Authentic Health Care Marketing: Treating People with Empathy, Curiosity, and Respect

By Jane Weber Brubaker

In health care, we lead with facts. But if someone rejects the facts, what is the right response?

One thing liberals, conservatives, and independents have in common is, we don’t always agree with one another. When our wildly divergent worldviews collide, it can feel like such an existential threat that it seems our only choice is to part ways with friends — or even family members. Added to this, truth is no longer viewed as an objective fact, and trust in institutions, including health care institutions like hospitals, is declining.

That sharp dividing line between belief systems has consequences. It could mean the difference between life and death if people reject traditional health care solutions or refuse care because they don’t trust the entity that’s telling them they need it. In the current environment of cultural tribalism, how can health care organizations break down the barriers and rebuild trust in the communities they serve?

The co-authors of Authentic Healthcare Marketing, Brandon Edwards, CEO of Unlock Health, and Shannon Hooper, Unlock Health’s president and COO, believe the antidote to the toxicity is authenticity. Health care marketing, they state in their book, “requires a complex balancing act: living an authentic brand positioning that finds the common ground while understanding the vastly diverse belief systems enough to deliver personalization that connects fully to the individual.”

In our recent conversation, Edwards and Hooper shared their ideas for how marketers can break through the red state/blue state conundrum — and why they must.

Changing Minds

Targeting population segments with personalized messages is not a new concept in marketing. But how do you persuade someone who disagrees with you — sometimes vehemently — to consider your point of view, especially if you believe you have facts on your side?

There is a tendency to write off people who are skeptical of evidence-based medicine. Edwards shares, “I’ve gotten a little bit of pushback from people who say, look, if these people want to be stupid and ignore science, then so be it. I don’t think we want to say, you disagree with me, therefore I don’t care about what happens to you. I don’t think that’s a healthy attitude about humans much less health care.”

Hooper suggests a better approach, noting, “With the diversity of the audiences we have to engage with, it requires a lot of curiosity, empathy, and sometimes patience.”

Edwards adds, “You almost never move someone from yes to no — or no to yes. You move from no to maybe to yes. I think a sort of foundational psychological principle is, once we believe something, it feels very jarring or disingenuous to flip over our belief from black to white or white to black. We have to go in the middle to gray and say, I don’t know, let me think about that.”

Building Bridges

One way to connect is to show up authentically in places where your target audience goes to get news and information, even if it’s uncomfortable.

“The first question I’ll ask clients is, as an example, do you have a presence on Truth Social and Bluesky,” Edwards says. “Increasingly, people’s social media engagement is determined by their partisan affiliation or their beliefs. Are you engaging people where they are comfortable and showing up? Or are you only engaging them where you are comfortable? You may think you know how to reach people. There’s also a huge part of just getting stuff in market and seeing how it’s reacted to, and then dynamically adjusting around that.”

The opportunities for engagement vary depending on the platform. For example, Truth Social has paid advertising and Bluesky doesn’t. What Bluesky does have, Hooper points out, are opportunities for brands to participate in influencer organic campaigns. The definition of “influencer” is different in this context.

Reddit offers another opportunity to show up authentically, but Hooper cautions, “Those communities sniff out advertising or marketing or any promotion in a second. But if you can show up authentically there … it can be a really, fertile place to engage and kind of lead people in a conversation.” [Editor’s note: Reddit also has paid advertising, and it’s growing fast. The WSJ reported on 7/31/25 that Reddit’s ad revenue increased 84 percent in Q2, to $465 million.]

Unlock Health partnered with Klein & Partners on a new research study, Authenticity in Healthcare. “Patient-first care” and “Trust and transparency” were the strongest responses when survey respondents were asked, “What would an authentic health system advertising message say to you? What would you expect to hear or read in an ad that would make you think… that was truly authentic to what they said or promised.” Download the report

Edwards mentioned influencers like podcaster and stand-up comic Theo Von, whose audience is younger and less likely to trust institutions and experts. “So that might be a situation where you might actually be leveraging a nurse or a doctor or somebody like that, but you’re leveraging them through a different channel, delivering a slightly different message.”

As health care marketers venture into these waters, testing and optimization will be key. Edwards stresses, “You may think you know how to reach people. There’s also a huge part of just getting stuff in market and seeing how it’s reacted to, and then dynamically adjusting around that.”

Hooper agrees, noting, “There just has to be a lot more experimentation in many of these areas.” She sees potential in using technologies like dynamic creative optimization, a tool that adapts ad content in real-time based on user data.

Measuring Authenticity

The purpose of the research study with Klein & Partners was to explore the validity of a framework developed by Unlock Health — The Healthcare Authenticity Index — for quantifying authentic health care marketing. They define four quadrants of authentic healthcare marketing:

• Does it speak a human truth to our audience?
• Is it meaningful to our audience?
• Is it believable?
• Can our audience trust this?

The study sheds light on these questions, but Edwards admits it doesn’t fully answer them. “When you say, ‘Can our audience trust this?’ what does that mean? Trust is somewhat of an ethereal concept.” On the pragmatic side, he sees the challenges of deploying, actioning, and tracking the results of authentic health care marketing.

The study points to the need to be a reliable, trusted, and authentic source when someone needs care. “I think this is really about making sure we’re reaching all of the audiences we serve when they have a need,” Edwards comments. “Only 1 percent of people use a hospital in any given year. Reaching that 1 percent at the moment of decision is absolutely critical but also being credible with them when the next 1 percent comes up.”

Jane Weber Brubaker is executive editor of Plain-English Health Care, a division of Plain-English Media. She directs editorial content for eHealthcare Strategy & Trends and Strategic Health Care Marketing, and is past chair of the eHealthcare Leadership Awards. Email her at [email protected].