More Ps Please — Rethinking The Marketing Mix For Healthcare

By Michelle Snyder, Chief Marketing Officer, Welltok

Even if you are not in marketing, you’ve likely heard of Marketing’s Four Ps — product, price, promotion, and place. These have been the Holy Grail for marketers since Philip Kotler popularized the concept over 50 years ago. Over the years, it’s been fun to read about the supposed new Ps which include some combination of Profit, People, Purpose, Procurement, Presence, Passion, Pivots, and plenty more.

Though I am reluctant to mess with success, I will admit that I have spent a lot of time over the past few years thinking about three more P’s and how they are driving some of the most exciting innovation in healthcare today and critical to building a successful healthcare IT company: Platform, Personalization, and Partners.

Platform
A lot has been written over the past few years about the “Rise of the Platform” in various industries. Healthcare is no exception. With the proliferation of data from many different sources — clinical information, consumer data, data from tracking devices, and more — there is a huge need to absorb and make sense of the data to create relevant, meaningful experiences for healthcare consumers.

In addition to pulling in the data, there has been an enormous proliferation of content, programs, apps, and other resources that are being created on a daily basis from both established healthcare players as well as the thousands of digital health startups looking to grab a slice of the more than $3 trillion healthcare pie. For many of these companies or solutions, being part of a broader, agnostic platform that offers a more seamless holistic experience for the end consumer can often speed up access to both customers and end users.

There is increasing talk in healthcare about owning the consumer. This actually makes me happy as for many years, nobody seemed to care about creating a great experience for the individual trying to navigate the healthcare system and improve their health. However, in developing new platforms, the industry needs to be careful we are not just creating more fragmented experiences under a different guise. The winners in the space will be companies that recognize the need for not only an agnostic, holistic platform but that starts with creating the best experience from the healthcare consumer’s perspective (vs the healthcare industry) and bringing together resources across the whole consumer health lifecycle.

Personalization
Personalization has been a hot topic in marketing. While healthcare still has work to go on doing better with the basics of personalization, it’s been interesting to see how some of the most innovative companies are moving beyond the basics to thinking about how they personalize the entire user experience, not just the adoption process.  

Healthcare has historically treated individuals with a one-size-fits-all approach, but now technology is giving us the ability to create an N of 1 approach. Having a platform that can aggregate data and create a consistent experience is a great start but using advanced technologies such as predictive analytics and cognitive computing provides the ability to take personalization to a new level.

Through sophisticated predictive analytics technology, we now have the ability to leverage multiple disparate sources of data beyond clinical information to get data driven insights such as who is at most risk, who will be most receptive to your messages, content or programs and who are you likely to impact the most. Then by applying cognitive computing technologies such as IBMWatson, companies can begin to learn more about each consumer with each interaction on your platform in order to continually personalize and customize the consumers’ experience with your platform.

Partners
Okay so you have a platform which has the ability to create a personalized experience, the next big challenge is getting enough great content, programs, and resources to support that personalized experience. With the thousands of companies and products and smart people that have emerged in the digital health industry over the past few years in healthcare, it doesn’t make business sense in my opinion to try to create all those programs and resources yourself. Even if you are large company with seemingly unlimited resources, you will never create the best app, content or program across every healthcare consumer need (cost information, diabetes management, stress management, and the list goes on).

The best platform companies have figured out how to create a model where everybody wins — partners who get faster access to customers and consumer eyeballs, the consumer who has a more seamless experience accessing all the tools and resources that are relevant to them in making health related decisions, and of course the platform company itself — who has access to best of breed resources across a wide range of needs to populate their platform.

While these Three Ps are all each important and distinct concepts in their own right, they are closely related and dependent on one another. Creating a truly seamless, personalized experience will be near impossible without a platform. Without partners, it will be difficult to populate the platform with enough content to create a personalized experience. Without personalization, a platform will not likely be powerful enough to drive the behaviors you want to change. In concert, these Three Ps have the ability to create meaningful and delightful experiences for consumers and revolutionize the way the industry connects with individuals within the healthcare system. 

About The Author
Michelle leads all corporate and product marketing, brand development, marketing communications and public relations activities for Welltok. Michelle is a recognized as a marketing and strategy leader in the digital health space. She was most recently an Executive-in-Residence at InterWest Partners, investing in digital health companies and serving as an advisor to InterWest portfolio companies. She was also one of the early executives at Epocrates and worked for over a decade to build the company into one of the leading mobile healthcare technology companies and the most recognized technology brand among clinicians. Michelle earned her bachelor’s degree from Carleton College and MBA from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.