Moving Innovation Forward
Think about the last time you received a piece of truly valuable content. Was it mailed to your home? Or handed to you by someone on the street? Perhaps it was in a newspaper that was delivered to your doorstep in the morning.
Odds are it was none of these once powerful forms of communication. You’re most likely receiving your content these days through a smartphone or computer screen. More people than ever are using digital channels to get helpful information from businesses and professionals and those numbers will likely continue to rise. However, what happens if this information is health-related? Does that change the dynamic? More importantly, should it?
This March, The Digital Health Coalition brought industry thought leaders together to tackle questions of this sort. Hosted by Pfizer, the day was a series of discussions and talks on the most pressing topics related to digital healthcare marketing: the difficulties of driving transformational change in a vertical that moves historically slow, how new technology is driving innovation in areas with real-world impact, how the customer experience and stakeholder alignment need prioritization, and how speed is the newest barometer for success and failure.
4 key learnings
1. Focus on the problem first.
Albert Einstein once said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
The first step is to be honest about what you don’t know. Healthcare takes on arguably the world’s most important issues yet is in many ways engineered towards risk management. The data, topics, and conversations are extra sensitive making it critical to dig into real problems before coming up with the solution. Which typically leads into another major issue for our industry: chasing only the “cool” innovations.
2. New doesn’t equal innovative.
Innovation isn’t the equivalent of a new toy or shiny object. All too often marketers buy into solutions that look wonderful on the surface. You know the type: it comes wrapped beautifully, promising intangibles, proclaiming itself a “game changer” or “disruptor” but then magically (and inevitably) it fizzles out. The reason for its failure is simple: at its core it’s not actually addressing any real human problem. Innovation for innovation’s sake doesn’t help anyone. While it’s true technology can play an enormous role in helping to advance ideas, it’s paramount to remember that technology is merely a tool. People will always be the core of our business. If we aren’t hyper-focused on human-centered design and solutions, these shiny objects will soon render themselves obsolete.
Another fundamental problem with this approach is that new technologies require new processes, which can divert attention and resources away from achievable success in chase of a bigger prize. It’s critical to stay vigilant and grounded in the mission of our industry. This will help guide decision making. Edwin Lee, SVP of Strategy at Klick Health, summed this up very nicely:
“Digital innovation should focus on problems that are big enough to matter but small enough to solve.”
3. Content may be king but speed is the queen.
The rise of social media has created a world where customers expect great service and they expect it now. This has modified the need to not only be where customers are but to be there fast. The approach to healthcare should be no different. Patients are increasingly taking a more proactive interest in their own health. Customer-centricity implores a truly holistic mantra: from small tactical/project-based innovations all the way to partnerships with larger existing platforms to accommodate for the speed we all need.
Perhaps the most appropriate (and equally motivational) moment on this topic came during a fireside chat with Tricia Brown, a digital marketing leader at Merck, who has recent experience implementing a more agile approach to her business:
“The customer doesn’t care about your excuses. We must have the courage of conviction and be a voice of the customer. In order to succeed, you must continue to be bold, be impatient, and be persistent.”
That’s sound advice. But before you go sprinting to the finish line, it’s critical that you…
4. Define and align on expectations.
We all can agree that measurement should happen early and often. Data is the lifeblood of every experiment. However, like most things in life, achieving success is an iterative, never-ending process. It’d be an extraordinary feat for a hypothesis to get proven on the first, second or even third try. So why are we so quick to treat our marketing innovations as failures? This type of short-term thinking, leads to programs and platforms getting prematurely constricted of their oxygen before ever given a proper chance to grow. Most of the time, outcomes are defined by a single metric (ahem: ROI) and do not consider all of the insights gained. We must shift the paradigm beyond to include learnings— allowing the data to not only be captured but leveraged. This is an important step in the next phase of digital innovation.
Once you properly set the stage, it’s time for the show. Just remember: even if you are only seeing small improvements, that means you’re on the right track. I urge you to continue because in an industry where health outcomes are involved, the tiniest bit of progress can ultimately have the largest impact.
