Marketing effectiveness has fallen by nearly a quarter since 2020. Ian Baer, Founder & Chief Soothsayer at Sooth, offers his insights on how healthcare organizations can respond, with Jim Cagliostro. Episode Introduction Ian shares how 90% of today’s marketing decisions are emotional, and 80% are made on impulse, and the challenges of ‘’marketing by the pound.’’ He also explains why a regulatory environment means healthcare often stays in the shallow end of the marketing pool, how data unlocks empathy between brands and audiences, and advises everyone to ‘’bring your soul to work every day.’’ Show Topics Making emotional connections in marketing Sooth helps brands to understand the truth Healthcare has unique marketing challenges ‘’Marketing by the pound’’ The roadmap of healthcare marketing is the most complicated The power of patient stories Leadership tip: Bring your soul to work every day 08:13 Making emotional connections in marketing Ian said 90% of the decisions people make when spending money are emotional. ‘’AI, it's very buzzwordy, but what it does for us is it allows me to take what used to require one or two years of custom research that might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, into a methodology that we can execute in a few weeks to give a brand a very clear understanding of the emotional journey of the individual that they're trying to reach. Now of course, the impact in healthcare is huge because look, 90% of all the decisions people make when it comes to spending their money are emotional. It's a big mistake marketers made for decades upon decades in thinking there's a balance between the rational and their emotional. No, there isn't. People make emotional decisions, and then they seek rationale to back up where their heart has already gone. And Harvard did some brilliant work that they published in 2016, an article I recommend to anybody and everybody get their hands on, called The New Science of Customer Emotion. .. And what they found was, of the thousands of different emotions we all experience, it's been estimated that people experience 34,000 different emotions. … But what they found is there are actually only 10 things that we feel as humans that have a positive correlation to the way we spend our money.’’ 14:54 Sooth helps brands to understand the truth Ian explained the background to his company name, and its purpose. ‘’So, I went looking through my LinkedIn profile, just going through all my experience and, "How can I describe what I do?" And I found a LinkedIn recommendation from a former client in which he referred to me as, "Soothsayer." And it reminded me that very often, when we were at a time of crisis for his brand, he would pick up the phone and call me and say, "Oh, soothsayer." And that would very often start our conversations. I thought, "Well, that's a really interesting word." I always thought a soothsayer was somebody who predicts the future. It's not. Soothsayer is somebody who tells the truth. The word sooth literally means truth. It just went obsolete in the English language about 400 years ago when Shakespeare got done with it, which is what enabled me to actually trademark it as the name of a business. It's pretty hard to get a vernacular word as the name of your company. So, when we decided to name the business Sooth, because in reality that is exactly what we're doing is helping brands understand the truth, then it just followed suit that I should be the soothsayer, that we actually have two practices at the company. We have the soothsaying practice, which is determining what the truths are, and then our client partnership practice, we call those people ‘’soothsolvers’’ because what they do is actually take the truth and put it to work in really smart marketing recommendations, and work in partnership with senior leaders on the client side.’’ 17:23 Healthcare has unique marketing challenges Ian said the regulatory environment means that healthcare is averse to taking marketing risks. ‘’Because of the regulatory environment, healthcare marketers have learned to play it extremely safe, and it's understandable. The last thing you want is a slap on the wrist, or much worse, from the FDA when you've spent countless millions of dollars, let's say, bringing a drug to market. But the result is most healthcare marketers have become conditioned to stay in the very shallow end of the swimming pool. And where that becomes unfortunate, we spoke earlier about no industry really needing empathy in their marketing more than healthcare. Well, we now have the ability through use of data, through use of technology, through one-to-one connection and interaction, through experience design, to create a really special personal experience. And yet, data privacy is a scary thing. Engaging with someone, one-on-one, whether it's through social media or other, that's a scary thing ...
