Instead, healthcare vendors should ensure they are crafting messaging that truly differentiates them from their competitors and is consistent. And, according to McKinsey, most important of all is the salesforce. “Even in the digital era, our surveys show that personal interactions with sales reps remain the most influential factor — across touch points — for B2B customers.”
Do Healthcare Vendors Lack Understanding of Customer Needs?
An interesting analysis by McKinsey & Co. found that business-to-business companies frequently send on the “wrong” message in their marketing and advertising efforts.According to McKinsey: “There’s a surprising gap between the brand messages that suppliers offer to customers and what their customers really want to know.”
McKinsey analyzed marketing pieces by 90 B2B companies across various industries and identified 13 core messaging themes. These themes ranged from low prices, to corporate social responsibility, promoting diversity and more.
According to the analysis, corporate social responsibility, sustainability and global reach were the most common themes to appear in marketing materials, but these areas appeared to have “minimal influence on buyers’ perceptions of brand strength.”
The areas that had greater influence on brand strength — effective supply chain management and specialist market knowledge — ranked as some of the lowest utilized messages by the B2B marketers.
The theme of corporate social responsibility is one we see often in healthcare. It’s an easy message for healthcare vendors. While it’s true that their products and services do help healthcare organizations deliver care — and that the link can be made from product to healing a sick patient — that’s not really the message healthcare executives are looking for when trying to differentiate between PET scanners, electronic health record systems or other large capital purchases.
