Recipes for successful consumer health campaigns

New Delhi: In an attempt to reshape a marketer’s approach to healthcare marketing and communication, folks who spent their whole life working on strategies to market products under extremely tight regulations gathered in Gurgaon on August 30, 2024, to share their lessons from their work at the first ever Cannes Lions showcase in India.

The final day of the showcase, organised by Medulla Communications, was a blend of inspiration and knowledge-sharing. Praful Akali, Founder & MD of Medulla Communications, moderated the session, guiding attendees through a deep dive into the creativity that defined Cannes Lions 2024.

Mansi Khanna, Chief Operating Officer of the joint venture between Dr. Reddy's and Nestlé kicked off the session by defining a health marketer’s challenge as “The highest on relevance and the toughest on compliance.” 

The barriers that stand in the way of consumers choosing wellness are misinformation and taboos that affect women more than men. To stand out amidst the clutter, marketers must channel their creativity to speak clearly to the consumer while being culturally conscious. 

Khanna cited ‘The Bread Exam,’ a gold-winning campaign at Cannes Lions that uses traditional bread-baking techniques to teach women how to perform self-checks and detect early signs of breast cancer without using the words ‘breast’ or ‘cancer’ for once.

The Bread exam: Case study

Sharing her input on how a good consumer healthcare campaign should look, Khanna mentioned a campaign named “Rethink Healthy” by the AIA Group that aims to challenge traditional views on health and promote a more holistic approach to well-being.

From the horse’s lips itself, Khanna said, “It’s a deeply rooted campaign that ticks all the checkboxes of a good consumer health care campaign by literally checking the first point of being consumer and patient-centric and recognising the need and challenge of why consumers are struggling to integrate healthy lives and become healthier than what they are. The campaign is specially focused on the Asian markets, where they say, ‘Asia is becoming wealthier but not healthier.’

Marketers need to demystify health and healthy habits for consumers, and the campaign targets the exact spot. Based on hard-hitting survey results that said 80% of people believe that they are not healthy but 57% don’t do anything about it because they feel it’s such a huge struggle to work on health and 63% believe that it is going to be very intense. Before planning a campaign, marketers need to understand their consumers first.”

Isn't it time we changed the way we see health?

Diving deeper into the session, Aditi Sood, Business Unit Head, Sleep & Respiratory Care at Philips advised marketers not to sell healthcare products but to educate the consumers about the right treatment and therapy using their products.

With India being a developing economy and many Indians still fighting for access to healthcare, Sood highlighted how a focus on technology can help Indians gain access to quality healthcare services.

Suggesting marketers to consider these three key points before planning a campaign, she said, “

Firstly, access to health care is a major challenge to think about because the majority of our population is not covered under reimbursement as the paying capacity of public schemes is much less than required. Even today, 48% of Indians spend on healthcare from their own pockets.  This goes to show that one of the major areas where we can use technology is to increase affordability, to make solutions more affordable to patients.

Secondly, India’s doctor-to-population ratio stands at 1:854 and there is a shortfall of doctors by around 57%. Thirdly, awareness of credible health-related information is critically low, as 75% of tumour patients are already in advanced stages by the time they consult a doctor so the need is to build campaigns and products that solve any of these issues.”

Stating an example of how technology can be leveraged, Sood brought up a project from her work at Johnson and Johnson where her team leveraged technology to reach out to doctors during COVID-19 to train doctors on new equipment that could significantly improve surgical outcomes for cancer surgeries.

However, due to travel restrictions, meeting doctors in person was a barrier. To overcome this, her team developed an augmented reality (AR) app allowing doctors to experience the product in 3D and practice using it on a patient virtually.

For every marketer present at the session, Sood had four takeaways: Identify the bottleneck; think outside the box; consider the impact on society at large; and communicate well with the patients and the doctors before you go ahead with the product.

Last but not least, Saurabh Jain, Regional Marketing Director & SPOC at Reckitt Hygiene India, hopped onto the stage and asked every marketer present in the room to ask themselves the question - “Are we genuinely solving the consumer’s problem? Does our brand have a legitimate role in addressing the issues we’re tackling?”

“If your brand isn’t relevant to the problem, it’s unlikely that it will sustain the efforts and see the full circle of completion,” Jain added.

Putting forward the story of ‘Toiletisation of India’ Jain mentioned of a campaign that prompted building toilets in India and resulted in the making of  Akshay Kumar’s film ‘Toilet: Ek Prem Katha.’

In the words of Jain, “When we started the campaign, only 43.4% of households in India had access to toilets. Literally, 57% of the households in the country did not have access to toilets. Then the brand came in and partnered with the Government of India by tapping into popular culture and saying, ‘How could we use the cultural nuances, get into some popular beliefs and systems that people have and really make an impact?’

So, we tied up with the largest Hindi newspapers in the worst affected states and offered free matrimonial ads for women if they added five status words, ‘Ghar Mei Saaf Shauchalya Zaroori’ and the response was massive. Our five status words were included in 30% of the ads, making matrimonial pages a deafening call for constructing toilets reaching 13 million people. The initiative put immense societal pressure on grooms and their families to build and maintain toilets. The matrimonial ads completely changed the conversation around toilets and weddings have now become a key toilet-building time for families.”

Going ahead, Jain gave an eye-opening statistic where he spoke about how 70% of Indian women can’t find a clean and usable washroom when they need one because the ratio of public toilets for people in India stands at 1:20,000. “Instead of solving their problem, we force them to live with it,” Jain further added.

In a bid to enhance the accessibility of toilets, Jain mentioned how Harpic launched the Loocator app that helps people find clean and usable washrooms. 

“Utilising the familiar Google Maps API, Loocator integrates additional features such as ratings and search functionalities for toilets near you. To promote the app, cups with QR codes were distributed across the city, encouraging women to stay hydrated without fear. As a special initiative for Women’s Day, Loocator partnered with two of India’s largest public health providers to clean the most frequently used restrooms, sparking widespread conversation and engagement,” Jain noted.

Wrapping up the session, Khanna had five ‘takeaways that marketers could takeaway’ from the session. “Feel your consumer’s environment, not just know it!; Personalisation is in focus, more than ever before; Mental health is gaining huge significance in defining healthy and lastly, make it so simple that it becomes a routine.”