For chief marketing officers, the task of communicating the right message has become more complex in light of the events of 2020. Hospital communications teams had to become more nimble as they tried to overcome misinformation about a deadly pandemic while assuaging public fears over coming back to healthcare settings. Such work is compounded by the challenge many providers face in seeking ways to repair relationships with historically marginalized communities of color at a time when concerns over racial inequity have eroded trust in many institutions, including healthcare institutions.
Modern Healthcare reporter Steven Ross Johnson recently held a roundtable discussion with three top healthcare marketing executives to understand how the current environment has affected their marketing and communications approaches for the short and long term:
Molly Biwer, brand division chair, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.
Misty Hathaway, vice president of international and specialized services,and chief marketing officer, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston
Vicki White, chief brand and marketing officer, AdventHealth, Altamonte Springs, Fla.
Modern Healthcare: What kinds of strategies have you had to employ to adjust to the “new normal”?
Molly Biwer: With the advertising we had prior to COVID, what we were broadcasting was related to Mayo Clinic being a destination for care. And even though the tagline was “Where to Go,” the imagery was really about traveling to Mayo Clinic to receive care. Obviously when COVID hit, we had to completely change course.
So like many companies, we took our current advertising off the air, and then took a hard look at what messages would be important. We pivoted to messages around optimism, confidence and care. And certainly, where it was relevant, we offered assurances of safety.
We also leaned into messages with empathy and compassion while offering hope and that beacon of certainty. As this pandemic has lingered, we’re really finding that people feel isolated and lonely.
Vickie White: We launched our new brand last year to be consumer-led, instead of brand-led. Our messaging is designed to meet the current needs of the community we serve, but our response to what’s happening in the country has never been more important than it has been this year.
We’ve had to stay nimble through kind of the three phases of any disaster. We think about the unity stage where people tend to pull together and heroes emerge, to the disillusionment stage where the heroic spirit kind of wears thin and trauma and stress levels leave us feeling exhausted and helpless. And then there’s that reconstruction and reckoning phase that we feel like we haven’t quite hit yet. But for the unity phase, we saw that our consumers didn’t know what was happening or how to respond. We really pivoted our campaign to celebrate that outpouring of support that the communities showed our team members and how they received so much love and support early on. We turned it into a message of inspiration and unity.
And now we really feel like we’ve moved into that disillusionment phase. We’ve all been fighting the same illness for months. As we’ve studied our consumer sentiment and current healthcare behaviors, we feel that people are kind of losing faith in themselves and each other, and we’ve seen unprecedented levels of stress and anxiety and people putting healthcare off in alarming numbers. So we launched a new campaign, what we call “Humans Are Incredible.” We kind of looked at it as our love letter to the community that acknowledges our shared hurt and just reminds us of the physical and emotional strength that’s in all of us.
Misty Hathaway: We shifted gears pretty dramatically back in March. Boston was a very heavily hit community early on, and Mass General was the hospital that saw far and away the largest number of pretty severe COVID cases at the peak of the surge for us in March, April and into May. We quickly became a content marketing shop, so we turned off all of the advertising and retooled everybody’s focus into creating relevant content, targeting medical professionals across the country and around the world. We translated a significant number of our protocols into multiple languages and turned them publicly to be an educational resource in the treatment, prevention and care of COVID patients, as well as providing consumer information.
We also kept pace with the news cycle. If there was an article about remdesivir in the national press, we had content ready soon thereafter from our researchers and practitioners to inform patients and physicians around the country and around the world about our experience with the drug in treating our sickest patients.
The pace of change has been very different this year. We’re used to planning six months or a year’s worth of a marketing strategy, but we’re now operating in much, much smaller segments of time.
MH: As visiting restrictions have been lifted at many hospitals to allow more elective types of procedures, how do you convince people that your facilities are safe places to visit?
Hathaway: In a variety of ways. Storytelling with video, storytelling with content on the website, and also sending the message about the importance of not delaying necessary care.
I think organizations across the country are all recognizing that we’re catching diseases later in their progression because people are putting off important appointments with their cardiologist or they’re ignoring chest pain, or they may be ignoring that lesion on their skin.
We have a campaign currently with a series of videos from our physicians, just reinforcing the importance of not delaying care because of fear of the pandemic and balancing that with strong reinforcement of the safety of our medical facilities. We have physician videos of walking patients through the facility and of patients talking about how safe they felt when they came into Mass General.
It’s both of those messages: One, it’s safe to be here, and two, it’s really, really important for your health that you don’t delay care.
Biwer: It’s that balance of our messaging continuing to speak to the need for continued social distancing but stopping the medical distancing.
MH: What has been your experience with COVID-19 misinformation leading to confusion and a backlash from some over safety precautions like wearing masks and social distancing?
Hathaway: There was a point in the spring and summer when the search engines and social media outlets were curating content and making assumptions about who was a credible source related to COVID. So with Google, for example, or Twitter or Facebook, content coming from large academic medical centers was kind of pushed down because it was not yet validated as trustworthy. It was an interesting experience, because clearly as some of the major academic medical centers in the country, they’re very trusted sources of information. It was something we haven’t encountered in the past where Google was kind of refusing to pull up Mass General results-related searches, because we were not yet deemed to be a credible source. It was just an odd, kind of a stunning experience for us. Particularly at a time when the general public was hungry for good information.
Biwer: We had that a little bit with Twitter. We did not have it with Google, but we were faced with that same thing. I think Johns Hopkins was that credible source that everybody was going to, really because of the (COVID Tracking) map that they have. We were kind of all fighting for that—to be considered that credible source that Johns Hopkins was fortunate enough to have early on.
White: One of the biggest challenges is making sure that our voice of truth is stronger than the nonsense that’s been out there and staying consistent with that source of truth and owning our content and venues as much as we possibly can. We have our physicians doing a weekly Facebook Live to really make sure that we can get that up-to-date information out to consumers and be that trusted source of truth for our community.
MH: Overall, what lessons have you learned about how to target an audience?
White: One of the lessons that we learned was really around our internal audience and how important it was to bring that audience in first and making our team members, our brand ambassadors, clear on how essential they were to us and making sure they had the most recent information.
We embedded marketing and communications into all of our regional pandemic response teams, as well as our system command to make sure that was top of mind in everything we were doing every day.
MH: COVID isn’t the only pivotal event of 2020, with protests over racial injustice happening across the country. From a marketing perspective, how have those events affected your messaging strategies to communities of color?
Biwer: Externally, we made a commitment to pledge $100 million over 10 years to develop strategies and outcomes and metrics to eliminate racism, not only within Mayo Clinic, but then also for our patient population and our staff. We have the Plummer doors (built in 1928, the two bronze, front doors of the Plummer Building at Mayo Clinic are 16 feet high, weigh 4,000 pounds each and have been closed a total of 11 times). They are only closed at very, very historic times—and as a result of the tragedy that happened in Minneapolis, we closed the Plummer doors one day, which was externally and internally very emotional and a really poignant moment for Mayo. We’re doing a lot more training and we clearly know there’s more to do, but I think we’ve taken some meaningful steps in the right direction for sure.
White: One movement that we were proud to be a part of—and my colleagues were a part of it as well—was White Coats for Black Lives, where we took 8 minutes and 46 seconds in remembrance of George Floyd and countless others. (On June 5, AdventHealth staff members systemwide took a bended knee together to take part in a national moment of silence that was part of the White Coats for Black Lives movement.)
It was one of our most-engaged posts because it wasn’t a post, it was a movement. I think we reached over a million people in just a matter of hours.
But we have so much more work left to do. Our participation emphasized our commitment to our Black colleagues and patients and fighting against racism and healthcare.
Our senior executives did a lot of great work speaking into the conversation directly with team members and through social media, acknowledging that many of our own personal experiences will never be broad enough to truly understand and that we must really humbly seek to listen, learn and create solutions together.
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