The main concern of consumers today is choice - right?
If people in Friendly Little Hometown say security is the thing that's most important to them, that should be the theme of ads for Metro Big City Medical Center - correct?
Successful PR and marketing pros have intuitive insights into their marketplace so they know exactly how to position and package a new healthcare service - correct?
Wouldn't it be nice if it was really that easy? Just read a national opinion poll, pick up some research from another city, tap into intuition - and get the intelligence and insights needed for a successful marketing communications program.
Unfortunately, it isn't quite that easy. Fortunately, there is a method that is predictable, rock-solid and almost never-fail - and that method is conducting original qualitative and quantitative research in your market.
Reasons For ResearchResearch has become the new bedrock for marketing and PR programs, for several significant reasons:
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Savvy, successful PR and marketing professionals at healthcare organizations (HCOs) are using research methods to probe audience awareness, attitudes, needs and opinions; to assess perceptions about the organization and its programs; to test messages, product/service design and promotional approaches, to measure customer satisfaction, and for a variety of other uses.
"Without primary research, I don't know what my audience is thinking or feeling, why they act the way they do, or what words and images will have an impact on them," said one convert to research. "After we've probed and tested and tried out concepts, I've got a pretty clear road map of what to say, how to say it and what channels to use to send our messages."
While new and more sophisticated research techniques are popping up every day. several tried and true methods remain the bedrock of PR and marketing communications research, beginning with formative research used in developing communications campaigns.
Focus groups are often used to begin the process, by listening to audience members as they discuss health care topics. Insights into their awareness, preference, opinions, attitudes, perceived needs, concerns and hopes can be gleaned, along with a sense of the intensity of their feelings.
While focus group findings cannot validly be applied to an entire population, they can be used to develop surveys that provide quantitative measure of an audience's awareness, opinions, preferences, etc., in hard statistics that can be reliably extrapolated to a population.
The statistics, while solid, offer only a snapshot of an audience - the what and how, without being able to effectively probe the "why" questions.
While each method, solo, has its limitations, used in combination, they provide what a marketer needs - a clear picture of audience members' awareness and preference levels, combined with the context, insights and "texture" that help to truly understand the audience.
Message and creative testing focus groups add the next level of fine-tuning, allowing the marketer to "audition" slogans, ad or brochure copy, pictures and graphic approaches, to see what elicits the most positive audience responses. A veteran marketer points out another key benefit: "You find out what they hate - it can save you from the career-ender of doing a big bucks ad campaign that is a total flop."
While the benefits of conducting formative research seem clear, there remains a litany of "reasons" why this essential process is often omitted:
- "We don't have the budget." (But there is enough money to risk doing a campaign that's off-target and doesn't deliver results?)
- "We don't have time." (Think how much time it will take to create a new program when the original one fails.)
- "Top management won't approve it." (Is research being presented as an "add-on," or as the core step in ensuring that a campaign's messages are on target - and the only way results can be measured after the campaign?)
The most often mentioned reason, or excuse, for not doing research is "We already KNOW our audience." This assumption can be dangerous, if it's based on outdated research (in today's turbulent marketplace, that means anything more than a year old), research findings from another market (you cannot assume if they believe it in Manhattan, they believe it in Minneapolis), or that fabled "personal insight" based on anecdotes and conversations with a handful or consumers or a vocal minority.
The folks at Disney assumed they "knew" the European market, based on their experience in Florida; the Clinton administration built a health care reform plan around opinion polls that misread what consumers meant by the words "healthcare costs," and the AMA's call to action on the "choice" issue fell on deaf ears in markets where harried moms were more worried about monthly premium deductions from their husbands' paychecks.
In each case, formative research would have made a critical difference in developing message, developing programs and finding the right communications channels. To get them - the key audiences - to know, to understand, to believe and to take action, means getting inside their minds, and research is the only way to get there.
Upcoming issues will explore what's most effective in customer satisfaction research, the other key challenge for the contemporary healthcare organization.