On marketing health in a new consumer-driven India

In the last year and a half, health has been the centre of attraction across the board. For marketers in the healthcare ecosystem, it has been a period of learning and innovation.

At the second edition of the Health Communication Conference, Suman Varma, CMO, Hamdard; Smita Murarka, CMO, Duroflex; Darshana Shah, Senior Vice President Marketing, Aditya Birla Health Insurance; and Nikky Gupta, Co-founder and Director, Teamwork Communications Group spoke at large about the shift in marketing strategies in healthcare and the growing importance of content.

For Smita Murarka, the conversation around the importance of sleep during the pandemic has helped Duroflex's cause and it was the right marketing strategies that propagated the brand’s ideologies successfully.

“Sleep used to be a highly ignored issue but once the pandemic started and people started focussing on we knew that this was really the awareness that we were waiting for. When business was active pre-Covid it was a choice between pure product communications versus talking about sleep.

"But now it has become easier because consumers now understand what those few things are that are critical for health. Awareness like this put things in favour of brands like us that are not so much healthcare brands but cater to some element of health. So for us, it’s been a great opportunity because as a nation we have started taking our health more seriously than ever before,” said Murarka.

Speaking about Hamdard's efforts to merge its traditional brand image with a more digitally savvy one, Varma emphasised how they rolled out a lot of digital campaigns to keep the brand's presence alive.

"We did a lot of insight mining. We found out that it is the mother who is taking care of the family’s health and we did a lot of communication around that. It was also the millennials who pointed out quite a few new trends for us,” said Varma.

For Shah too it was an exciting period of re-strategising at Aditya Birla Health Insurance when customers woke up to the idea of having health insurance.

"Suddenly it became a pull category and not a push category. Our whole idea was to be a health first company and during this time it helped us to build on our proposition. We created a conversation around new health partners and health buddies and created a whole new series called ‘Sehat Ki Nayi Adat’. This gave us a lot of customers coming to us from the health lens. We reached almost 70 million customers in this period through virtual home videos,” she said.

Gupta whose communication firm works with more than 45 health brands said her clients have been asking for a custom-made communication plan during the pandemic. “Things are changing so frequently that you cannot rely on long-term plans so our teams are working round the clock and they are making short-term plans for 15 days or for even seven days according to the client's requirements,” she said.

Talking about the importance of content, Varma said, “When you are a health and wellness brand, you have to look at the efficacy of the product rather than just the imagery around it and you have to be talking the youth language and also talking to people who influence decision-making.

"While we were enjoying all the attention that we were getting from the digital word we decided we would dial down the age of the brand by taking on what really resonates with young consumers especially for our Safi range. We came up with three films on Safi and it was really well received.”

For Murarka too the pandemic was an opportunity to create the right content. “We make premium mattresses and doctor recommended mattresses in a country where most of the purchase in the category is unbranded. Once Covid struck, we were ready with a lot of content. When went all out and we released a campaign on sleep for immunity."

"We did things that no other brands in the category had done before. Last year during the first wave there was a lot of stickiness on content so a lot of people were quite upbeat and it worked brilliantly for us. Once business became normal, things didn’t change for us in terms of content. We knew that this is something that had to stay and we decided we would balance it out with business content around products etc. So before the second wave, we had one of our largest IP properties ‘The sounds of sleep’ which became quite viral organically. But in the second wave, the mood was really sombre so we tried to understand the mood of the consumer and took a backseat and for 15 days we got doctors on board and shifted our strategy to get qualified experts and make them talk about how sleep impacts things like vaccine efficacy etc,” she said.

For Shah content changed the whole conversation during the pandemic. “This category has always been known as Mediclaim which is a PSU product so when we entered the market we wanted to talk more about health insurance and the health factor in it. We started a community when we started which was called Active Living which started with limited members of about 65,000.

"Earlier we were focusing more on static posts and writing blogs or long-form articles. Last year, suddenly we realised the need for a lot of content need and empathy with the consumer so we bought all variety of content whether it was podcast or music or videos and obviously static and infographics on the platform. We created almost 200+ content pieces. So last year we had million-plus visitors in the community and today we have 20,000 plus subscribers. We also have interest groups where we saw 300% jump in conversations and hence content has become a huge piece for us,” Shah said,

Adding a quick tip Gupta said, “Be it social media content or PR content or the influencer marketing content one thing that we must focus on is trust, empathy and right information because when you give a piece of wrong information it spreads like wildfire. So keeping that in mind being a communication firm it was our responsibility to keep the focus on and plan the right communication for them.”