Marketing Upheaval Creative Outhouse

Mat Mathews, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Boys and Girls Clubs of America (BGCA), is guiding this 160-plus year old organization through a  digital transformation.  BGCA is wonderful organization that impacts children all over the world and technology is playing an ever expanding role in helping kids grown, learn and keeping them safe. As Mat says, "Everyone likes change until it has to happens to them." He talks about is approach and how he gets people onboard and motivates them to embrace the change.  Mat has worked with Creative Outhouse to launch huge initiatives and a big part of the conversation is about behavior change. It's a great episode you don't want to miss if you're facing any organizational change in the future. 
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Midtown Atlanta, like all urban areas, took a huge hit during the pandemic. The move for people to work from home has also hurt the businesses and communities who = depend on the influx of daily visitors. Brian Carr, Director of Marketing and Communications for Midtown Alliance, and his team are creating new reasons to get people to come back to work in town and stay longer once they arrive.  He discusses what's working and what isn't and how Midtown is helping people gain the one big thing they're missing— personal connections.
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Midtown Atlanta, like all urban areas, took a huge hit during the pandemic. The move for people to work from home has also hurt the businesses and communities who  depend on the influx of daily visitors. Brian Carr, Director of Marketing and Communications for Midtown Alliance, and his team are creating new reasons to get people to come back to work in town and stay longer once they arrive.  He discusses what's working and what isn't and how Midtown is helping people gain the one big thing they're missing— personal connections.
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On this episode, Dr. Marni Bender, a clinical psychologist, talks about how fear and anxiety are driving the general public's behavior and what marketers can do to affect positive behavior change. Creative Outhouse specializes in behavior change and this episode shows how similar psychology and marketing can be. 

Well, anxiety has gone through the roof as you can imagine. For people who already had anxiety, it has been exacerbated tremendously— especially anxiety around health issues. With COVID, many people are very afraid of getting infected or losing family members, things like that. But also, I’m seeing people who haven't typically struggled with anxiety in the past. IN addition to health anxiety, we’re seeing issues about financial security. But there's also been a sort of a vague uneasiness overall about what is happening in the world; like it feels as if the world is falling apart for a lot of people and they don't have a lot of security or safety about what's coming in the future.
 
 Behavior Change Marketing Starts With Why
Rudy Fernandez
So how does that manifest itself?
Dr. Marni Bender
In terms of basic symptoms, it's a lot of physical symptoms like upset stomach, headaches, general muscle tightness, that makes it hard to just relax. And that comes out a lot of times in anger, fighting, just an irritability with others. It also tends to make people want to control things or avoid things. When people get anxious, they get very avoidant of things that make them anxious because it makes your anxiety go away. Or they get very controlling.  Again, that's a way to give them to reduce their anxiety. If they have a sense of control, it's often an illusion of control.
Rudy Fernandez
So it's a binary either nothing or try to control what are some of the things they try to control that are sort of irrational?
Dr. Marni Bender
I would say it's actually not binary. It's a matter of degree. But I see what you're saying like people seem to have the opposite response either controller or avoid, but how much they do it is certainly a matter of degree. We all probably do that a little bit. But the more extreme we get, the more problems we tend to have functioning in life. A simple example would be people that are extremely ordered. if something gets out of place,
Rudy Fernandez
Like organizing a spice rack or whatever…
Dr. Marni Bender
Yes, exactly
Rudy Fernandez
And what kind of things are they avoiding?
Dr. Marni Bender
It can be seeing people. It can be taking care of their health, dealing with their personal finances, people tend to start getting into financial trouble... They don't want to pay attention to it. So they either ignore it and just start incurring lots of debt. Or they will almost go to the other extreme of like, I don't have a problem and spend willy nilly shopping and things like that.
We're Missing Clear Messaging
Rudy Fernandez
You brought up something that I've noticed. We are all still trying to feel around for what is the best way or what is a comfortable way to engage with friends, for example. We had some other friends over and we sat outside. When we went inside to get food, they came inside with us.  It was awkward because we’re thinking, “there’s a reason we're in the heat.” So it's really trying to figure that out your social interactions, and you're right sometimes It's like, let's just avoid social interactions. And it's a weird balance right now.
Full transcript here: https://creativeouthouse.com/anxiety-and-consumer-behavior/  
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This episode contains mind-blowing insights into the Pharmaceutical industry, targeting HR managers, personalized healthcare marketing vs. privacy and a new term for you, “Monkey Math.” Whether you’re in marketing or not, this episode will be eye opening about the medicines you take and the unnecessary costs. 
Hey everyone. This is Rudy Fernandez from Creative Outhouse. This conversation with Kyra Hagan is eye opening. For starters, she talks about how 25 – 30 cents of every dollar a company or organization spends on healthcare goes to pharmaceuticals. And many times, there’s what Kyra calls “monkey math”. So there’s a lot of waste. So how you do you get the message to people that there’s a problem and you can solve it? How has he new world of healthcare changed messaging and tactics? Well, that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Welcome to Marketing Upheaval.

My guest is Kyra Hagan, Vice President of Marketing at RxBenefits. RxBenefits is a technology-based company that helps midsize employers get better pricing on prescriptions for their employees. Kyra has more than 20 years of healthcare IT experience and has a unique perspective on what's going on in the world of prescription drugs, and how mid-sized employers are managing that part of their coverage they offer their employees. We’re talking about that and how she engages her audiences, what's changed with the COVID crisis, and what she sees on the horizon.
Rudy: So let's start with RxBenefits. Who exactly is your customer?
Kyra: Well, RxBenefits actually has three customers. We partner with Employee Benefits Consultants, often called brokers, to bring an optimized pharmacy benefit to self-insured employers of all sizes. At the end of the day, we end up servicing the broker, the HR manager or the benefit leaders inside of that organization and all of the organizations’ employees and their family members, who we call members.
Rudy: So what is the problem that RxBenefits solves for them?
Kyra: Pharmacy is a critical benefit. It's highly utilized by employees, but it's also very costly. And I think today, about 25 - 30 cents of every healthcare dollar that an organization is spending on healthcare benefit is going to prescription drugs, with no sign of a slowdown. Unfortunately, not all of that spending is beneficial. A lot of dollars inside the system are wasted due to poorly negotiated pharmacy buying contracts, lack of clinical oversight and really poor customer value or poor customer service and explanation of the benefits. We exist to help employers bridge those gaps so they can balance the economic and the clinical value of the benefit. That tends to lower the overall cost of the pharmacy benefit by an average of about 26%.
Rudy: That sounds like an easy sell. What kind of barriers could you possibly have that if you say, we're trying to lower your cost for pharmaceuticals, your cost per employee or however you measure that, right?
Kyra: Unfortunately, there's a false perception in the marketplace from HR leaders that lowering cost in the Pharmacy Benefits means lowering coverage. 
View the rest of the transcript and show notes at: https://creativeouthouse.com/pharmaceutical-savings/
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Hey everyone. This is Rudy Fernandez from Creative Outhouse. At Creative Outhouse we create brilliant content and integrated marketing campaigns. Just go to Creative Outhouse.com and click on Creative Work if you don’t believe me. This episode with Kathryn Smith of MedShape is really enlightening. MedShape supplies foot and ankle surgeons with advanced devices for surgeries. Most ortho procedures were stopped for a few months. So who would have a better overall picture of how that’s starting to pick up than the people who supply the materials for surgery? And their customers are primarily Doctors. So I wanted to hear what’s changed in terms of how to market to an audience that’s always part of the marketing mix in healthcare. I learned a lot talking to Katherine and you will too. So enjoy. Welcome to Marketing Upheaval.
My guest today is Kathryn Smith, Director of Marketing for MedShape. Kathryn holds a doctorate in Bioengineering from Georgia Tech. So I have a lot of questions about that career path. She’s been with MedShape for more than nine years. MedShape makes advanced medical devices using foot and ankle surgeries. The COVID-19 crisis brought about 80% of medical procedures to a halt, and foot and ankle surgeries are among those procedures. We’re going to talk about marketing in this environment and what it looks like moving forward.

Transcript:
From Bio-engineering to Marketing
Rudy: So, first question is personal. What stands out to me is you have a PhD in Bioengineering. And now you’re a Director of Marketing. So tell me about that journey.
Kathryn: I think that’s the number one question I get all the time. I got my PhD in Bioengineering. I started with MedShape after I graduated, working on the R&D side, actually as a Postdoc, which is a typical position. After you get your PhD you go on to do further research and publish. MedShape is a unique company in that we’re very research focused, for our size. We probably have more PhDs on staff than a typical medical device company. And so I started out doing benchtop research around our products, collecting data to publish. So I started working more with our surgeons or surgeon customers on these studies, spending more time out in the field in surgeries. As we started to launch more products and helping train the surgeons on the products and then get feedback for our pipeline. That eventually transitioned into a marketing role. I started out as a marketing associate, and then have been the marketing director for about 6 years now.
I didn’t know anything about marketing when I started. I’ve definitely learned a lot along the way. What I have learned is, marketing medical devices is very similar to being a researcher. If you’re a scientist, you’re collecting data and then you’re trying to figure out how best to tell the story around your data. Be it in a presentation or conference presentation or in a paper and marketing medical devices or marketing in general is the same thing. You’re crafting the story around your products. And given my technical background, I think that’s definitely proven to be beneficial for me and the technical nature of our products to be able to understand the data around it and then be able to figure out how to effectively communicate it to our customers.
View the full transcript and images at: https://creativeouthouse.com/orthopedic-surgeons
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