Medicine and dog food marketing

Josh Bernoff, co author with Charlene Li of the book Groundswell (you have read that, right?), works with the technology and market research company, Forrester, and writes a blog that goes by the same name. Yesterday he posted Wrong customer, or, the perils of dog food marketing. I really enjoyed reading it and thought that his point was excellent and very well made. I tweeted a link to it and said that I thought the medical profession was next in line to discover this lesson. I got a couple of responses back asking why I thought that and rather than go through the whole Twitter DM thing asking for email addresses, because I certainly can’t explain it in 140 characters, I thought I’d just post it here. For those following the story theme posts, this is a bit off topic but certainly relevant to Marketing and PR efforts.

A quick bit of background on my involvement with the medical profession, and, by that, I mean physician’s practices, not pharma, not healthcare, not any of the associated branches. I’m not a doctor, I don’t play one on TV and, I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn last night. Starting in my late tens and early twenties however, and continuing through to this day, I have made a lot of friends in the MD profession. It started through my involvement with tennis and continued through my days selling software and working as an executive at a software company. Docs, and their wives, played a lot of tennis and they were some of the first professionals drawn to the PC craze. Mostly over the years, I’ve listened to them talk about their lives and their practices. They tend to be a whole lot smarter than me so, for the most part, I’ve tried to follow that two ears one mouth maxim when we’re together. Those friends have also, for the most part, tended to be surgeons, a very different breed if you know physicians at all.

Now, a quick bit about medical marketing and then we’ll get back to Josh’s point about dog food marketing and what I meant by my comment. For years and years and years, physicians were not allowed to “advertise”, other than a listing in the Yellow Pages under the appropriate practice category. That also held true for attorneys if you recall. So, in order to grow their practices they had to rely on other physicians to refer patients to them or they had to rely on word of mouth referrals.

Right away, if you’ve read Josh’s post, you’ll see that this is a classic dog food marketing scenario. Josh uses a textbook company as his example and says this “Most companies have at least two kinds of customers, the ones who use their products or services, and other ones that are buyers, distributors, advertisers, or other types of partners. Often those other customers, like the professors, seem more important, since they make decisions that affect hundreds of sales or thousands of dollars.” Just like the medical profession. The patients are the “customers” and the referring physicians are the other types of partners. And since doctors couldn’t advertise to patients, they were forced to market to other practices or partners.

Josh makes two points. “Dog food marketers: beware. The more time you spend on the needs of the non-user customer, the less you are focusing on the user of your products, and the more vulnerable you become. If you empower that other customer to persuade you to make decisions not in the best interests of the people who use your products, you are striding down the path to ruin.” Now, please note, I’m not saying that the referring doctors are not acting in the best interests of the patients here. Nor am I saying that the attending doctors are not acting in the best interests of the patient. What I am saying, back to my tweet, is that medicine is a classic dog food marketing profession, and that the sea change in consumer attitude that has impacted many other professions thus far, will impact medicine in a big way.

Josh further makes the point “It doesn’t matter if you sell insurance, shoes, or web searches. If you always worry first about the one who uses your products, she will lead you into new business models, new features, and loyalty. Social technology means you can form a relationship with that customer, even if you send your invoices to someone else. If you worry too much about that “other” customer, he’ll go into competition with you, insist on more discounts, drag you down as he goes out of business, or distract you, opening up room for competitors. User customers may have loyalty. Those other customers rarely do.”

Very applicable to the medical profession. Referring practices are already competing and starting to do more and more procedures that in times past would have been referred on. And, I have seen practices who, when faced with this, have changed the way they did business, or treated patients if you will, and actually sent existing patients back to the referring practice for minor procedures in hopes that the referring practices would continue to refer the patients back for the bigger procedures.

Sounds quite a bit like the point Josh makes doesn’t it? The doctors though, are between a rock and a hard place and I know how difficult this coming change must be for them. However, health care is front and center on everyone’s mind and will likely be so for some time to come. Consumers, patients, are starting to get more and more active in their own care. They have been empowered by the internet and new media to talk with each other, to gather on support sites and to even have the ability to rate a physician’s care. There are a growing number of practices, led by younger doctors although not always, who have taken steps to join the conversation, to start to form those relationships in spite of the legal and medical advice challenges that they face having decided to take those steps.

I suspect that those practices will be the ones to prosper in the future and that those who neglect to start to engage won’t be able to react quickly enough once the sea change occurs. And occur it will. It’s happening to every other industry and medicine is certainly not immune. As institutionalized trust continues to diminish, and medicine is as big an institution as we have, patients, and not referrings, will be the “customer”. And, once that happens, practices will have to be skilled in more than dog food marketing.