Transcription:

Bill Klaproth: On this edition of the SHSMD podcast, you know that many healthcare organizations are built on solid foundations of providing care to all segments of the population including multi-cultural segments. However, in 2020, many realize that they might not be telling that part of their brand story to the right people at the right time. This is challenging, you know this. So how do organizations that have a true mission to serve multi-cultural segments tell that story to be successful? Well, we're going to find out. With me today, Peggy Weber Kiefer from BVK and Julia Lecounte Grayson, affectionately known as JL, she said I could call her that, from the Moffitt Cancer Center, Tampa, Florida. So let's get to it right now.

This is the SHSMD podcast rapid insights for healthcare strategy professionals in planning, business development, marketing, communications, and public relations. I'm your host, Bill Klaproth. And in this episode, we talk about creating meaningful healthcare campaigns for multi-cultural audiences with Peggy Weber Kiefer, Vice President and Account Director of Healthcare at BVK, and Julia Lecounte Grayson. Again, she said I could call her JL, so I'm going to call her JL. She is the brand strategy manager at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida.

And this episode's sponsored by BVK, a top 25 independent business marketing and advertising agency with expertise in delivering purpose-driven healthcare experiences that impact lives, build healthy communities and shift societal health behaviors. Visit bvk.com/rapidinsights to schedule a private session with one of their healthcare experts today.

Peggy and JL, welcome to the SHSMD podcast. As you know, we start every episode of the SHSMD podcast with rapid insights. One quick tip someone can use to make their marketing communications better today. Peggy, you're up first. Give us your rapid insight.

Peggy Weber Kiefer: Bill, my rapid insight is that your brand is never too grown up, too mature for fresh insights. Especially when you're messaging to specific groups, who might not think or act like you do, that old warning about the most dangerous insight is a focus group of one is certainly a fundamental marketing truth.

Bill Klaproth: Oh, that is so good. I love that rapid insight. Thank you for that. Okay, JL, you're up next. Give us your rapid insight.

JL Grayson: Sure. The consumer bases are truly no longer as homogeneous as they've been in the past or perceived in the past. Consumers want to connect with brands that resonate with them.

Bill Klaproth: I love those rapid insights. Thank you for those. Both right on the money. Peggy and JL, I've been so looking forward to talking to both of you about minority marketing. It is so important today. And I do think that people are missing the mark a little bit, not quite doing it right. So this is going to be a great topic about that. So when we talk about multi-cultural marketing, give us an overview of the project. Peggy, let's start with you.

Peggy Weber Kiefer: Thanks, Bill. I think in 2020, we all had our eyes opened a little bit and our minds and we all questioned potentially our own contribution to cultural and ethnic disparities. And we all looked at how social and economic factors contributed. I just don't know a single, responsible, caring human who didn't have those kinds of thoughts starting last spring.

And once you kind of look at yourself in the mirror as marketers, I think the next thing that's the logical step is to look at the brands that we represent and analyze that brand behavior around those same filters. I think healthcare organizations have had a really rich history of providing care to any and all, but 2020 made us realize that we might not be telling that part of the brand story in the best way to the right people at the right time, because we don't always take time to dive deep into the reasons for instance that some groups might not access care. It's not that the care isn't there, but maybe our brands have been expressed in a way that didn't feel welcoming, because maybe we made some assumptions that an overall brand platform was going to be intuitively relevant to everyone.

JL Grayson: That's so true, Peggy. Diversity is part of Moffit's DNA. It's always been there. There's always been a strong, intangible commitment to providing care to all and bridging the gaps in care. It's not just something we talk about, it's something we do. We have many examples, particularly with the black and African-American outreach efforts.

But one area where we saw opportunity is with Hispanic marketing. Through the lens of 2020, we looked at how we communicate with Spanish-speaking audiences and, quite often, organic opportunities emerged.

Peggy Weber Kiefer: Yeah. And Julia, don't you think it was kind of a matter of not that we aren't doing anything, but can't we do better?

JL Grayson: Absolutely. It was definitely can we do better, which I think is what makes our organization great, because we're always looking to do better, be better, and to serve our communities better.

Bill Klaproth: So as you were just talking about doing better, let's dig into that a little bit, JL. What does doing better look like? And where does it all start? Help us with that.

JL Grayson: Doing better means understanding more about the challenges Spanish speakers face when accessing care, cancer care specifically. And a lot of them are specific to this group. When I say those challenges when accessing care, it's not that we intentionally create obstacles and I'm referring to healthcare systems. But it's more along the lines of messaging in a way that truly considers their unique perspective and chips away at some of the barriers, simply because we know more about their decision journey.

Peggy Weber Kiefer: Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that comment I made in the beginning about having insights is really critical when we look at that decision journey. As marketers, I think we're really in tune to how people make decisions. I mean, otherwise we wouldn't be in the jobs we are in. We're good at that, but sometimes we can also make some assumptions. And in this case, we set aside our assumptions and we really leaned into research to help us understand more realistically, more factually how a decision journey, particularly around cancer healthcare, is different for a Spanish-speaking audience than it might be for some of our other segments.

The way we did that was we relied on Nielsen data, and first we looked at healthcare attitudes in general since COVID. And obviously, there's a lot of rich insight just in that layer. But then we layered Hispanic healthcare attitudes nationally on top of that. And then we took it one step further and we looked very specifically at Hispanic health care attitudes in Florida, because that is a different segment of Spanish-speaking United States citizens. And that really helped us sift and find the crucial insights that makes sense for Moffitt's brand story.

Bill Klaproth: I love that. So data is so important. And you talked about how that gave you critical insights. So tell me what happens next. How do those critical insights translate to branding efforts? JL, let me ask you that first.

JL Grayson: As you mentioned, Bill, data is critical. But data without the why behind it or turning it into something tangible, an action item is simply data. So Moffitt's brand platform is based on courage. And the values that really resonate with Florida's Hispanic populations are honesty, family and learning.

And we got to that awareness through data, through survey data, through asking those questions. So we looked for the overlap. We looked at the way the brand behaves and we found relevant proof points to support the important values of the population. The great thing is we didn't have to start from scratch. We didn't have to create a story. It was there and authentic, but we had to think about the brand differently.

Peggy Weber Kiefer: Yeah, absolutely. I'll just chime in too. The other thing with this particular audience that we considered in the values and the decision-making are the cultural influences. I think particularly with some segments of our population, things like spirituality and kind of a discipline of thinking cautiously about health definitely factor in here.

And we couldn't ignore those elements as well, because it totally influences how you present the information that you learned from the data. Again, to JL's point, it's one thing to have data, but it's another thing to know what to do with it. The other thing that was really important learning with this group is that the role of gender and the role of generations is very important in the decision-making process, both with persuading people to get preventative cancer care, the screening and treatment after.

One example that I just found really interesting is that our survey showed, our research showed that 94% of people in this audience say they consider themselves in good health and they consider good health a sign of accomplishment. So 94% of people say health is super important, but 55% of them say they don't want to go to the doctor. So, what's in that gap? What's causing so many people to want good health, but half the population say, "But I'm not going to go after it as far as going to a provider"?

Bill Klaproth: Yeah, that is a weird dichotomy. Very interesting. So you were talking about taking the data and knowing what to do with it, I guess the challenge would be then taking that information and turning it into a marketing message that kind of fits into your brand without diluting or altering your brand platform. So Peggy, how do we do that?

Peggy Weber Kiefer: Well, the first thing we did was we looked very carefully, as JL mentioned earlier, at the intersection using a typical Venn diagram. What is the courage platform? What does Moffitt's brand has to offer? What is there that overlaps with what this audience considers most important in their healthcare journey?

Again, we're not making anything up, it's all there. But sometimes you don't emphasize one thing to all audiences, because you don't realize perhaps how important it is to a specific segment. So this gave us an opportunity to say, "Okay, when we're speaking to these people, maybe these are the parts of our brand that will resonate."

And part of that too is understanding that the way your brand looks and feels and behave has to be consistent. You can't change your brand because you're trying to be relevant to a culturally specific segment. Consumers are way too sophisticated for that. They will smell inauthenticity a mile away. They'll conclude that you are just doing it for some other motives and that's not inherent to your brand. So you do not want to do that. But what you can do is you can start to put that brand context into specific content development that is culturally relevant.

JL Grayson: I echo that, Peggy. That's a great point. I believe that what we realized initially was that we needed to have a multi-targeted approach towards age groups. The research helped us to learn that the older baby boomer generation has culturally-based belief that impact their willingness to even think about getting cancer.

So we needed to start talking to their adult children. And we needed to adjust the messaging to reflect those culturally important values that Moffitt shares, but isn't always highlighted in our ads or our messaging, like honesty, for example. If you're going to say that we got you, we get you, we have to be able to back it up.

We started featuring some of our prominent Hispanic physicians in ads because representation matters. People want to see themselves and sharing their stories about their commitment to the community and to their profession, that was impactful. And with family, about relating to the love and sacrifice their parents have made and relating that back to the responsibility of the adult children, and that responsibility isn't to infer it being weighty, but really a privilege to care for their parents and to be responsible to encourage screenings so they could be with them longer so they can have a healthy quality of life.

Bill Klaproth: That's a great way to put those messages together, messages that will resonate with the target audience. So on the SHSMD podcast, Peggy and JL, we always try to be instructional, very how to, so we always try to break it down. So let me see if I'm getting this correct. First, you have to understand the data. You were mentioning, Peggy, those crucial insights. And then once you understand those insights, JL, you were talking about finding those values that resonate. You mentioned honesty and family.

So once you understand those themes, if you will, you can develop those campaigns around those values or those themes, targeted at different age groups, such as 18 to 24 or 65 plus. And even though they have a common theme of value and honesty, the look and feel of the ad may be a little different, but that message of honesty and family is still front and center, no matter who you're targeting. Do I have that right?

JL Grayson: Absolutely. I think it's important to note that we feel like it's important to have that strategy across the board. What's the differentiating component here is that we recognized that we needed to shift a little bit. We needed to make sure that we were hitting the target with the right language, the right imagery, and the overall message and highlighted things that were important to this audience.

So, absolutely. That's correct. There are still so many opportunities and I hope Peggy agrees that we learn something different all the time. That's the whole goal, right? We want to make sure that we're optimizing, that we're meeting the needs of the community and we're very purposeful and focused on this effort and we want to make sure that everyone has access to the best cancer care. And that they know that Moffitt is a place that considers the entire community, because we know that that's important. Equity in healthcare is important.

Peggy Weber Kiefer: One little thought to add to that is that it's crucial that whatever you're saying is authentic. And I know we've touched on it a couple of times during this podcast, but it's so important that it's real, it's not just something you're doing to check a box. This has to be part of your mission as a healthcare organization and what you're looking to do then is to communicate it correctly, not come up with a communications plan to make it look like you're doing something that you aren't really committed to.

Bill Klaproth: I think that is such a great point. So many times we see, "Hey, me too. Look, I'm doing this too." And you'd dig a little deeper, they're just doing it because everybody else is doing it and it's not a real commitment. There's not a real honesty behind it. So I think when you talk about authenticity, Peggy, I think that is right on the money.

You've got to be authentic when you're marketing to multi-cultural segments, but it's got to be real. You got to mean it. You got to love it. You got to embrace it. I mean, the community, that's what you're doing it for. So I think that's a great point. So as we wrap up, let me ask you this, what is most important to remember when it comes to this type of marketing? JL, let me ask you first.

JL Grayson: Wow. Such a great question, Bill. Thanks for asking. The most important thing is to be intentional. Peggy and I, when we set out on this journey and I call it a journey, because we spent a lot of time thinking about this. We were very intentional. We were intentional about the audience, we were intentional about the messaging and we were intentional about our goals. What were we really trying to achieve?

And so as marketers, I think we need to be intentional about connecting with multi-cultural audiences, multi-cultural consumers across the board. It is definitely worth it and it's necessary. So I would say intent. Be intentional about serving the community. Be intentional about connecting with those that may not feel like they're represented or that the message meets their needs.

Peggy Weber Kiefer: Yeah. And I would just add to that, be intentional repeatedly. You can't assume that once you have figured it out, that you're finished. I think it's always a matter of refreshing and optimizing and finding those new insights that might have you shift the messaging again slightly to keep up with changing consumer wants and needs.

Bill Klaproth: What a great way to wrap this up. That was so important, I think what you both said. I love that word intentional. That is so good. So be intentional about connecting with your multi-cultural community. And then, Peggy, so right on about having to do this repeatedly. You can't just do it once, right? It's got to be a campaign and it's got to be ongoing.

JL Grayson: Absolutely.

Peggy Weber Kiefer: Exactly.

Bill Klaproth: Wow. This has really been a great discussion. Thank you both for your time. We have really appreciated this. It's been very informational and instructional. So JL and Peggy, thank you again.

JL Grayson: Thank you, Bill.

Peggy Weber Kiefer: Thank you, Bill.

Bill Klaproth: And once again, that's Peggy Weber Kiefer from BVK and JL Grayson from the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida.

And once again, this episode is sponsored by BVK, a top 25 independent business marketing and advertising agency with expertise in delivering purpose-driven healthcare experiences that impact lives, build healthy communities and shift societal health behaviors. Visit bvk.com/rapidinsights to schedule a private session with one of their health experts today.

And to learn more about SHSMD, visit SHSMD.org. And visit our education page to learn about our upcoming programs at SHSMD.org/education.

And if you found this podcast helpful, and again, how could you not, please share it on all of your social channels and please hit the subscribe or follow button to get every episode. This has been a production of DoctorPodcasting. I'm Bill Klaproth. See you!