Unleashing the Power of Consumer Marketing & Branding in Health Care with Carrie Lewis
Read time: 5.5 min
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What happens when a consumer marketing veteran gets into health care? Expect drama, sparks, and transformation.
Carrie Lewis is a lifelong marketer in the consumer space, leading marketing for global brands like Sherwin Williams and Stanley Black and Decker. Most recently she pivoted and became a CMO at Metro Health System in Cleveland. Today, she works as a fractional CMO as part of Chief Outsiders. In our conversation a few weeks ago, we get real about what it was like to take her marketing chops into health care and her counter intuitive strategies she uses to turn around and generate $2 Bn in revenue for a struggling community hospital system.
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of tips and topics:
As a new CMO, start with curiosity, humility, and share why you are there
Use the power of personal stories to give patients hope
Health care organizations typically have marketing carved out - that needs to change
Show the executive team what is marketing, never tell them
Be a cheerleader for the CEO and help them reach their goals
Close the great divide in provider organizations through marketing and watch the culture improve
Take the first 100 days to digest all research and learn everything you can
KEY LESSONS
Embed marketing and branding into the entire organization, bringing together the “great divide”
Marketing is typically seen as a peripheral function. Especially for health care organizations, and companies, whose leadership are typically clinically trained or grew up in finance and operations. Carrie contrasted that to her experience in consumer brands.
“Everyone is thinking marketing from the CEO down about value proposition for this opportunity. Who are our biggest customers? They are constantly listening and have their finger on the pulse on the company, the community, and their customers.”
When Carrie arrived at Metro Health System, she observed an issue which was front and center “Health care leaders leave marketing to just marketing. It's a separate thing. You go to them when you need something creative or a new flyer posted, and that is the least of what marketing is.” My perspective is that this doesn’t only exist in health care providers, it’s pervasive within the health care industry.
The other important observation is the “great divide” between clinicians and leadership, where the power struggle between groups lead to contempt and an extremely misaligned organization, which is almost always felt by the employees, the community, and the patients. Carrie found a way to bring them together by heavily highlighting the physicians as the individuals and the service leaders that they were. It created trust and bolstered employee culture, which started to bring the two groups together. Moving from a world of “what can you do for me” to “what can we do together”.
Personal stories are incredibly powerful, they bring hope to patients and can rally an organization
Carrie Lewis and late husband Andrew in a cab going from New York to Columbia for chemo.
Carrie’s story about why she entered the health care industry as a marketing executive is extremely personal. “I was with Sherwin Williams as Vice President of marketing for their consumer brands channel, and he had passed away when I was there. When you lose your husband at 40, you need a moment. A moment to reflect. A moment to digest that. I took a year off… I did anything physical I could to have silent moments of just pure reflection - where did I go wrong? What could I have done better? Like divine intervention, I got a call from a local hospital… they said, help, we need a real marketer.”
And when she started, she was incredibly humble, curious, and shared her story with physicians and leaders of the health system, “I'm here because I want people that were in my situation to be able to know exactly what this team can deliver them, and they don't”
When asked what was THE thing that health care organizations are missing out on in terms of branding and marketing, Carrie didn’t hesitate – hopeful patient stories.
“I really truly believe that my job as a caregiver to Andrew and what got him from two years to 10 years was his endless idea that there was hope. I needed him to have a placebo of hope wrapped around him. Stories shed light on very specific human experiences that the healthcare enterprise has with patients… Those are stories and messages of hope that individuals, caregivers, and patients that are ill cling to.”
She also acknowledges how hard it is, but that’s why these stories are special.
“Writing those stories, having that amount of content to constantly generate and produce, get them into the right platforms so that people can find them. That's a marketer's nightmare. But that's what needs to be done and that's why it's not being done”
Gain trust from the executive team and get more budget for marketing by showing, not telling
As a new CMO to a team that doesn’t get marketing and branding, you don’t start educating folks.
“Show them. Don't tell them a thing. I'm a huge advocate of pay by the drink funding. You carve out a little bit of funding, you do something, you show incredible return… After a while, your CEO comes to you and says, how much money do you need to make this incredible return even more incredible?”
And a secret strategy Carrie use is to make sure she allocates a percentage of her priorities to achieving the goals of the CEO.
“Your number one job is to be the CEO’s cheerleader. So what I secretly do is to divide myself by maybe 80/20 making sure the CEO’s goals are being delivered, that’s my 20%”
If she is faced with big negative voices, Carrie runs toward them, instead of avoiding them, an effective but counter intuitive tactic.
“A squeaky wheel that hates marketing? You're my first guy. Because when you flip that guy and he goes, oh my God, marketing generated 30% new patient prospects for me. That guy starts to tell your story, and every single department chair comes to you”
There is no marketing hack – results require a stringent process and an ecosystem of tactics
When talking to Carrie, I asked her about her process and what she tends to do first in every engagement. And while she feels that every project is different, she follows a familiar approach. It all starts with data and insights.
“In my first free 100 days before they can fire me…is insights, complete saturation of insights, customer insights, every single patient insight. I want data, I wanna understand the competitors. I wanna understand every single thing that they're bringing to market. Anything that they've talked about bringing to the market. Their ups and downs, their weaknesses, their specialties. I wanna understand our company. So I meet with every single senior leader executive to try to understand their purpose"
Next, she dives into strategy development, understanding the market place and the opportunities for growth before them. After that, it’s getting into positioning and all the foundational branding elements right. The last step is activating on the tactics, and this is where Carrie offered up a story as a green marketer putting her all her eggs in one tactic, thinking it would be the unlock to revenue growth, but alas, a costly mistake.
“It was a very expensive, I mean, this would be a year to create all of this data and content… it’s horrible, I think it was like $380,000 of iPads”
Conclusion
If you want to get the behind the scenes look at how a consumer marketer sees health care and the strategies and stories of how she helped generate a whopping $2Bn in revenue for a struggling health system, download and listen!
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