bob shared several previous advertising campaigns for products and services as mundane and ubiquitous as a loaf of bread to illustrate that engaging consumers through creative approaches to communications can serve to set you apart from your competition. Since GDC has been advocating this approach for several years now, it was hard not to jump and yell, “YES!”

MMA’s mHealth Debuts

Steve Cook, also a partner in i.e. healthcare and a marketing powerhouse in his own right, took the opportunity to debut a new initiative from the Mobile Marketing Association called mHealth. Its purpose: To create a collaborative healthcare industry forum that is consumer-centric and is aligned with the MMA vision and mission. Mobile platforms and applications stand to play a strong role as effective information management tools in consumer-driven healthcare. To ensure GDC’s healthcare clients stay at the forefront of innovation, Group Account Director Beverly Ingle will join Steve as a member of the mHealth initiative. If you have a passion in mobile health and want to get involved, contact Beverly at bingle [at] gdc-co [dot] com.

Design-Thinking Marketers Can Change Healthcare

Tess Coody, GDC partner and CEO, led a dynamic conversation around disruptive innovation in healthcare with Suzanne Towry, director of communications at Vanguard Health Systems. The premise? Design-thinking marketers are in the best position to lead innovative change in healthcare, and Tess and Suzanne’s case study on Tenzing Health illustrated why. Everyone who knows Tess also knows about her passion for improving health and healthcare, and no one left the room unmotivated to make a difference.

“How Design-Thinking Marketers Can Change Healthcare,” covers guidelines and a case study on how marketing and communications can lead innovative business strategy that’s customer based, including:

  • Creating and fostering a test environment
  • Using feedback loops for listening to feedback and driving success
  • Iterating and scaling in the short and long term

 

 

 

Download this presentation as a PowerPoint file

Download the related whitepaper, “5 Steps to Changing the Healthcare Perspective” as a PDF

Read the case study on how GDC crafted Tenzing Health’s marketing strategy