Emotional Healthcare Ads—To The Rescue

Most healthcare marketers can’t help themselves.

You’ve seen the ads—hospitals roll out messages that brag about their top doctors, show off new robotic surgical systems and promote conveniently located emergency rooms.

Wake me up when those commercials are over.

I don’t mean to be overly harsh about such tired healthcare advertising strategies, because some medical communications professionals are doing it well—and I’ll share a few later in this article. But most hospital CMOs often face tremendous pressure from physicians to put them front and center, market new specialty areas or drive traffic with boring billboards. Intense competition forces them to push make-an-appointment-now messages. Such tactics might earn small bumps in awareness. I’m all for that. But those messages are fleeting. They don’t build an emotional connection with an audience, and they don’t lay a foundation upon which feature-and-benefit advertising can follow.

Do you see Coca-Cola presenting the chemical make-up of its soda? Have you watched an Apple commercial that compares its features to a competitor’s? Can you recall a spot from Audi that discusses turn radius or seat warmers? Nope. In their national advertising, these brands demonstrate the importance of making an emotional connection with people. That’s a strategy lesson for all healthcare providers and related businesses, from hospitals to health insurance companies.

Why do we prefer brand-name products? 

There is a strong relationship between emotional resonance and connecting with a brand.

“The influential role of emotion in consumer behavior is well documented,” says psychologist Peter Noel Murray, Ph.D., an expert in emotion-based consumer behavior.

According to Murray, people viewing ads are influenced more by their emotional response to the ad than its content “by a factor of 3-to-1 for television commercials and 2-to-1 for print ads.” Murray believes that emotions are the main reason we prefer brand-name products. I agree. Advertising professionals often think we should be explaining their customers’ features and benefits. There’s nothing wrong with that—but only AFTER a campaign that forms an emotional bond between a potential customer and the brand.

One way to gauge an ad’s emotional intelligence is to see if people are enjoying and sharing it. We don’t share ads that explain how great a company is; we share ads that move us.

Hubspot knows why we share ads: “Apparently, anything that includes a dog or soccer stars or an ad that makes you break down in tears at your desk.” More to the point: “Ads that make people share and buy can usually be summed up in one word: emotional.” It’s no surprise that the most popular topics among frequently shared ads included friendship, happiness, inspiration and warmth. We’ll share ads when we’re happy, sad, afraid, surprised, angry or disgusted. We can’t help it.

Some healthcare organizations are on board with the trend toward emotional ads. Dignity Health’s “Hello Humankindness” campaign presents a winning example of how feelings can rub off on a brand. And BlueCross BlueShield of Arizona also has done some good work that focuses on the questions we all have about healthcare.

To illustrate how emotional advertising works, let’s pretend I was CMO of a health insurance plan. I would create a strategic plan with a three-stage campaign that leads to the important months of open enrollment. In this example, let’s assume the sign-up period begins November 1st.

January-May: emotional connection 

During the first part of the year, I would create a multi-channel advertising campaign that focuses SOLELY on establishing an emotional connection with potential customers. Even though our health plan has a vast array of competitive features, I wouldn’t mention them. This is not the time to tell people that we have the most doctors, that we don’t require pre-authorization or that our premiums are the lowest in the industry.

Instead, I’d direct my advertisng agency to create a campaign built on patient stories which evoke strong emotional responses. A father tosses a football to his differently abled daughter. A student, speaking at her high school graduation, smiles at her grandmother beaming back from her wheelchair in the front row. A sea of naked babies all hold hands. In these ads, the only brand connection might be the company’s logo that appears at the end.

The goal is to make people happy. Help them smile or cry. Give them reasons to share an ad. Even if it’s unconscious, we want potential customers to feel good about the brand. Emotional appeals allow us to do just that.

For illustration purposes, the next phase of marketing strategy abandons this pure-emotion tactic. However, it can take years for successful branding campaigns to take hold, so emotion-based ads frequently play out for extended periods of time. These high-level umbrella campaigns often run concurrently with ads that begin to explain features and benefits.

June-August: feature-themed marketing

We’re five months away from open enrollment. It’s too early to mention why we’re better than our competitors, but we can take baby steps in that direction.

If we did our job during the first few months of the year, we’ve already softened up the market with a campaign that worked exclusively on emotions. Potential customers like us. They’ve shared some ads on social media.

Now, we can layer in a campaign that stays with an emotional appeal, but also communicates a few of our main benefits. A doctor says to her patient, “I’ve been seeing you for 20 years and you’ve never looked better,” with an ending voice-over that says, “With our insurance plan, you never have to switch doctors.”

See what we did there? We presented a warm moment that everyone can relate to, and then provided a gentle feature of our health plan. No hard sell. No facts or figures. Yet we've given them a reason to connect us with customer satisfaction.

September-November: take action now

Our target market has been hearing from us for a while, first with a campaign that made our audience love us, then with spots that started to mildly communicate some of our core benefits. Now, let’s go in for the kill.

This is the critical time. We need people to choose us and sign up. This third stage of the campaign won’t be shy about presenting our features and benefits. We might even have some words in our ads that set us apart from our competitors:

√ Lowest deductibles

√ Always keep your doctor

√ Never need pre-authorization

√ Voted #1 by J.D. Power 

By now, our market is emotionally ready to hear, digest and respond to our messages. Victory.

Need help?

Not sure where to start? No problem. LAVIDGE experts in developing healthcare creative with an emotional appeal can point the way.

To learn more, give us a call at 480.998.2600 or send email to [email protected].