Embrace the virtue of discipline: Decide what matters most
Confession
Healthcare marketers have a lot to accomplish.
Grow the service line. Build awareness. Increase preference. Support physicians. Communicate quality. Promote access. Highlight innovation. Reach new patients without forgetting existing ones. And, while we’re at it, could we mention that we’re compassionate?
Most of these are perfectly reasonable things to want. The trouble begins when we want them all from the same piece of marketing.
I’ve seen creative briefs with so many objectives, audiences, messages, and proof points that the only conceivable way to satisfy them would be to make the logo smaller and reduce the type size.
Even apparent specificity can disguise a lack of choice. Saying our target is “men and women ages 18–64 in our primary service area” sounds quite precise. We have an age range. We have a geography. We have presumably excluded somebody.
But unpack it and we’ve essentially said we want to reach most adults who live nearby and aren’t yet eligible for Medicare. We still haven’t said much about who these people are, what they need, what they believe, or what might cause them to act.
Greed shows up in healthcare marketing when we’re unwilling to decide which reasonable thing matters most at the moment.
Virtue
The opposite of greed is discipline.
For healthcare marketers, we define discipline as the prioritization of fewer, more impactful efforts. The art of self-control.
That word fewer is doing a lot of work.
Prioritization requires us to decide that some things matter more than others. A campaign may have ten possible messages, six potential audiences, and several legitimate business objectives. Discipline means choosing among them.
That can be uncomfortable, particularly in healthcare organizations where many people have a legitimate interest in the work. The service line wants us to represent its expertise. Physicians want us to include their credentials. Leadership wants us to mention the new facility. Someone has just remembered the award we won last month. Everyone’s right, but if every perspective carries equal weight, we haven’t prioritized anything.
Repentance
When I was learning advertising, I learned the billboard test. If you can’t communicate the idea in roughly eight words, you probably haven’t found the idea yet.
Someone passing a billboard at speed has only a few seconds to understand and remember it. That’s an unforgiving standard, which makes it a useful one. If the central idea can’t survive that degree of compression, adding another paragraph probably isn’t going to rescue it.
More importantly, focus creates the conditions for better ideas.
Suppose the thing we really want to communicate about an emergency department is speed. That gives a creative team somewhere to go. They can explore what speed means to someone who needs care. They can dramatize time, create comparisons, find metaphors, build tension, or use an unexpected visual idea. A central thought gives them a standard against which to judge all those possibilities.
Now give the same team a brief asking them to communicate fast, compassionate, convenient, advanced, expert, personalized, and community-based care.
Each claim may be perfectly defensible. Together, they leave the creative team with very little room to create because the work has to carry the weight of the list.
This is why we shouldn’t confuse discipline with simply making things shorter. A six-word message can lack focus, and a longer piece of content can remain beautifully single-minded. Discipline gives the work a center of gravity.
The same principle applies to audiences. Age and geography can give us useful targeting variables, but they don’t necessarily tell us who we’re trying to persuade. A more disciplined audience definition begins to tell us something about the person: what they currently do, what they believe, what need they have or what behavior we’re hoping to change.
The narrower definition may exclude people who could conceivably respond. That’s the uncomfortable bit.
Every meaningful strategic choice closes some doors. Discipline gives us the confidence to close the ones that matter less so the work can walk decisively through the one that matters most.
One small act
Take the brief for your next campaign and find every use of the word “and.” Look particularly at the audience, the message, and the list of things the work needs to communicate.
Not every “and” is a problem, obviously. But each one is an invitation to ask, do we need both?
If the answer is yes, keep it. If the answer is “well, everyone wants it in there,” you may have found something worth discussing.
Take a deeper look at how Greed shows up in healthcare marketing and how to embrace Discipline.
