Recognizing that women account for 80% of all healthcare decisions, Robert A. Becker launched its "Female Focus" division earlier this month that will specialize in crafting strategic, research-based communications to capture this market of healthcare gatekeepers and decision-makers. The New York-based healthcare agency is a full-service healthcare marketing and strategic communications company. As part of Becker's Consumer Health Division, which has nine pharmaceutical companies, Female Focus is expected to provide clients with a unique and comprehensive understanding of women as an increasingly important consumer purchasing group.
Ernestine McCarren, Becker's senior VP, is heading up Female Focus as its managing director. With 15 years of consumer health marketing under her belt, McCarren has been involved in three major female-targeted campaigns that included a direct-to-consumer effort for osteoporosis and medical/consumer marketing efforts for yeast infection and a copper IUD product.
Here, she shares with HPRMN where the healthcare marketing voids are for women and the communication messages and vehicles that will reach them best. She can be reached at 212/299-8273.
Q: What are women's overall attitudes and perceptions toward healthcare?
Women feel that doctors do not take their healthcare concerns perhaps as seriously as they do males, specifically in cardiovascular areas. Seventy-five percent feel that they don't receive the same level of care and attention that men do.
There's now a tendency for women to seek out female doctors, because they feel they focus more on the person and male doctors tend to focus more on the disease.
Q: Why did Becker target women and what areas did it look at?
First of all we recognized the importance of women and the important role that women play in healthcare.
Women make 80% of all healthcare decisions. They're making these decisions not only for themselves but their children, spouses and now as caregivers to their aging parents.
We also acknowledged that men and women are different, they respond differently to marketing and communications. We will be focusing on how to market and communicate to women.
One of the things we uncovered in our research was that the non-female traditional areas like cardiovascular and heart disease and a host of other conditions that are really important healthcare considerations for women are not being specifically addressed.
Q: What are the potential healthcare categories for this effort?
The categories that are thought to be traditionally female like women's health, contraception, osteoporosis. We're also looking at categories where there's a high female prevalence like depression, migraine, arthritis, hypertension, heart disease, diabetes and HIV/AIDS.
Q: In terms of crafting messages, what has your research yielded in how to best reach and talk to women?
Women process information differently and make decisions distinctly different from men.
Women are relationship-oriented and like to make connections. Women look for a relationship to be made before and after the sale of a product or service.
Women are motivated by realism. They want to deal with companies that recognize the realities of their lives. They want a company that will communicate to them with candor, rather than fast talk.
Women like to communicate with companies that have a "corporate soul," where some of the profits go to children, local charities, the community or preserving the environment.
Q: Have you had a chance to look at minority women?
We're putting a whole new focus on ethnic marketing as well. It's not just ethnic differences that we'll be looking at, but cultural differences also.
With African-American women there is an economic dichotomy. More and more black females are moving into middle-class affluence, and there's an increasing number of black women who are unmarried mothers in central cities.
The advertising that you do to them should reflect their values to strengthen family and recognize their diversity.
The Hispanic area is a very imprecise umbrella. Marketing must address recent immigrants, established generations and many countries of origin. Family, language and culture become the important things.
With Asian-Americans, education, work and recognition of their culture is really important. And language-specific marketing is critical.