Stewart Gandolf, CEO of the Healthcare Success Agency discuss the significant impact of the Baby Boomer generation on healthcare, the shift from traditional healthcare to a focus on wellness, and the rise of vaccine skepticism. They explore the evolution of healthcare marketing, the challenges of public trust, and the importance of specialization in marketing strategies for healthcare providers.
Stewart Gandolf shares the significance of specialization in healthcare marketing, the challenges faced by agencies, and the evolving role of procurement in agency selection. They explore the impact of AI on marketing strategies, particularly in healthcare, and emphasise the importance of expertise and credibility in building client relationships. The discussion highlights the complexities of the healthcare marketing landscape and the necessity for agencies to adapt to changing market demands.
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I missed it. I would’ve loved hanging out with Blondie and Mick Jagger and all those people.
Transcription:
Darren:
Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
If you are enjoying the Managing Marketing Podcast, please either like, review, or share this episode to help spread the words and wisdom from our guests each week.
Now, the baby boomers have had significant impacts on society at every life stage. With boomer groups now well into their sunset years, they’re impacting health, wellness, and longevity with a vengeance. This is influencing all aspects of the healthcare industry, from medical practice pharma, aged care and more, particularly in the way it is represented, promoted and marketed.
To discuss this topic, please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, the CEO of Healthcare Success Agency, Stewart Gandolf. Please welcome Stewart. Stewart, how are you?
Stewart:
I’m doing good, Darren. Thank you for asking.
Darren:
Well, considering the topic, I hope you’re in good health.
Stewart:
Yes. Well, let’s talk about fun fact about the baby boom generation and everybody knows. And so, technically I think the definition is 1946-birth year to 1964. But alas, that is such a wide range of ages that it’s almost a misnomer.
In fact, you may not know this Darren, but there was a whole largely unsuccessful movement to rename the second half of the baby boomers, the Jones Generation. And the idea there is the first half of the baby boomer generation, TV was new, they had Howdy Doody, I had Scooby Doo.
So, the Vietnam War was, hell no, we don’t go. And I was at home in my jammies watching TV. I had no idea what this was about.
Darren:
Same here.
Stewart:
So, the other day I made an obscure reference about an event I held lunch, which was like Studio 54, and the lady on the speaking said, “Well, what was it like at Studio 54?” “I have no idea. I was a child.” I missed it. I would’ve loved hanging out with Blondie and Mick Jagger and all those people.
Darren:
When they talk about the 60s, I wasn’t really there, I was at home.
Stewart:
Yeah. So, I relate more to gen X because I was the original latchkey kid, and I listen more to 80s music than 70s music. So, I just think it’s a fun fact.
And that’s the one thing when you get into marketing, if you’re … so there’s our first little lesson of the day, you have to go a little deeper than just a label or a stereotype because it’s very different. And you said that you’re from the latter half of the generation as well, and it’s completely different. You were not there. I missed Woodstock, I didn’t even know about it until much later. Like damn, I missed some fun.
Darren:
So, both of us, I guess are born in the 60s and not in the 50s. And look, that’s one of the problems with these labels. It’s interesting how that spread 46 to 64 is 20 years, and now they’re down to 15 years, the generations. I’m waiting for when they get down to 10 years, every decade will be a new generation.
Stewart:
It should be. But if you look at what happened in that period, again, I was a little kid when JFK got shot, I was not even remembering any of that, except I remember a picture of his son on the magazine saluting, and I remember RFK and Martin Luther King. But I was, again, little, I missed all of this stuff.
So, it’s a very different viewpoint. And when I was in high school, I saw this movie that I loved that I always remembered. One of those high school movies, it’s called You Are What You Were, When and it was talking about the impact of the generation you grew up on and how that changes life views. And that was pretty presion considering where we are today. So, anyway, there’s the baby boomer discussion du jour.
Darren:
And look, but they have had a significant impact, haven’t they? As you mentioned, the 60s and free love and the oral contraceptive that brought that about. The 80s where greed, for want of a better word, was good. And fitness was somewhere in between with let’s get physical. The earliest baby boomers are now heading towards their 80s.
And so, in the last 20 years, I think they’ve had an impact because we’ve seen the rise of the wellness movement, the idea of living longer and living healthier with the longevity movement that it has continued to be a significant driver of social change at certain levels along the way. And I don’t think it’s over yet, because they’re still having that impact today.
One of the things that I really wanted to talk to you about was this idea, because I worked in medical science for the start of my career before I got into marketing and advertising. And there was a time when healthcare was considered a science, and it was given sort of all of the respect, and you took the doctor’s word for it.
Now we’ve got this broad idea of wellness where all sorts of treatments and practices are coming out from people that are largely not necessarily qualified medical practitioners. That’s right, isn’t it?
Stewart:
Yeah, for sure. So, there’s a lot to unpack there. And I think the first thing I thought was interesting is if you look back at the baby boomers, so they started off as, hell no, we won’t go. And then they embrace capitalism aggressively, and then they went off to the wellness and all those other things too. So, it is funny how people change again as time goes on.
The interesting thing about the wellness versus healthcare, there’s a lot there to even consider. So, for example, here in the States, there’s a big sort of blended medical group, hospital system and insurance company called Kaiser.
And for those people that are marketing students, you can look this up, they had a campaign called Thrive, which is probably about 10 or 15 years ago when they first came out with that by now.
And they realized very astutely, nobody wants to think about the hospital, it’s like the last place you want to go. So, they stopped marketing, healthcare, they started marketing, wellness and health as opposed to healthcare.
And that’s a subtle distinction, but the idea of healthcare is you’re getting better from being sick. The idea of health is you’re staying healthy and well. And so, that’s one force of just like the health systems like Kaiser figured this out.
Another thing is, on that regard that the — again, people, especially baby boomers, decided from the beginning, they want to do things their own way. And so, they don’t want to be a victim as much. And it’s funny, I haven’t talked about this lately, but for a long time I was talking about patient experience.
My mother, when she was in her nineties, went to an appointment and at seven o’clock in the morning, they said, “Oh no, no, the doctor doesn’t come here till nine, we just want to make sure that everybody’s settled and ready to go.” I’m like, “What? Are you insane?” No baby boomer would’ve accepted that. But my mother’s like, “It’s okay. He is a doctor.” I’m like, “Let’s get out of here now.”
So, it’s a different attitude. So, you have changing norms, it’s changed. And then today, of course, with social media everybody has a vote. Everybody has an opinion, informed or not. So, you have the public wanting more of this, but also, there are good voices out there and there’s also some stuff that’s just dribble and actually very dangerous.
And so, there’s a lot going on for sure. But it’s not surprising, the baby boomers would be kind of at the forefront of that. They have been forever.
And now as things change, it’s funny because the generations are so much more, I don’t think it’s so much a generational difference, of young versus old. It’s like when they were young baby boomers were different than they are now. So, we’ll see how things have evolved. So, anyway, there’s a lot there, what else do you want to talk about there?
Darren:
Well one of the key things that we’ve seen is the rise of the anti-vaxxers. There was a time like your mother’s generation, and I remember as a young adult, you would listen to your doctor and the medical profession had this cache of credibility that seems to have been undermined by various groups.
We’ve got the Gen Xs that have led the anti-vax movement. And then we’ve seen, particularly during COVID, a lot of questions arising about the various vaccines and things. And particularly in the U.S., where it seems that it’s lost some of it … there’s a greater level of skepticism that’s undermining some of the credibility.
Stewart:
So, I’ve actually researched this recently. I had somebody from the UK reach out to me and she wanted to write a guest post to my blog. And she saw it as an invitation and we talked about a potential outline for the blog, because it turns out there’s a history of vaccine skepticism. You can look this up and it goes in waves. In fact, I just posted on this on LinkedIn like last week.
And so, the short version here is there’s been skepticism since the very first vaccines. I remember, again, being little my sisters were both what’s normally thought of as baby boomers as compared to me. And so, they remembered polio when every summer kids were coming down with polio. And one of the property managers I’ve had was walks in braces to this day from polio as a child.
So, it was a big, big deal. And so, but even then, when the … vaccine first came out, not every parent wanted to. And I remember my parents telling me how they stood first in line to get the vaccine, but it was very real watching every summer, apparently the kids would get sick. And so, there was just a terrifying thing to think, wow, polio is coming. It was much more real and clear and present.
So, here in the states and also abroad it became very divisive. Another thing people have forgotten and Trump our president initially wanted to call the vaccine the Trump vaccine and that got lost. We forgot all about that. He wanted to position it as himself.
So, but there’s so much, the sort of divisiveness around the world, I think partly because of our politics, but also just the nature of COVID.
It’s not just here in the US. These are worldwide phenomenons. Inflation and shortages of supplies. The US I think we think about it as this is a US problem, but it’s all over the place. Like this is all over the country. The western countries are very similar.
So, I feel like that’s unfortunate. And for me, like living here in the states where measles are breaking out again and there’s other diseases, I just feel like I’m much more closely aligned with healthcare. I’m trying to get the word out to save people and rather than just saying, well, my opinion’s as good as yours, I realize that you’re a doctor, you’re a scientist, you’ve studied this and you have data, but I decided that my idea is better, so therefore I’m going to follow myself.
Darren:
So, Stewart, what are the implications though then for anyone working in healthcare marketing where you know that you can be sometimes talking to potential customers, clients that are going to be skeptical about the messages that you’re putting out there?
Stewart:
So, I think that … I don’t remember — oh, by the way, one thing, I didn’t finish the thought. So, I checked this out in perplexity, and I asked, is it my imagination? Or is vaccine resistance far worse than it was before COVID? And the answer is no.
And again, this is on my LinkedIn post, and in fact, there’s studies showing the vaccine hesitancy has risen dramatically since COVID. So, that’s factual. You can look that up.
So, when we do marketing here, maybe I’ll take a step back. When I first started working in marketing and healthcare, was back in the 90s, I stumbled into it, actually, I was recruited. I didn’t want the job, but I was like I took some risk, it didn’t work out. So, I said, okay, I’ll try this for a few a few months. And ended up becoming VP of marketing of that company and worked there for 10 years.
And so, when I was doing that, I was going around the country teaching practitioners how to grow their business, how to market their business. And back then it was pretty uncommon still there was a big ambivalence. A lot of the doctors would pay money to come and see me speak and then tell me they can’t do everything. I just told them like, “Wait, no, you came to see me, why are you arguing with me? I don’t understand.”
And the public wasn’t as used to it as they are today, but today, so you have multiple factors. First of all, the public’s become much more aware of advertising by providers. You see it with plastic surgeons everywhere just like you do attorneys here. So, I don’t think it’s as much of a skepticism of like oh, that doctor’s a bad doctor because he needs to market. And younger doctors embrace marketing aggressively.
So, a lot of the older doctors who were trained by older doctors about marketing, by the way it used to be legal here. And in a lot of other, again, western states are very similar. U.S. tends to be ahead of the pack, but there’s still a lot of skepticism towards healthcare marketing by providers in other countries.
Anyway, you’ve got that whole side of it where the public’s gotten more used to it. Doctors have gotten more used to it.
I work with mostly, well, we work with all kinds of people. We work device pharma but most of our business really is providers of some kind, whether it’s telehealth, multi-location, specialty providers. We have a lot of those here, like big derm groups or big gastroenterology or whatever, addiction and then hospitals and health systems.
The hospitals and health systems, especially I think feel like it’s their duty to get the message out in their community as leaders, it depends by the way, every hospital’s a little different, but a lot of them feel like it’s their duty to educate the public.
So, I think that, but they also don’t want to be controversial, so it is really a funny time. They want to get the word out. They’re a little tepid. It’s all across the board. I mean, we could talk about this part of it for hours, but it’s like — and we’re seeing too I think as things get continually out of hand, you’ll see hospitals get more aggressive in getting the message.
I think they’re kind of a little, I don’t know, beaten down is the wrong word, but during COVID they lost money. It was a disastrous time for them. Most people think here at least that they were getting rich. And it was a really, really difficult time.
So, they were trying to be the leaders of health in their community, and they were treated with a lot of skepticism. And they also fell in the rankings too. It used to be doctors were like at the very, very top. They still are compared to everybody else, but they lost some statures. So, it’s challenging for sure.
Darren:
It is interesting, isn’t it, that marketing was often banned for medical professionals for a long time. And the reason is that all of medicines based on informed consent, and yet how are you informed about who is the best service provider for you, if there’s not a source of information such as marketing?
In most cases it’s referral. And there’s the possibility that referral happens on a commercial basis. Who knows?
Stewart:
It’s really funny how that changed because I was there for … I mean, the actual law changed before I was working. And I hear there was a Supreme Court case in 1977. It was part of it, it’s a longer, more complex story, but attorneys sued, it was called Bates and O’Steen, sued for the right to market. And doctors followed suit and there was FTC. There’s a bunch there.
But in any rate there used to be, and there probably still are laws on the books that you can only have a name plate on your door this big three inches by eight inches wide. It was that precise. And the idea of marketing was if not illegal, it was unethical.
And you’re right, that was exactly keeping the public misinformed. So, now it’s just like we’ll just trust … because we know everything. And that’s not kind of how a lot of countries have developed over time to have that level of trust.
Well, another fun fact that might be interesting to your listeners, when reviews of doctors first came out, our company had such good search engine optimization that we were called by reporter after reporter because we looked up anything to do with healthcare marketing or doctors and ratings or whatever our site. And we still are really heavily search engine optimized. We did that by design from the very beginning.
So, I don’t know how many interviews I did, but the gist of every interview I did was something like look, the public loves ratings. Google loves ratings. You don’t get a vote here. It’s going to be everywhere because back then, the doctors were literally trying to sue Google, sue the patients. And when they sued the patient, then the local news would pick it up, so then it would be even bigger of a problem.
So, it was really a crazy thing. And I can see why the doctors would be insulted by this. They’re like I am not a pizza. I am in a different class. But that’s not how the world looked at it. People were starving for information about the providers.
And we forget now. It’s still imperfect, but at least you can Google their name. Because there are people, you Google their name, and you see lawsuits all over the place. So, you at least have that option. You can at least check rating sites. If you’re one of the one half of 1% tops and check out their credentials, you can, this stuff is available now. So, it’s better in that regard.
And then the other thing too, that’s in the books even though this is being forgotten, there’s still ethics rules out there in most states. You can’t say you’re the best doctor at this. And you have to be careful you use the word specialist. And they’re parallels in Australia and other places, just like we talked about before we did the interview, these are pretty common.
So, there’s still guidelines at ethical, but yeah, I’m always about like transparency is better than none in almost every case. In almost every case.
Darren:
And Stewart, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because even though the medical profession and health care providers are allowed to advertise in some cases, there’s significant legislation as well. It’s not just ethical guidelines, it’s also, for instance, pharma. And we’re both aware of the differences. Australia has a very different pharma regulatory system because of the government subsidies compared to the U.S.
But in some cases, there are some drugs, for instance, that can’t be directly promoted to the consumer. And yet there are ways around that by just highlighting the particular conditions that this drug addresses, isn’t there?
It must be quite a balancing act in your role. And I know you don’t do a lot of pharma, but getting that balance right, about how much of it is B2B marketing to the medical profession, and how much of it’s B2C where you’re actually also engaging the consumer, the potential patient in making informed decisions or making recommendations.
Stewart:
Sure, there are each, we do work in pharma as well, and device and health plans, and also Medicare, which is our insurance system for older adults. Those tend to be highly regulated. So, anything to do with devices, anything to do with pharma, anything to do with health plans, and especially Medicare Advantage plans, these are highly regulated.
And so, we’re aware of these. We work with our clients. Again, after you work in the business not very long, and you start to learn things that you’re likely able to do and not do, but you’re also working with the compliance department of the pharma or whomever, because at the end of the day, they’re the ones that are responsible.
And so, there’ll be times where like again, we want, if you come in like you don’t know anything about this stuff, you’re going to be an amateur, they won’t work with you because they don’t want to go spend their time educating you on the most basic stuff.
But even with good knowledge, even if you’re right, you have to always rely on their legal to counsel to guide you through those issues. And what you talked about there, you alluded to is direct to consumer advertising, which wasn’t a thing probably 20 years ago now. This idea that a pharma could advertise directly to the consumer even when it required a prescription.
So, this became into, ask your doctor about Viagra, which was literally one of those commercials, or different blood pressure medicines or whatever. And then, you and I talked offline about, then they have the scroll of horrible things that could happen to you. And so, that’s a thing too, but they have to do it.
And it is really, really detailed what they can do and not do in terms of legal. But I guess the one thing that I would say is some of these side effects can be really, really bad. And although a lot of times when those drugs are that bad, the ones that are successful, they’re combating something that’s really bad.
So, if you have you know, some dread disease, people get pretty desperate to find a cure or something that makes their life better. And that’s just kind of a fact.
Darren:
Yeah. It’s interesting how in this conversation, you’ve made reference to specialists. It’s not just specialists from medical profession, but increasingly the marketing of healthcare and even wellness is reliant on finding the right specialist agencies and advisors, isn’t it?
Stewart:
Yeah. That’s actually one of the things we talk about a lot. So, first of all, we’ll break it down two ways. If you break it down by types of marketing agency because marketing agencies can either be broad or specialized, either by niche or by service.
So, what I mean by that is we are a healthcare marketing agency that immediately narrows us down from many, many thousands of agencies down to probably a couple hundred. And of those maybe a hundred or sort of legitimate at scale agencies the rest are very entrepreneurial. They’re still agencies, they’re still good people, probably, but they’re not at scale.
So, that’s one area of a specialization. But more to the point you were just mentioning is, our agency, for example, has made the either brilliant or terribly stupid decision to do it all.
So, the easy way to do it, or easier path at least, is I’m a branding agency, that’s all I do every day, brand, brand, brand, brand, brand. I am a SEO company, that’s all I do all day is SEO. Whereas we do the strategy, the branding, the creative, the paid search, the paid social, the local SEO, the technical SEO, the content planning, development, like all these things and when you’re working at a higher level, all those people are specialists.
Just like there’s nephrologists and gastroenterologists and neurologists. Literally, I just found out the news a couple days ago that our person who leads our local search is moving on. She’s got a family and she’s doing some other things. So, she’ll be leaving us. And now we have to find somebody with local SEO experience, not general SEO experience, not technical SEO experience, like local SEO, that’s what we need.
So, that’s the way marketing is today. When it’s good, in my opinion, especially with larger budgets, you just need that level of expertise. And when we started, it was tough because our marketing knowledge, it was further along than our ability to deliver.
So, we learned about SEO, and we learned about paid search from the first days. I went to Google’s headquarters for an event within a year of our founding. We were heavily involved in SEO, but we knew how to do this for ourselves, but to scale that for clients was hard. But that’s just an indication of why specialization matters, because you have to organize the department around that.
Now, the reason why I said that’s either really brilliant or really stupid is because on the brilliant side, that helps us win business, people come to us because they want to bring it all onto one roof. But there isn’t a very valid counter argument to this model, which is, it’s harder to scale, it’s harder to make profitable because you have to be great at everything. And it only took us 20 years to get here.
So, yes, it’s a competitive advantage that we do everything. We win a lot of clients because they want to do it all in one place. But if all you do is paid search and SEO, it’s a lot less complex. It’s a lot easier to get good at just one or two things than it is to get good at everything.
So, there are tradeoffs there, but based on my personality and what I wanted the company to be, I chose that path from the beginning. I’m not going back now, but there are trade-offs.
Darren:
Well, and increasingly, all of these channels for every marketer becomes increasingly difficult to coordinate when you’ve got different agencies working on different parts. That’s one of the things is that we see marketers often shift between going to a single … we call it a single throat to choke, Stewart.
This idea that one point of accountability, which I guess is why the holding companies will often have a healthcare or wellness specialty division that they’ve tried to cram all of the different services into sometimes.
And then you’ve got the smaller specialists like yourself, and then you’ve got the individual specialist that you then end up with a roster that’s best of breed. You’re cherry-picking skill sets in that, but then you’ve got to coordinate them.
Stewart:
So it is, it’s just a lot. So, it’s funny one of my friends was referred to me by another friend, his name’s Corey Quinn, he has a podcast too, and I think he calls it the Specialization Podcast.
And so, Corey is usually training agency owners to pick a niche and specialize. And so, what’s fun is, I met Corey after we’re already doing this. Sadly, we kind of figured this out one out on our own, but there is a model there.
One of the things that Corey does is a really good job of enunciating, because I always think about it from the standpoint of it’s easier to market.
If I go to somebody within our niche, like I can say truthfully within our core niche, like there’s thousands of agencies out there and healthcare marketers, there’s maybe a hundred but in this one little niche we’re talking about, there’s two, that two agencies that are really legitimate players.
So, that really helps me from getting client standpoint. But the part that Corey talks about a lot is operationally and training your team. That’s really important. And I take that for granted, I sort of forgot about that.
How am I going to teach a team to do autos and then hotels, then nonprofits. It’s hard enough teaching about medicine, that’s a lifetime of knowledge that I have to — and remember, I don’t get to keep people for 40 years. So, I have to train people and then they move on and train somebody else, and then they move on.
So, the idea of specialization for an agency may seem really limiting. But if you pick a niche that is a good niche. Like for our niche, for example, in healthcare, keeping in mind, again, we have all these individual specialists.
But for our niche, it’s pretty recession resistant. There’s always ebbs and flows in any business, but compared to travel, this is pretty good, oil and gas, this is pretty good.
So, the niche matters. If you’re thinking about another option for some of your people that are listening, if they’re agency owners having two or three niches maybe, but for us, healthcare is plenty deep.
And then plus going back to that experience I got when I first started this, every weekend I was working with a different group of doctors. So, I could be working with a nephrologist, a gastroenterologist, a neurosurgeon. Then the next week I was working with a cardiologist and an oncologist.
So, I had experience that’s irreplaceable. I wish I could be like Neo from The Matrix movie and take a chip and give it out of my head to somebody else, you can’t. But that’s really what got us our start, was that knowledge. I could speak about periodontics, I could speak about endodontics, I can talk about prosthetics or whatever.
So, that really helped us get going. And it’s still part of our DNA today. And if you have that knowledge, great. And if you don’t pick a little tiny island and own it, that’s defendable, because it’s just really hard to be a generalist. It just is, in my opinion.
Darren:
Well, I think there’s clients that are going to want the generalist, but then there’s others that want the specialist. And in fact, over 25 years of doing this, helping select agencies, I’ve seen clients move from consolidating with a generalist that provides end-to-end solutions. And then going that slowly fragments and they end up with all these specialists and then it gets too difficult to manage, so then they start consolidating back.
I find it fascinating when trade media journalists phone me up and go, “Is there a trend towards consolidation?” I go, “For all those marketers that are consolidating, yes.” But then at the same time I see a whole lot of others going and fragmenting out to best of breed models and having to manage that.
Stewart:
So, it’s funny because like in terms of healthcare we just lost a pitch. Well, they loved us, they told us, but their management wanted a general agency, and they had hired the head of marketing. This is in dental from a major consumer brand.
So, hey, it’s different strokes for different folks. We don’t take it personally. We’re not for everybody. Nobody is.
So, they specifically wanted outside of healthcare experience and that’s fine, but that’s rare. We don’t see that very often. Much more often we see the cases they want healthcare experience.
But if you think about it though, by definition, that’s why they’re calling us. Most of the people that we work with call us. We do have outbound efforts, but most of the time because of SEO and our sort of footprint out there, people call us to do business.
So, by definition, they were interested in healthcare that’s why they call us. But I do think it’s an advantage. And for me, our business is very complex. It is not an easy business. If I knew how daunting it is, I might-
Darren:
If you had your time all over again, you may not necessarily have gone there.
Stewart:
I like to think I’m pretty smart. I could have figured out another business. It might have been easier if I tried. Honestly, just keeping it real here, there with you, Darren, keeping it real. It’s not easy. But I do like having that specialization. And plus, maybe part of this too because I’m just giving you my point of view, there’s other agencies that are exactly opposite to do well.
But for my personality too, this is something I discovered back when I was doing the speaking, I was literally speaking at … I figured out, I spoke at over 200 venues over 10 years. So, I was doing about 20, 25 a year for 10 years. And that was like three days of speaking.
I joke, my wife, I’ve not really known her 25 years, I’ve known her 23 because I was two years when I was in a hotel.
But during that period, I didn’t realize that I actually liked being the expert in the room. I actually liked being the leader. I had never spoken publicly, Darren, ever before I took that first job doing that. And you either sink or swim, you’ve got a three days of audience there, you’re going to be a really long week if you can’t figure out what to do.
So, that just appealed to my … so, I like the idea of specialized knowledge. I like being an expert. And it just fits my personality.
Darren:
Yeah, absolutely. And the point you made before about it’s interesting, we see when a new marketer starts at a company that is not their traditional experience, so you use the example there of a consumer marketer coming into dental or healthcare and then making decisions.
I find it fascinating that they’re inclined to default to what they know rather than spend the time to really work out what are the needs of the organization. There would have to be a good strategic reason to go for an agency that is not a specialist or is at least not experienced in a particular category. And I’m not just talking about healthcare here.
I’ve seen the same happen with auto, which has its own challenges. I’ve seen it with travel and accommodation, higher education. There’s a strategic play that says, “Well, let’s get someone that’s not in our category, so they bring fresh ideas.” But then you do spend a lot of time investing in training them up so that you’re all not wasting your time on ideas that are never going to fly in that category.
Stewart:
So, it’s interesting too, I had this conversation with my brother-in-law who, this is a different way of saying this, but he pointed out and he happens to be a pastor. So, he’s got a big church he was a pastor for.
So, I thought it was interesting because like oh, he is more credible because he is younger than me, but he got some good ideas after all. So, one of them he’s mentioned was he noticed this, when people come to a business, or in his case a church, they bring whatever worked for them there to the table and they expect it to work here. And that’s really true about businesses.
So, moving to the fact that he was a pastor as an employee, oftentimes people come like with the expectation that whatever they did before should apply in this case. And it can be a completely different agency.
And then from a marketing standpoint, what you just said is, yeah, coming from the fast-food business and getting into healthcare is a big leap. Or a lot of times we get calls from somebody who’s, let’s say they’re a brander, like they came in from a branding background.
And in our business and probably most niches, but certainly in healthcare, they don’t understand these nuances. They have no idea that a brand person is different than an SEO person. They expect, like I hire one person to do all of it, and they even call it PR without knowing it’s different too.
So, there is that challenge. We do get called actually a lot Darren, from people that are brand new to healthcare that say, Look, I know I’m a good marketer, but I don’t know anything about healthcare, I’m looking for a partner to help me ramp up faster.
That’s probably, I don’t know, one out of 10, one out of 15 of our clients specifically for that because it feels like we can help them get up to speed quicker. But it does come across all across the board. But what other insight can I give you? Just like you said, there is a ramp up curve there and you can learn the shallow stuff really quickly. You can learn the shallow stuff you need to know in a week. But the insight stuff takes time.
So, a great example of this is how to speak to doctors. So, for example, I’ll just make up a story that happens all the time. We work with somebody with 70 locations, they come in from a consumer good business or some other type of business, and they’re blown away when the doctors are skeptical and don’t even like marketing. And now they’re going to meetings and like how do you even talk to these guys in a way that can convince them.
And that’s savvy. That’s like skill experience to not get eaten alive by 70 doctors when you’re presenting to them.
And just to hint for those, anybody who’s interested, I always say in healthcare it’s about credibility, credibility and credibility. It’s like you want to have your stuff together because … oh, here’s another fun fact, Darren.
If you needed orthopedic surgery, would you just say, “Oh, I know this guy.” I know a guy. Nobody decides to do orthopedic surgery in their spare time. I don’t know anything about orthopedic surgery, Darren, but I’m going to start cutting your leg to open it up and fix it, nobody does that.
But in marketing, I may not know anything about marketing, but like oh God, here we go. Or I know a guy that can does marketing. You’re like, “Really? That’s the level of standard?” It’s exhausting to me, honestly.
Darren:
Okay. So, there is something I want to fly with you Stewart. And that’s the role of — procurement is taking a bigger and bigger role in marketing decision making, particularly around the selection of agencies and other vendors. And luckily, I guess if procurement’s working within a healthcare or wellness business, they would have a clear understanding of the business needs.
But have you seen the role of procurement actually helping that decision making or had no impact or has a negative impact often because they’re often known for pricing.
Stewart:
I’ll give you some examples. We have a criteria, sort of a loose criteria, but I’ll tell you where we’re more likely to participate, where we’re more likely not to.
So, from our point of view, and I’ll explain it from the other side as well. So, if I get something that’s an 80-page RFI, (Request For Information), not even RFP. And then it won’t let us ever talk to anybody. We have no context.
They tell us the incumbent is involved, and this is a true story, and the incumbent is involved. We prefer agencies within a four-mile radius, when you look at that agency within four miles. We just laugh and pass. Like we’ll just say no, we’re not even participating at all.
And another red flag is when they won’t tell you how many agencies are participating, like all that, they won’t give you a budget. All those things are not as serious … like we we’re busy, fortunately we don’t need to throw stuff over the castle wall and pray and hope somebody reads it.
So, if it’s a brand name company, if the ask is reasonable. Oh, another thing that’s a red flag, we very rarely will do it if they ask for it, we will sometimes if it’s the right case spec work.
So, they do these things all because they think it’s going to get the best price, the best terms or whatever. What they don’t realize is a lot of legitimate players just will pass. If they’re busy, they’ll pass. They’ll never see our input to this.
I had somebody last week who sent us an e an email saying, “Okay, I have an RFP and we want to spend 10 to $50,000.” And so, I got on the phone with her because it mentioned brand, RFP, influencing doctors, all these other stuff. And I said, “So, let me help educate her.”
So, I explained that there are some companies that do templates and if that’s all you want, then you can get that for $10,000. You’re going to have to write it, there’s no SEO. If you truly want SEO and a brand and all these things, it’s going to be more than 50.
And so, I just heard from her and she said, “Yeah, you’re too expensive for us.” Cool, I saved my time, was a half hour invested. I hope that I educated her, but it just isn’t a fit for us. And I’d rather figure that out now before I go get my whole company involved creating a pitch.
But that to me was okay because we were able to sus that out pretty quickly but boy, there’s a lot of people who spend a lot of time on stuff.
And so, it is hard, I often think about … I’ll give you another example. If I had to do an RFP right now, I’m looking right now and we’re going to talk about AI a minute. But I’m looking at 20 different vendors for AI. That is really hard for me. I’m not an AI expert; how do I find from the 20?
So, I can see why from purchasing how they have a hard time because to them, all marketing companies are alike, but they’re so different. In order to make a good decision, you kind of have to understand what you’re doing a little, in my opinion. I don’t think it’s a dollars and cents thing.
So, I think they certainly should have a seat at the table, but if they drive it without marketing being involved, it just seems more likely than it should be to make a mistake in my opinion.
Darren:
Well, often their objective is not the same as the marketers’. And you need to get those two together. Value is quality and price, not just price. And we both know it’s very easy for someone to give you a lower price, but at the expense of the actual quality or even sometimes get to the point that they can’t even deliver what they promise. And then what are you going to do? You’ve already appointed them.
Stewart:
And there are people who do that, by the way. They’ll take the crappy low bid knowing they’re going to come back and change it. And to me that’s not super ethical and it’s kind of a waste of time.
But going back to that example I just provided a minute ago, not in a negative way, but just factual. I said, “Okay, when you get a price in that range you’re asking about there, they’re not writing a thing. They’re not adding any SEO they can’t, there’s no way they could afford to.”
So, you just said you wanted custom writing, you said you wanted to brand the business, you said you wanted to track doctors, which is really hard. You can’t do it for that. So, if you want to adjust your expectations, you can, but at least you should know.
And she was so excited she took my recording and shared it with her COO, and which is cool and I’m okay if it’s not for us.
Darren:
Now look, you’ve said before, you started almost three decades ago in healthcare marketing. So, you’ve seen a lot of changes. I mean, digital technology, the internet, data use and now AI have all had impacts. What are you seeing as the big disruptors at the moment? The big opportunities?
Stewart:
Yeah, I’ll say for our niche, especially the provider side. So, I’ve literally had conversations about this, multiple of them today. So, this is top of mind for me. So, when you hear these topics about marketing AI, you’re going to hear a lot about assisting art or coming up with illustrations.
And by the way, my daughters are both in the arts, I’m sure glad they didn’t pick illustration because like it’s, wow, it’s scary what AI can do for free in seconds. So, one wants to be an animator, which is also scary. The other one wants to do experiences, so there’s definitely still some disruption there. But illustration’s tough.
Also, for writing, and in our experience, we hire professional writers, we’re not over outsourcing those things. So, we use AI as a tool, we don’t use it for creative. We use it to supplement what we do and make other processes faster. We’re not using it to erase jobs, but we are using it as a way of hiring more people more slowly.
But for us, the big one is two things. They’re all surrounding one problem. And so, again, this is really for specific to healthcare and probably some other retail kind of businesses. But something about doctor’s offices, whether they’re one or two offices or hundreds or a call center, they have the hardest time answering their damn phones. They just can’t do it well.
So, I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but here it’s like doctor’s office, please hold. And so, if you’re calling as a patient that needs to be there and you don’t have any choice, you’ll put up with it. But if you’re calling off a paid search ad or off a website, you’ll hang up and call the next person.
So, this can be a factor that can kill 90% of the marketing’s effectiveness. This one factor, it’s like all the work we do to get that person a call is lost if they can’t answer the phone.
So, this has been one of these itches I’ve been trying to scratch for 20 years. I literally thought about buying a call center and having my own call center, but like that’s a blow your brains out fund business. Turnover and training and ugh, no, not for me.
So, what’s going to happen here is today there are AI agents that can answer the calls, and I think that’s going to be transformative because now you’ll be able to get a good quality experience 24 hours a day, unlimited volume.
She’ll never be tired. He will never be grumpy. They’ll stay on script; you can control what they say and then you can still escalate to humans when you need to. So, my prediction is that’ll change healthcare marketing fundamentally.
And for sure we are investigating and investing a lot of time in this, in a similar vein. And you’re more direct response. People will understand this call tracking, where you can actually track a phone call and listen to it. Is a technology that’s been around since the early two thousands. We were an early adopter in it, but now they have AI that can decide is this actually a patient or a routine call? How well did the agent answer the call?
Did anybody ask for the appointment? These kinds of things can be done at scale through AI. So, both those are related. One’s dealing with humans, one’s dealing with the bots. But either way, I think that’s transformative. That’s a big deal.
And there’s other things too, but that’s the one that may not be as obvious to some people. But that is such a big problem. I cannot tell you how many times we send thousands of patients to somebody and they can’t answer their phone and then they just stopped the program. Not because we failed, but they couldn’t answer their phone. So, I think that’s transformative.
Darren:
Yeah. You made me laugh with the doctor’s office please hold, because the other one is those dialing systems where it says push one for this, push two for that. And you get all the way through, and they say, “Did you know you can make an appointment through the app?” And then you go to the app and there’s no appointments for the next two months, because they don’t put all the appointments on there because they want to have you call up and fit you in. They want to control it.
But anyway, there’s times technology drives me crazy, but the AI call answering systems are terrific innovation.
Stewart:
Well, it’s funny, the technology beef of the day for me is we have Airbnb rental and twice now the system has allowed somebody to book three nights, and we only accept a minimum of six. And now we have to go fight with them because they must have somewhere, and if we cancel these reservations, it’ll penalize us and we’re super host.
So, it’s like really frustrating. And then you can tell their incentive is to close out the customer service case and get us off the phone. They keep saying, “Well, this case is closed.” Like, “No, no, it’s not. It’s unresolved. And I’m not going away.” So, I will haunt you, I am not leaving. I am going to get this resolved. So, it’s a thing.
Darren:
Well, as a pitch consultant, one of my frustrations is every agency thinks I don’t understand the frustration of pitching when in actual fact we have to pitch often as much as they do.
But look, Stewart, thank you so much for your time. It’s been a great conversation having a healthcare background. I really appreciate your insights and your experience in that area and absolutely understand the importance of being a specialist.
I’d be interested to know from healthcare marketers how they feel about some of the specialist offerings out there, particularly in our market here in Australia. But it’s been a great conversation. Thank you.
Stewart:
I appreciate it.
Darren:
And look, final question before you go. I’m just wondering, we’re talking about before, longevity there’s this move. How many years do you see ahead of you continuing to do this fabulous work in healthcare?
