00:00:04
There's probably not a more polarizing shift to go from I'm selling toilet paper, paper plates and marketing those things to health care.
00:00:14
And I share this story sometimes, it's like in November of that year, I was talking about your next promotion at Walmart and we're talking about toilet paper.
00:00:23
And then I made the move and in December, I was getting a question about can we build an app for our heart transplant program?
00:00:29
Because we need more heart transplants. And you're like, that's different. Marketing matters.
00:00:38
Marketing is absolutely critical. You can have the greatest product in the world if no one knows about it.
00:00:44
It just doesn't matter. People think out of the box, it's going to make you more creative.
00:00:48
But sometimes when you're in a constrained situation, that's when a lot of creativity blooms.
00:00:53
Barbara, you use Uber Eats, don't you? My husband does. I don't believe in the internet.
00:00:58
I didn't know that the internet was faith based. I'll tell you, you could just buy the car we bought.
00:01:02
We have a hybrid. What'd you buy? I don't know exactly. The power of brands, ladies and gentlemen.
00:01:08
This is Marketing Matters on the Wharton Podcast Network. Hello, and welcome. You're listening to Marketing Matters on the Wharton Podcast Network, our weekly podcast where we analyze the latest in advertising, marketing, customer behavior, and new product launches.
00:01:25
I'm Barbara Kahn, the Patty and J.H. Baker Professor of Marketing, and I'm joined by my co-host, Americus Reid, the Whitney M.
00:01:33
Young Jr. Professor of Marketing and the brand identity theorist. And today, we have a very interesting show.
00:01:41
We're joined by Kate Mettinger, who's the Vice President of Marketing and Physician Outreach at Piedmont Healthcare, which is a large, private, not-for-profit healthcare system based in Georgia.
00:01:54
Now, Kate has been at Piedmont Healthcare for about four years, as I understand it, but she came from Georgia-Pacific, which is a CPG firm best known for brands that you'd find in your home, like Brawny, Angel Soft, and Dixie.
00:02:10
And she was at Georgia-Pacific for almost 10 years. Now she's moving, or has moved, from CPG to healthcare, and at Piedmont, she just instituted a new brand campaign, which is called Quality Care Changes Lives.
00:02:26
And the idea is to try to take this healthcare clinical excellence and turn it into clear, human-centered storytelling.
00:02:35
So in this conversation, we're going to explore how an expert in CPG marketing can exist and thrive in a trust-driven healthcare environment.
00:02:47
Kate, welcome to our show. Welcome, Kate. Thank you so much for having me, you guys.
00:02:52
I'm excited to have the conversation. So before we get into all of this and the new campaign and all, what made you go from CPG to healthcare?
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Like, why did you make that move? Sure. I think from my perspective, it was really a learning journey.
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I had a great experience at Georgia-Pacific. To your point, I was there almost 10 years.
00:03:12
I was on the agency side before that for 10 years, also working in retail and a little bit in CPG.
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So I was just thinking about what's next in my career and what's the learning journey going to be so I can continue to grow my skill set.
00:03:24
So I had started poking around about nonprofits or just different avenues beyond your traditional CPG company.
00:03:32
And at the time, my mentor and good friend, Dal Bergsma, was at Piedmont already.
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And he knew what I was looking for in terms of the next step in advancement and really thinking about nonprofits and said, you know, not exactly what you were thinking, but close.
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It's a not-for-profit. It's healthcare. And I have this opportunity. Would you be willing to consider it?
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And so we had several conversations and said, you know, if you had gone to Kimberly Clark or some other CPG, I wouldn't have followed you.
00:04:01
But this is hitting all the right notes. It's one of those lucky strike moments where you have a great mentor and a huge advocate and that it has the right opportunity and everything just aligned in the cards for me to come over and try healthcare.
00:04:14
So you're looking for the challenge. So before we get into the specific campaign, is it easy to make that transition?
00:04:22
I mean, from consumer-focused marketing to patient-driven marketing, is it the same thing?
00:04:27
One's just sick? Is that like what it is? I get that question a lot. It's very funny because also remember, this happened during COVID.
00:04:37
So it was 2021. We were in the height of COVID, and toilet paper was obviously having a very big moment at that point on one side of the COVID equation.
00:04:48
And healthcare was having a different moment. So that was a wild time to make that anyway.
00:04:53
But what I would say is there's probably not a more polarizing shift to go from I'm selling toilet paper, paper plates, and marketing those things to healthcare.
00:05:04
And I share this story sometimes. It's like in November of that year, I was talking about your next promotion at Walmart.
00:05:11
We're talking about toilet paper, and then I made the move. And in December, I was getting a question about can we build an app for our heart transplant program because we need more heart transplants.
00:05:21
And you're like, that's different. And so there's this moment where I was like, that's a little different.
00:05:28
There's an app for that. Yeah, that was a different part of that funny story. But yeah, there's a moment where you have that kind of imposter syndrome mentality where you're like, oh, I'm across from these world-renowned heart doctors, or I'm across from world-renowned oncologists.
00:05:46
But at the end of the day, your training kicks in, and it holds up. And to answer your question, Barbara, it all still applies.
00:05:53
It comes back to the basics and the marketing basics is what's my objective? Who am I talking to?
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Who's my target? What's the brand? How are we activating? So it all holds up. And once you can kind of get your head past that kind of odd moment, it absolutely translates, and your experience comes together.
00:06:12
Yeah, I love that point. I want to build on what Barbara is saying as well and ask you a question, Kate.
00:06:16
And that is this. When I have interacted with nonprofits in the past, one of the things that I've noticed is that there's a challenge sometimes because they almost don't want to see themselves as businesses.
00:06:29
And it's sort of like it's less that you're not for profit and more that you are for purpose.
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But yet you have to also bring like discipline to this as well in terms of exactly what you said.
00:06:41
So when you made that transition into a nonprofit, talk a little bit about the way that the culture was sort of structured around the discipline of being a business but also maintaining this kind of notion of that purpose and being, obviously, to Barbara's point, patient-centered is sort of the key pillar here.
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Was that a challenge? Was it already in place? What did you experience when you first joined?
00:07:05
So I think it was in place, is in place still. We have great leadership who runs an incredible business from a not-for-profit perspective.
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We are very metrics-oriented. We have our balanced scorecard that helps drive all of our decisions.
00:07:20
So I would say Piedmont is probably one of the most business-minded not-for-profits that you'll find.
00:07:26
You do often have, you know, people in the organization who are like, oh, no, we're about helping people.
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We're not about business. So you do talk a lot about if we are good business people and if we do the right things from a financial perspective, from a stewardship perspective, and, you know, kind of, again, be good stewards of our community investment, that allows us to help more people.
00:07:49
And so you connect those dots of how it all comes together. It's not that we're, you know, hungrily trying to drive, you know, office visits or that type of thing for, you know, games or fun.
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It's about when we do that and we do our business well, we're able to help more people.
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You know, Piedmont, from a community impact perspective, gives away about $844 million in community benefit last year.
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So when we do good business, we're able to produce good results for our community.
00:08:21
So let me double down on that parallel that you're mentioning about it is a business in a way and you do run it that way, even though it's nonprofit.
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And obviously your heart transplants and not toilet paper. So there is that difference.
00:08:35
But like there is like I saw some interviews with people, you know, probably your old mentor, actually.
00:08:43
And he was really kind of making almost an apples to apples change. Like so you mentioned it, your demand variable is office visits or how many appointments and things like that.
00:08:56
And the belief is that if you do a good brand campaign and you build brand awareness and positive customer experience and positive favorability, which are all marketing terms, that you will generate more office visits, better use of your digital tools and all these other things, which are the same kinds of metrics that you measured before at your old job.
00:09:24
But yes, but it's delivering a different end product. And like America's saying, you have maybe different values, but the measurement is pretty similar, right?
00:09:35
Absolutely. There's huge parallels to be drawn in terms of financial or financial industries, in terms of account openings or airlines, in terms of selling seats.
00:09:43
Right. So you get foot traffic, you get metrics like that. So there are 100 percent parallels.
00:09:50
We just have the benefit of knowing when we drive office visits. That means someone's getting the care that they hopefully need.
00:09:56
And we're able to have them have a great experience because of other things we put in place.
00:10:01
So you're looking at the full funnel of support. So what we're here for, like the new news here is this new campaign.
00:10:09
And so now so you believe that if you build a good brand, people will come, you know, like kind of the same thing is.
00:10:19
But what I think is super interesting and it's what your campaign is about and what you had to figure out.
00:10:24
And you've certainly been at Piedmont long enough for years to kind of have a good sense of that.
00:10:31
You have to do human storytelling. But what does that mean in this world? And in some sense, I would guess this is a little bit different than selling toilet paper because the advertising campaign is going to be different.
00:10:44
Right. Or the storytelling is different. Yeah. And let me just build on Barbara's question to layer on this, which is the idea.
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When I think of health care, I try to conceptualize it, Barbara, where it's like, what is this thing?
00:10:56
What is this credence good? I'm going to go get a service. And I can't really judge its quality until after the service is over.
00:11:01
And so I may show up with in my mind a perception of health care that is either completely neutral or maybe even negative because of what I may believe about the health care system more broadly speaking in this country.
00:11:14
So I'm wondering, to build on Barbara's point, do you have to overcome like negative perceptions of what people expect in this space before you can actually begin the storytelling process in an authentic way?
00:11:27
Or do you have to kind of clean up the mess on aisle five, so to speak, because of what consumers may be.
00:11:34
I'm sorry to use the toilet paper example, but because of what consumers may be walking around with in their minds, you know, and sort of that's the fact that you're trying to create something.
00:11:41
But you can't really put your hands on this thing until you can get some sort of idea what, to Barbara's point, what the brand stands for.
00:11:48
What are your thoughts on that? Right. Absolutely. So I think that there's a few things there.
00:11:51
I mean, one, when you go back to the beginning of our campaign or what prompted this, we had been going through a rebrand for about five years.
00:11:59
It started back in 2021. Trying to set Piedmont apart from your traditional health care marketing, you know, from that perspective, everybody knew Piedmont.
00:12:10
We had high awareness. We have the highest awareness in the market when you think about the state of Georgia.
00:12:14
But nobody necessarily had a good perception of what Piedmont was. You know, it's kind of neutral, possibly a little bit negative when you think about who we are and what we stand for.
00:12:25
And so people didn't realize in their backyard is a company and a health care business that is a top 10 transplant program.
00:12:33
It sees 50 heart patients from all 50 states. We actually pull from because our heart program is that good.
00:12:40
Or we see 14,000 cancer patients every year. And so people just didn't really know that.
00:12:47
So you had messaging. You had real points. Yeah. So there's real points. But here's, I guess, the comment I'm going to make about that is some of the traditional marketing perspectives might say, go tell people all those data points.
00:12:59
And just go like, we are breadth. We're scale. We're this. And I think you go back to that kind of Maya Angelou quote of people will remember not what you did, but how you made them feel.
00:13:08
And so you think about how we would set ourselves apart is communicating how we made our patients actually feel.
00:13:15
And being able to tell some of those stories is going to resonate more with somebody than throwing out, you know, top 10 transplant program.
00:13:23
Because that might not matter to them until they need a transplant. Or they may not know is that is 14,000 cancer patients a lot?
00:13:31
It is. But as a patient, you might not have a lot of frame of reference for that.
00:13:36
But you can relate to someone's story about what their journey is. No, we call that identifiable victim.
00:13:43
Yeah, there's a lot of research that supports what you're saying. That consumers definitely respond to the one single individual and that person's story more than they would to the statistics that you're saying or the data points.
00:13:57
But I am curious when you start. So so the idea is to tell people stories and how and how they feel as a result of these some of these.
00:14:06
But did you focus? Did you decide to focus on the heart transplant stories? Or could you talk focus on something that, you know, were you making the decision to choose the stories to tell that really differentiate the strength of Piedmont?
00:14:21
Or were you just telling stories that could come every day in a health care system?
00:14:25
Yeah, that's a great question. So for our broader campaign, our higher order messaging, the video, the social ads that we're doing is really around our highest volume service lines or some of the places where we have expert and leading care.
00:14:41
So you'll see we started actually with a brain tumor, a brain tumor spot. We included a heart transplant spot.
00:14:49
We have an ortho spot. So we really did align it to the, you know, the larger service lines and where we provide that level and highest level of expertise.
00:14:57
And then we also sprinkle in some of the everyday stories we get in some of the lower fidelity work we're doing on social or, you know, in some of the various PR places, we're able to move quickly, but it's less of a high production event.
00:15:10
So you're talking to real patients, right? And then you're going to ask them to tell their story that.
00:15:17
So. How'd that go? Like, you know, I mean, we're not talking. But Barbara always asks very pointed questions.
00:15:24
Kate, if you haven't. How'd that go? Yeah. That I would be so great in front of a camera.
00:15:33
Fair. That's fair. Yeah. Works. I don't know. Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, I think it definitely adds to it.
00:15:40
We have real patients and real providers in our spots like these are not paid actors.
00:15:45
They are. And while you may be a world renowned and expert surgeon, you may not translate that well on camera.
00:15:51
And that's just a reality that we know that we work through. So we do a lot of coaching in the moment.
00:15:57
I think we we have worked with agency partners who help us get the best out of people and make them feel really comfortable in that moment so that they can share their story.
00:16:07
We've been very fortunate. I think that it's gone. We've been able to pull that out of people in a way that resonates with others.
00:16:15
It is authentic. It is meaningful. Yeah. I love that. When Barbara said that, I immediately I immediately thought of a bunch of ads that I have seen with people, you know, patients talking about, you know, their reaction to the service.
00:16:32
And I remember thinking to myself, that's fake. It's too polished. It's too good.
00:16:37
It's just, you know what I mean? And you just kind of discount it. So to Barbara's point, like do that fine line between authenticity, but also engaging and captivating, because if you have someone there that's not captivating, then you're sort of defeating the storytelling point in the first place.
00:16:51
So, you know, talk a little bit about the carefulness by which you thread that needle that Barbara's talking about.
00:16:57
Yeah. So I think we we don't try and overproduce or overcorrect things so that you can you can tell at times that it really is them.
00:17:06
So I'll give you a very specific example. In our ortho spot, we actually worked by the Marius Mims, who is a former UGA player.
00:17:15
He is now in the NFL and he was able, you know, he came had surgery with one of our providers to repair his ankle.
00:17:23
He is a giant man because he's in the NFL. So he actually bumped the boom mic where he surprised he surprised the doctor, who is also a tall man but looks small in comparison.
00:17:38
He was going to hug the doctor. He bumps the boom mic and there's this awkward moment.
00:17:42
But we left it in because it made it real and not like we were we were so careful.
00:17:47
So we look for those little moments. We also let them write that we have the patients write their own letter and will, of course, help refine and edit where needed.
00:17:56
But the words are really theirs. And I think that's so important to the story and letting them share their gratitude and their experience at Piedmont.
00:18:05
So you just started this campaign. Have you been able to measure its success yet or do you have a sense of how well it's going?
00:18:11
So I do. So it's actually been in market for about 18 months. We are exceeding all of our benchmarks when you look at brand preference and favorability that we've been looking at.
00:18:20
So we're absolutely achieving our goals. Our year one campaign went, you know, won a Reggie.
00:18:26
So felt pretty good about that for the team and hold on, Kate. You got to you have to break this down for our listeners.
00:18:33
One Reggie. Did you say Reggie? OK, tell us about that award. What is that? The Reggie Awards are through the A&A and it's about marketing effectiveness.
00:18:41
So a Reggie award you go through every year of the American National Association of National Advertisers does awards to say, what's the you know, the greatest work out there and the Reggie's show effectiveness.
00:18:57
And that's what they're all about. So I was thrilled to win for that. Oh, well, that's exciting.
00:19:04
Right off the bat. You don't want to do work for work's sake. You want effectiveness.
00:19:07
Yeah, I've never won a Reggie Award, but I want one. It's really great. It's like a cash register.
00:19:13
It's pretty funny. Well, of course, it's one thing winning awards for advertising.
00:19:19
It's another thing driving those patient visits. And has that worked? Absolutely.
00:19:24
Yes. So, you know, we're seeing really strong ROIs for our efforts. Again, when you think about dividing out our campaigns and as people think about campaigns, one is maybe about driving the brand.
00:19:34
Others are about driving office visits. But the things work together very nicely.
00:19:39
Right now, we're seeing great ROIs for all of our efforts. So we're headed in the right direction.
00:19:43
So, you know, in health care, there's like it is a different world than the toilet paper world or the paper towel world in that, you know, I assume there's like a board of trustees or something.
00:19:56
There's people who like oversee hospitals and there are a lot of doctors and, you know, and all those kind of people.
00:20:04
And they're not always so pro-marketing. I mean, was there did you have any kind of culture change to have to make it the idea of hospitals?
00:20:13
You know, and this is kind of what Americans was talking about in the beginning.
00:20:16
There's kind of a different set of norms for health care. It almost seems I think that's what your point was originally, Americans.
00:20:23
It almost seems like when you're doing health care, you shouldn't be using traditional marketing, even though the mapping does work and it does make sense.
00:20:32
Did you have some kind of pushback? Was there something that like you had to educate people that marketing are the good guys?
00:20:39
Yes. Or to put it differently, how'd that go? How'd that go? That's a good question.
00:20:49
I would say kind of coming in, I was so used to a CPG world where marketing is a huge driver.
00:20:55
Right. Of everything we do. I remember my first kind of few weeks. Someone's like, oh, you're marketing.
00:21:01
I'll call you when I need a billboard. I was like, oh, I would prefer you call me when you want to talk about your business objectives.
00:21:08
You know, I was like, let's talk business objectives and then we'll we'll talk about tactics.
00:21:13
But I think, you know, they've been incredibly receptive to what are we what are we trying to achieve and how we can demonstrate that marketing is a driver for growth.
00:21:22
And so thinking about how you engage with different stakeholders on that journey is so critical because you have not everybody is in the same boat.
00:21:31
Right. Not everyone believes that marketing is a driver for growth. So how do you show that for some of our physician or leadership?
00:21:39
You know, they are their health care folks. So they understand science. So being able to go towards building frameworks, leveraging some of our science based approaches in people like Byron Sharp,
00:21:50
Les Benet, Mark Ritzen, a lot of the big names that you hear in some of the science and evidence based marketing approaches,
00:21:58
we were able to really bring them on board, show them, tell them what we think is true and then prove it to them through our own data and our own efforts.
00:22:07
So it's been a journey, but I think they've been very receptive the whole the whole way.
00:22:12
Byron Sharp, I know him from Ehrenberg Bass. He's the big player in CPG world. Mark Ritzen as well.
00:22:19
These are pretty big names. And that's like a big idea. The double jeopardy effect, penetration and frequency.
00:22:27
And it is interesting to think about that kind of model in health care also, because it should hold.
00:22:33
But it is kind of a different way of thinking about the world. Yes. And I just to build on Barbara's point, I do want to check in with Barbara and I.
00:22:41
We do the we do the we do like a pulse check on our leaders. We ask them we have to ask the A.I. question.
00:22:48
So what's your point? What is Piedmont's point of view on bringing artificial intelligence and these kinds of tools inside the building to help with efficiency?
00:22:56
How does it augment? How does it how does it make the patient engagement experience better?
00:23:00
If at all, how are you using it and what's your point of view more generally? I love the way you ask that question.
00:23:06
So one is I would say we are absolutely proponents of using A.I., especially if and where it can help our patient experience or our provider experience.
00:23:16
So obviously, we're very careful with things that come into our technology environment so that we're appropriately protecting our patient data, that we're not exposing undue risk.
00:23:25
Health care is one of the highest targeted industries for bad actors and malware and ransomware and things like that.
00:23:32
So we're very careful with what we bring in. But there's amazing opportunities to improve the patient experience through A.I. So one example is using some of the ambient listening tools when you're in that moment of care.
00:23:46
So providers are able to get patient consent, turn on the ambient listening so that I can have a conversation with you, look you in the eye, discuss your symptoms and not be neck deep in your EMR, electronic medical record charting.
00:24:02
Yes. Yes. So that's a great use. That's a fantastic. This human, human element allows them to be in the moment.
00:24:10
And it also reduces and improves the provider experience of the amount of time they spend charting at night or, you know, whatever.
00:24:17
So when you think about is it better for the provider, is it better for the patient?
00:24:22
That's something that we should do from our point down the pit. Ladies, you know, we're about to have a pop culture moment here.
00:24:31
Hold on. Hold on. Let's make space. Charting much, much faster is a really big plot point in the pit.
00:24:41
Yeah. No, O'Reilly's crushing it for us all. He's like, your point is we can avoid physician burnout by implementing A.I. So it's a good one.
00:24:53
Excellent. But, yeah, I think from a marketing perspective, you know, we see a ton of opportunities for marketing and digital patient experience for us to continue that journey as well.
00:25:03
We are waiting in line for some things where we still need clearance and that type of that type of thing.
00:25:09
But when you think about how fast we've grown in terms of the number of locations we have versus our resources haven't necessarily grown at the same rate, it allows us to do more with less or do more with the same, I guess I should say, and be able to help more people.
00:25:25
So we're almost out of time. But I along these lines, it's related to A.I. in a way, is the other thing that people use in conjunction with A.I. frequently is customer analytics, customer data.
00:25:36
And you've alluded to that before. But that's another thing that's really different in health care, because there's all these privacy rules, regulation rules, what you can say, what you can't say.
00:25:46
You've got to get your lawyers to look at everything. I mean, has that has that been something that's been difficult bumping your head against or have you figured out how to navigate that?
00:25:56
If there's someone who's figured out a hundred percent how to navigate it, I would love to hear from them.
00:26:00
Please feel free to email me. Yeah, it's a work in progress. I would say, you know, first, we will always protect the patient data and our compliance above all else.
00:26:13
So we are still working on through what that looks like and what data we should use, what we can use on any given execution.
00:26:21
But I think getting to the right data sets, even if it's at a more macro level that can inform versus a PII level that can inform our strategy going forward, will be greatly enabled by A.I. So I think we're all hoping to get to the right place with that.
00:26:37
I love that. So, Kate, I'll share with you that Barbara is doing some work on the patient experience and some and some research that she's working on standing up right now.
00:26:44
So I want to I want to sort of ask a question that might help Barbara's research or at least provide some hypotheses.
00:26:51
Let us put you into the time capsule and have you take a look at the health care space three years, five years, seven years down the line.
00:26:59
What are some of the big things that based on the stuff you've seen at Piedmont that you're paying attention to?
00:27:06
Trends, things that may not be obvious from reading the tea leaves. What are your thoughts on some things that we should be paying attention to?
00:27:13
And that's an interesting, interesting and tricky question. I think probably one is how and what role what role some of the technology companies will play going even further in to the patient experience and being able to leverage A.I. to better deliver that patient experience and more seamlessly connect patients to the care they need.
00:27:37
When you think about kind of one of the bigger macro trends, there's a very large shortage coming from a provider perspective.
00:27:45
So, you know, less people, less providers available to help care for everybody. Georgia has the has I will not let me not put a number because I'll say it wrong.
00:27:57
But there is a large shortage of physicians that's anticipated across specialties.
00:28:01
So when you think about what are care delivery models, yeah, what are what are care delivery models that can be enabled either through technology or different ways that we'll be able to address that coming shortage?
00:28:17
And then, of course, there's always changing health care dynamics in the political space and the financial space that we we keep an eye out.
00:28:28
But ultimately, we just want to focus on how we get patients the right care that they need today and then what we will do in three and five years from now, from the long term vision perspective.
00:28:37
Yeah, maybe we'll have like robots do surgery, robots doing stuff. Yes, I agree.
00:28:44
It sounds like that you got your wish when you made the jump. You've learned a lot of new things, but found that your tools in the CPG world translated really well to the new world of health care.
00:28:57
So Kate Metzinger is vice president of marketing at Piedmont Health Care. Thank you so much for joining us today.
00:29:04
And if our listeners are interested in finding out more about this health care marketing or more about Piedmont Health, where should they go?
00:29:10
Go to Piedmont dot org. And we are happy to have have you guys check that out. And we will go from there.
00:29:17
And remember, they're world class heart transplant. So if you're not in Georgia, that's right.
00:29:24
If you come on, come on down to Georgia. We would love to care for you. Thank you so much for joining us.
00:29:31
And that's all the time we have for today. We'd like to thank our producer, Jacob Gradnik.
00:29:36
And thank you all for listening. We'll be back soon. Until then, this has been Marketing Matters on the Wharton Podcast Network.
00:29:43
I'm Barbara Kahn here with America's Read.