Effective Segmentation Requires More Sophisticated Approach
With "target audiences" still defined in broad terms such as women or seniors, the effectiveness of communications tactics automatically is limited, especially in the health sector where behaviors are more important.
Conversely, when marketers and public relations professionals can precisely define, identify and understand a specific audience subsegment that is most likely to respond to a message or offer, communications can be focused just as precisely to maximize effectiveness.
Or, as baseball great Willie McCovey explained when explaining his hitting prowess, "When I see the ball, I hit the ball." Precise audience segmentation allows marketers to clearly see the audience, so that program design and promotion are more likely to be hits than errors.
The alternatives to careful segmentation include guessing or relying on intuition; assuming that the audience thinks and acts "just like we do;" doing what worked in another market or what's on the cover of Modern Healthcare, or doing what the CEO or Board chairman personally knows will work.
Demographics Fail To Target
Long ago, marketers relied on demographics - gender, age, income, family size, ethnicity, education levels and so on. The problem with demographics - which many healthcare marketers still use - is that they cannot, do not and will not predict similarity of behaviors.
Not all women are alike. Not all women over age 50 are alike. Not all white women between the ages of 40 and 50 with family incomes of $75,000 and an American Express Gold Card are alike. And treating them as if they were alike, in terms of designing communications strategies, can lead to messages that don't appeal to part of the audience or channels that don't reach others.
Segmenting by behaviors - exercising, eating red meat, voting Democratic - still is based on external variables, making assumptions that all vegetarians are somehow alike in terms of motivation and beliefs. Psychographics are far more precise, tying behaviors to attitudes, beliefs and aspirations, but most existing psychographic segmentation systems have one big drawback for healthcare marketers: they are based on consumer purchasing behaviors, not on health behaviors.
Health behaviors are markedly different than any other type of behavior, and transcend most segmentation variables.
The issues in health behaviors are extremely complex: low biomedical literacy, an overload of often confusing information, and the fact that knowledge and awareness do not always translate into behavior. If that were so, nearly everyone in the U. S. would exercise, eat right and avoid excess sodium routinely.
Because health decision-making does not follow the same pathway as consumer purchase behaviors, it's important that healthcare marketers look for ways to analyze their audiences' attitudes, beliefs and behaviors in terms of their health.
That was the reason Porter Novelli's U.S. Health Care Practice developed Healthstyles, which groups consumers into seven segments that transcend demographics and which account for 97 percent of the U.S. population.
In addition to gathering demographics, media use and life path point information on the consumers in each segment, Healthstyles also profiles them to be health behaviors and by attitudes, beliefs and values - why they do what they do.
Working with these profiles, we can specify an audience and build a profile or let the data identify the audiences - groups of people who are alike on key factors like smoking.
A New Approach
The profiles also can be used to prioritize segments in order of those who will be the easiest to reach first, to generate results as quickly as possible.
Healthstyles data has helped us design public health education campaigns, create profiles to help physicians understand how to most effectively communicate with patients with specific diseases and identify which consumers are most likely to be interested in a specific drug (and what messages will be most compelling to them).
By using a similar type of "Healthstyles" approach to audience segmentation - going beyond demographics or consumer product psychographics - marketers can best meet the challenge of encouraging or discouraging behaviors.
The payoff of developing more precise and refined ways of understanding our audiences will be communications campaigns that work - to sell products, advocate issues or encourage behavior changes that will lead to a healthier American public.
Kathy Lewton is director of the National Health Care Practice at Porter-Novelli in Chicago. She is author of Public Relations in Health Care: A Guide For Professionals. She can be reached at 312/856-8888.
The Seven Segments
To derive the seven segments Healthstyles at Porter Novelli asked several thousand consumers to complete lengthy questionnaires about a variety of health behaviors including, among others, smoking, physical activity, nutrition, alcohol consumption, health conditions, healthcare utilization, cancer risks, occupational safety and barriers to/motivations for healthy living.
They also were asked about psychological (antecedent) factors such as self-efficacy, outcome expectations, risk perceptions, motivations and intentions, and social factors. The seven segments are:
- Physical Fantastics
- Active Attractives
- Tense But Trying
- Decent Doolittles
- Passively Healthy
- Hard-Living Hedonists
- Non-Interested Nihilists