The Emotional Complexity of Health Brands
How many drug ads have you seen where someone is on a beach, fishing with a grandchild, walking or riding a bike through a verdant park, or cooking? I'd personally put my own estimate at well over 100. Many pharma companies at this point tell their agencies they don't want a cliched ad with one of those scenes. Yet they keep getting made, and it is worth spending some time to think about why.
The first thing to consider is what most drugs actually do. I don't mean this at a scientific level, but rather what the experience of taking a drug means for most patients emotionally. At the most basic level, most prescribed drugs promise the possibility of feeling more normal: you have a condition that keeps you from feeling like your best, most authentic self, and the drug lessens (or possibly even eliminates) that problem. And if you keep your analysis at that superficial level, you next try to find a way to depict that feeling of more normalcy. So you are naturally drawn to scenes of leisure, fun and contentment.
(Why do they use the same settings so frequently, though? Two reasons: first, because the regulations around drug ads mean then need to show a typical patient doing something that they could likely do based on their age and health. That rules out a diabetes ad with the patient playing basketball. Second, advertisers want to capture something widely experienced by their target audience, so you won't see a COPD drug ad with the patient on a safari.)
But, as I said, that's a superficial way of looking at why people take drugs, and how they feel about their conditions. The emotional release of normalcy is preceded by the complex feelings patients have about their diseases, and even the idea of normalcy tends to mask some important nuances. To explain what I mean, I'd like to give two examples: one from my experience interviewing cancer patients and oncologists, and another that's a bit more personal.
Most people with cancer are initially devastated by their disease, with the shock of the news mingling with a sense of being cursed or singled out for a cruel fate. What is interesting is that patients tend to then sort into one of two groups: those who are determined to fight to the end, and those who become passive and accept whatever their doctor says they should or shouldn't do. Then they reach a point of anxious optimism, where they hope their treatment will work well while expecting that their personal curse will continue and they won't do well on treatment. If they progress to another round of therapy, they tend to be both more cynical and more informed, making more rational calculations based on whether a given treatment seems "worth it". When they do have a good result from treatment, they feel fortunate, as if they'd dove out of the path of an onrushing car just in time, but also have feelings of guilt to the extent that they've known other patients who didn't do as well.
Are you going to get all of that into a 30 second TV spot? OF course not: that might be hard enough to capture in a movie. But tapping into those emotions, especially if you're doing so at the right points along their journey, will be much more meaningful than the generic "you have a chance" ads you see everywhere. At the very least, deciding whether your ad is meant to appeal to the fighter mentality or the more passive mentality will allow your message to be much more specific and motivating
To paint an even more detailed picture, let me explain it from the perspective of a condition I deal with: rosacea. For about 3 years, I've had many friends and coworkers ask me if I got too much sun recently, because rosacea has left the skin around my nose and forehead with a permanently pinkish tint. When it first emerged, I was annoyed: why isn't lotion helping? How can I get back to looking the way I want to? Then I started to feel embarrassed: does everyone notice? Do I look really bad? Then I got defiant: it isn't a big deal, and screw anyone who is judging me. All this time, I was frustrated with the slow or nonexistent progress I was making under the care of several dermatologists, who seemed content to give me ineffective treatments as long as they were risk-free. When I finally found a treatment that seemed to help, I felt almost triumphant, like the long battle would soon end, but also anxious, because the drug is systemic and can have side effects that would potentially be worse than the rosacea.
A company that wanted to connect with me would have taken the struggles I was having seriously without making me feel that my condition was any kind of major handicap: a problem to be solved that would let me live less self-consciously. Is that "normal"? Yes, but the details make the difference between connecting and being mildly insulting. If, for example, a company had run an ad with the message, “Your rosacea keeps you from feeling like your true self is showing, but if your dermatologist doesn’t know that she might not offer you treatment that can really make a difference,” I would have been very motivated to have a different conversation with my doctor.
Treating the emotional complexities of health seriously does more than make your communications better: it helps patients navigate the labyrinth of the healthcare world with a sense of purpose and support that will help them make better decisions. Do it right, and your communications can actually serve patients instead of boring them.