The seven deadly sins of healthcare marketing
(and how to repent before your audience leaves you behind)
Even the most well-intentioned healthcare marketers fall into patterns that quietly sabotage their own impact. With humor, honesty, and passion for marketing as a discipline, we explore some of the most insidious traps marketing leaders fall into — not just in theory, but in practice.
You’ll recognize the sins. Pride shows up when brands mistake internal alignment for public relevance. Lust emerges when teams chase every trend, platform, or persona. Envy tempts marketers to imitate prestige systems without asking whether the strategy fits their own audiences. And Greed? That’s when a campaign has 17 KPIs, 42 assets, and no unifying idea.
These are painfully familiar behaviors, and they’re fixable.
Get ready to laugh, squirm, and rethink everything from your brand strategy to your campaign briefs.
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What pride costs
We’ve all met that person.
Within the first few minutes of a conversation, you’ve learned where they went to school, the awards they’ve won, the important people they know, and all the places they’ve been. They may be every bit as accomplished as they sound. You still find yourself looking for an exit.
Patients come to healthcare organizations looking for someone they can trust with their health. They’re often making decisions at the most vulnerable moments of their lives, placing their health, their family members, and sometimes their future in the hands of people they’ve never met. Your job is to connect with these people and lay the foundations for trust, and you can’t do that by keeping the focus on you.
A commitment to clinical excellence and research matters only in terms of the superior health outcomes patients can expect. Research alone doesn’t build trust. Rankings don’t build trust. Awards don’t build trust. They become meaningful when people understand how those accomplishments improve the care they’ll receive.
Too often healthcare marketing begins in a way that erodes trust rather than builds it. Organizations introduce themselves through credentials instead of connection. They ask patients to translate institutional achievements into personal confidence before a relationship has even begun.
But if excellence isn’t the way to build trust, what is?
The bright and shiny new thing
There is always something new in marketing technology, and there is usually someone nearby who is very excited about it. A new platform promises better personalization, a cleaner view of the customer, faster campaign execution, more useful data, better attribution, or some combination of all five. More recently, artificial intelligence has added another layer of possibility. Some of these developments are genuinely important, and some will change how we work. That makes separating useful innovation from our natural enthusiasm for the next new thing rather difficult.
A colleague once told me a story that captures the problem rather well. The organization had a digital marketing team and a digital function within IT. The IT team already had a CRM and technology stack capable of supporting what the marketers wanted to do, but the marketing team wanted its own solution. The proposed platform was new, impressive, and expensive, and the marketers felt strongly enough about it that the decision eventually made its way to the CEO.
They won. The technology was purchased, set up, and maintained, and the organization continued paying licensing and associated costs for five years. Yet the platform was never really implemented in the way everyone had imagined when the case was made for buying it.
I suspect most experienced marketers have encountered some version of this story. Perhaps the technology was different, or perhaps the investment was less dramatic, but the underlying temptation is familiar. We see what a new tool could allow us to do and become excited by the possibility. That enthusiasm can move us quickly toward acquisition before we have fully understood the capabilities, limitations, and unrealized potential of the technology already sitting inside the organization.
The insatiable desire to showcase everything
There are some briefs you can see coming before you have finished the first page. The organization wants to communicate its advanced technology, innovative research, expert physicians, national rankings, compassionate care, convenient locations, and excellent outcomes. Someone would also like to mention the new facility. There is an important community message to include. And, naturally, we need a strong call to action.
None of these things is necessarily untrue, and all of them matter to somebody inside the organization. That is precisely what makes the problem difficult.
For the presentation that inspired this book, we created a fictional health system called Overclaim Health and wrote the sort of advertising copy that results when everyone gets what they want:
And that was only the first sentence.
We continued with breakthrough discoveries, advanced treatments, nationally ranked teams, innovation, expertise, heart, and outcomes before arriving at a final flourish: Advanced. Award-winning. Compassionate. Local. Comprehensive.
The exercise was intentionally excessive, but not by much. Anyone who has spent enough time around healthcare marketing has seen a real brief capable of producing something remarkably similar.
Marketing as an instrument of healthcare
We’re going to take a slight detour in this chapter.
Most of the sins we’ve explored so far live comfortably inside the day-to-day work of healthcare marketing. Gluttony takes us somewhere bigger. More importantly, its corresponding virtue, Stewardship, gives us an opportunity to talk about health and health outcomes, which should be top-of-mind for every healthcare marketer. It also helps us understand the role of marketing and communications as an instrument of healthcare.
The United States spent $5.3 trillion on healthcare in 2024, or $15,474 for every person in the country. That’s 18% of the entire U.S. economy. On a per capita basis, we spend roughly twice the average of other wealthy countries without consistently achieving better health outcomes in return.
Why aren't we doing that?
Envy has an uncomfortable relationship with one of the ways human beings learn.
We watch other people, notice what works for them, and compare their choices and results with our own. Then we borrow, adapt, and improve. This social learning begins remarkably early in life with parents and caregivers, extends to teachers and peers, and into the broader world. Emulating behaviors and patterns from people we admire helps us acquire skills, understand social behavior, and figure out how to operate in the world.
It naturally translates into our work. If we see a competitor do something well, we pay attention. We try to understand why it worked and whether there is something useful we can learn from it. When our attention shifts from lessons we can apply in our own way to possessiveness and duplication, that’s where Envy begins.
Someone else has something successful or admired, and suddenly we want our version of it. We may not stop to ask whether it fits our organization, solves one of our problems, or matters to the people we’re trying to reach.
Healthcare marketing rarely reaches the malicious heights Pope Gregory probably had in mind. Mostly, we encounter its milder and considerably more respectable cousin, competitive anxiety. Another health system launches something impressive, and somebody asks the question almost every marketer has heard, “Why aren’t we doing that?”
