RESPONDING TO NEW CONCEPTS IN HEALTH
Accelerating cultural and demographic change is rapidly changing the shape of demand and expectation within health. With customer appetite for empowerment and informed choice now insatiable, how should brand owners respond?
From interacting with the healthcare system, to lifestyle choices in self-medication, nutrition, exercise and personal care, customer demands have evolved beyond product, brand promise and feature superiority. The meaning of customer value in these markets can appear highly elusive. Yet those companies able to deliver and capture customer value can secure new areas of sustainable competitive advantage.
Health and wellness is a uniquely personal category. Consumer brand choices and the treatment options recommended by healthcare professionals can have a profound impact on individuals. Growing customer empowerment is now recasting a previously hierarchical relationship between expert and customer to that of a democracy, with the web forcing new levels of transparency in everything from price to competing alternatives.
Customer engagement within health and wellness is also comparatively high vs other categories. Customers now understand their choices and are spending quality time to ensure they make ones that best suit their lifestyle aspirations. In markets where choice exists such as hospital selection preferences can significantly effect quality of outcome. Self-medication choices are also recognised as able to alter the speed and journey of minor ailment recovery. Even the choice of running footwear can play an unsuspected role in future health through it’s impact on the wear and tear of the knee joints.
Whilst many institutions within developed markets have suffered a loss of credibility and authority, this has not been the case for physicians, pharmacists, nurses and other healthcare providers. Their advice can be the most poignant and significant consumer interaction within the customer journey. However, they are both busy and have become brand savvy and often immune to marketing approaches. The challenge for marketing professionals is to appear relevant, offering genuine added value. Customer experience monitoring is the best way of ensuring this consistently remains top of mind. Our own brand experience mapping tool includes uniquely constructed graphic templates and cue cards to bring the information to life within the business.
We are also seeing the personal care markets undergoing major shifts. It is no longer sufficient for brands to be built on consumer brand promises enhanced with messaging aesthetics, and status associations. Science and technology has taken the previously mundane functional benefit into new areas of the brand positioning stage. A brief scan of the skincare and dental markets reveals technical claims that only a few years ago would have felt straight out of science fiction.
With this brave new world of health and wellness exhibiting such rapid-rates of Schumpeterian destruction, brand owners must ensure they remain relevant by consistently recalibrating their understanding of the customer journey, finding new ways to add value and consistently delighting their customers. This is no easy challenge. Whilst adding value can provide quick wins, delivering new initiatives that also capture that value and deliver longer-term profit are more complex and often require new and external sources of expertise.