Why do the Hospitals need to invest more in Advertising?

Hospitals in India hardly advertise. Most of them look at advertising as an unnecessary expense and keep it minimal. This really need not be so. Looked from another angle, advertising for a hospital can be a critical investment, which allows it to differentiate its services, educate customers about its core beliefs, introduce new products and services and help gain new customers. Unfortunately, in India hospitals believe that customers do not appreciate hospital advertising and may even be put off by it. Many hospitals, who are doing well do not see the need for advertising. With occupancy rates high, the hospitals feel they are wasting money by advertising. Little do they realise that advertising quite often is not only about getting more patients.

To make matters worse, whatever little advertising one sees is mostly inane and dull. The communication usually bears the imprint of too many cooks adding different flavours to the advertising, making it a weird medley of pictures, long copy and a strange layouts. The marketing teams in the hospital are forced to accommodate various view opinions (that of the hospital COO/CEO, the heads of medical departments, other leading physicians, the sales head, and sometimes the owner of the hospital ) to arrive at a piece of communication, which is usually a disaster from a marketing communications point of view. While, this piece assuaged inflated egos, ensures gory pictures (usually reflecting some landmark surgery) in the ads, highlights achievements of some or the other doctors, it fails in its primary purpose of connecting with the end-user.

Here are a few reasons, why hospitals should look at their advertising a lot more seriously and spend money wisely in connecting with their customers.

Core Beliefs and Positioning

A hospital must advertise its core beliefs through a well thought of brand campaign. It is imperative for customers to know what their hospital stands for, what its core values are and how does it strive to stay true to those beliefs. Thus, if a hospital professes to provide ‘Total Patient Care’as a consumer I would love to know, what it means and what all can I expect from the hospital. Similarly if a hospital is positioned as a ”cutting edge technology” centre I would like to know what that means to me as a customer. A hospital must stand for something in the consumer’s mind. I am not sure, our big hospital brands Apollo, Fortis, Max and Wockhardt (now part of Fortis) have been able to establish any kind of distinct identity in the consumer’s mind.

Products and Services

A hospital offers a multitude of services. Customers need to know about them and hence advertising is a good way of keeping customers informed. New services keep getting added from time to time and the hospitals need to keep their customers updated. Recently Max Healthcare started its cancer services. All that they did was release a solitary advertisement, welcoming the new Chairman of Cancer services!!! The ad was also supposed to serve the purpose of informing the customers about the commencement of cancer care services at the hospital. Wouldn’t it make greater sense to announce the commencement of a service with a nice campaign and if needed also feature the medical leader/team in the ads?

Hospital Launch

A new hospital commencing operations needs high decibel advertising. Artemis did this well, when we launched the hospital. We had large bill boards in Gurgaon, a fairly heavy presence in the local print media and local community engagement through ‘fam visits’ to the hospital. I recall Max Healthcare during their launch also did a fairly well orchestrated multi-media campaign. However, many hospitals too try to save money by launching quietly and hoping the customers will come through the word of mouth or through doctors pulling in their existing customers. I believe, these are sub-optimal ways of launching the hospital’s services and an old-fashioned media blitzkrieg works the best.

Renewing Existing Services

Sometimes it is necessary that a hospital ‘renew’ its existing services. These days, I am seeing some bill boards near my residence advertising Apollo’s new Knee Clinic. The communication is targeted at the elderly, informs about the new Knee Clinic, which offers Knee Replacement services at the hospital. Now, Apollo hospital has been doing knees for a long time, however the communication is trying to repackage the service and relaunch it. Unfortunately, There are just two bill boards and, while the intent is laudable, the hospital is being very stingy. Similarly, while in Bangalore recently I came across a ‘Short Stay Surgery’ campaign by Wockhardt Hospitals. Again the effort seems to be to reposition their Laparoscopic Surgery services in a customer friendly matrix, but the money behind the campaign appeared too little to make any significant impact. Other hospitals too need to often ‘renew’ and repackage their services smartly.

Driving Traffic

Hospitals can drive traffic to their OPD’s through innovative offers. In fact the bulk of hospital advertising today focuses here. A free Cardiac Camp around the World Heart Day is routine. Similar camps and offers in other specialities help drive traffic to the hospital OPD’s. The problem here is that hospitals do these sporadically, without adequate planning and often as band-aid solutions to transient OPD traffic related issues. Tactical campaigns need to be more consistent and better planned to yield optimal results.

Educating Customers

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a hospital did an educational campaign about let us say heart disease or diabetes or any other lifestyle diseases. The campaign should aim to educate customers about the disease, its symptoms, treatment options, success rates, technology available and the medical expertise available to treat the disease. The objective should be to inform the customers, help them ask the right questions and thus make the right choices. Unfortunately, none of our hospitals including the big chains are willing to invest in patient education simply because the returns are relatively long-term.

Pic is indicative.

Healthcare Advertising on Radio

Now that I work for a radio station I have been applying some time figuring out the feasibility of healthcare advertisements on Radio Stations.  In India the private FM radio stations are only allowed to play music and things like News, Sports, General Entertainment are not allowed. Most stations thus offer a mix of music interspersed with Jock Talk, audience bites, station sweepers, contest promos and of course advertising.    

The packaging of the stations is also slick, fun oriented and the jocks portray an on air imagery of being cool and connected to the young hip hop affluent city slickers. 

Hospitals, diseases and illnesses just do not gel with a Radio Station. This is at least what I thought, when I was on the other side of the table working for hospitals. The advertising media mix for my hospitals had plenty of Outdoors advertising (OOH in today's parlance!), print advertising, which included both English and the vernacular (Hindi and Punjabi) and sometimes advertisements on the cable networks. I spurned radio sales guys because of my belief that the medium and the on air content of the stations was just not suitable.

Now that I am closely involved with Radio advertising I noticed advertisements of Fortis Hospitals, Moolchand Hospital and Centre for Sight (CFS). Out of these Fortis and Centre for Sight advertised on Fever 104, which is the station I work for.

Out of sheer curiosity I decided to have a closer look and chose CFS. CFS is a chain of eyecare hospitals established by Dr. Mahipal Sachdev, a well known ophthalmologist. Dr. Sachdev used to work earlier at Apollo Hospitals and than founded CFS, which has now grown to multiple units. CFS has recently introduced the bladeless lasik surgery (the Intralease machine) and their target audience include the youngsters, who want to get rid of their glasses. CFS decided to advertise on Fever 104 with radio spots designed to appeal to this audience.

A three week campaign is presently underway. The response mechanism is a short message, which the radio station forwards to CFS and their sales team than contacts the prospect to try and sell the 'bladeless' surgery. 

When I met Dr. Sachdev before the start of the campaign I must confess I was a little apprehensive about the whole thing. However, we felt that the Radio station can add value in connecting with the right audience. Dr. Sachdev agreed and we did the spots and put them on air.

And the results, we have so far generated almost 300 queries in almost 3 weeks.  CFS is delighted and so am I. We are now planning on taking the campaign forward to the next level with programing integrations, testimonials and the works.

Similarly Moolchand Hospital has been successfully advertising their Emergency services on the radio and Fortis has been talking about the Maternity services at the Fortis La Femme.

Thus lessons for me the Healthcare Marketer are that no medium should be ruled out. Apparently it is the service line, the target audience and the message, which should determine the choice of the medium of communication. cancer or cardiac services will not go well on a fun filled radio station but cosmetic surgery, preventive health along with maternity services, emergency services etc. can be advertised on a Radio station.

I am happy to have been disabused of my preconcieved notions about Radio stations and healthcare advertising.

Hospital Advertising That Works

It is a myth to believe that hospitals do not need advertising.

Many a times I have come across the argument about hospitals wasting money on expensive advertising, which seldom works and puts off customers. In my earlier avtars as the Head of Marketing Communications in large hospitals I have been at loggerheads with my other colleagues, who have often voted against my advertising proposals. Here is why I believe they are wrong and advertising works in healthcare just as much as it does in any other service.

The caveat of course is that the hospital's communication must be subtle, the message must be designed to ring a bell and should be done in a manner, which is consistent with the customer's sensitivities. An over the top message, which is loud and persistant and tries to do too many things will certainly put off customers.

Advertising at the end of the day is a promise of service to a customer. This is true of all advertising and is just as much true for healthcare services advertising. There is no reason to believe that as a consumer of healthcare services I wouldn't want to know what the hospital next door really stands for?

The hospital advertising that would really work has to emanate from a deep understanding of the consumer behaviour, when he is required to choose a hospital. No one wants to go to a hospital to enjoy a few days away from work. One is forced to go to the hospital under the press of circumstances. The desire is usually to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible with a positive medical outcome, and with the least dent to ones pocket.

When a customer walks into the hospital he is anxious, fearful of surrendering control of his body to the hospital, uncertain of the outcome. The customer at one level is seeking medical care for whatever problem he has, at another level he is seeking a reassurance. A reassurance that he will be treated with understanding, compassion, honesty and dignity, that he will have access to the very best that medicine has to offer and above all a reassurance that in the end everything will turn out to be right.

A hospital in its communication must be able to connect with the customer at this level. The communication must be designed to inspire trust. The message must have an emotional connect, should make a consumer believe that this hospital is the best place to be in the worst of times. The emotional core must be clearly defined and set off against logical props such as great doctors, state of the art equipment, processes that help deliver a great experience and people trained to understand and quickly respond to patients needs. The real challenge for communications professionals is to put this in a neat campaigns (without making it look slick or put on), which communicates simply and eloquently with the customers.

Once the communication is designed the media choices have to be made. This is critical and somehow the least understood by marketers. The message should be powerful and yet flexible to be adapted to the needs of traditional print media, out of home media and increasingly the digital media. The media mix has to be carefully worked out. This is the tricky part because the mix will clearly depend upon the target audience, which varies from hospital to hospital.

The Common Pitfalls
Hospitals tend to try and cram too many things in a single piece of communication. This happens when the communication is shaped by too many people each with their own perspective. Typically the advertising layouts go around and opinions are sought from various quarters including the heads of various departments, senior doctors and anyone else who may have a point of view. This in itself is not such a bad exercise. The real fun begins when the Head of Marketing is asked that these views be squeezed into the communication so that it pleases one and all who matters in the hospital. This is disasterous as in all this one forgets that the advertising is meant to appeal to the customers and is not a tool to keep various stakeholders in the hospital happy.

The other reason why I suspect healthcare advertising sometimes does not work well is that the promise made in the communication does not entirely gets delivered as a seamless experience across the hospital touchpoints. Somehow the people, who are to deliver the promise remain clueless about the promise till they see the advertising out in the media !

This to say the least is like committing harakiri. Internal communication and training to align touchpoint experiences with the communication promises rarely happens.

Conclusions
Healthcare advertising is an investment that can pay rich dividends as long as it is handled in a sensitive manner keeping the needs of the customers in mind. It is essential that a hospital walks the talk, which can only happen when the service delivery is aligned to the communication promise.

Healthcare advertising is tricky and has many variables. However, that is hardly a reason to not to attempt it.