Humanizing Healthcare: Emotional Intersections in Marketing
A Strategic Lens for the Healthcare Marketer
As a healthcare marketing professional, did you know that you’re rarely speaking to just one person? I’m gonna bet you do. There are many cases where this is evident. You’re speaking to multiple people at once: a patient and a caregiver, a clinician and an administrator, or a community and the system that serves it. And effective communication demands that you resonate with each of the people in the conversation. That can be difficult, especially if you don’t have the healthcare consumer insights that help you to fully understand the lived experiences, emotional states, and internal narratives each person brings to the table.
That’s where the Intersections of Common Human Truth™ come into play.
This concept refers to a strategic and interpretive layer that builds upon the Five Dimensions of Emotional Truth™: needs, motivations, fears, hopes, and beliefs. Once qualitative research data has been coded into those dimensions, we look for patterns and intersections where these emotional truths overlap across diverse individuals, stakeholder groups, or communities.
These intersections are rich in human context and empathy. This empathy mapping process reveals emotional throughlines that reflect shared human realities across seemingly different experiences, like a cardiology patient and his or her spouse. Understanding these intersections is crucial in multi-stakeholder communication and audience segmentation.
What Are Intersections of Common Human Truth?
These intersections are overlapping emotional insights that transcend surface-level consumer data and represent resonant themes that converge to create unity and collaboration. They often sit at the core of strategic narratives and can inform both branding and human-centered healthcare marketing and communications.
It’s important to clarify something here: Intersections of Common Human Truth can take two distinct, yet equally important forms:
1. Persona-Based Intersections
This is where different stakeholder types—patients, caregivers, providers, advocacy, or administrators—share emotional realities within the context of a healthcare matter. These truths emerge when you analyze multiple personas and find emotional throughlines across their needs, motivations, fears, hopes, or beliefs.
Knowing these intersections allow you, the marketer, to create messaging and experience strategies that address multiple perspectives at once—connecting across roles and responsibilities in the healthcare journey.
Persona-based Intersection:
A parent, a teenager with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA), and a pediatrician all experience some form of motivation, hope, or need that intersects in the emotionally charged process of transitioning the patient from pediatric to adult care. Their emotional truths aren’t identical, but they converge in meaningful ways.
2. Geographic or Regional Intersections
These are emotional truths that are not tied to stakeholder type, but instead rooted in place, culture, cohort, or community identity. In this case, people who may have different clinical profiles or personas still feel the same way about certain healthcare topics—regardless of where they live, what their community has experienced, or how local systems operate.
These insights will help you tune messaging and marketing strategy (and design) to specific market areas, regions or cohorts—enabling you to create personalized and localized healthcare marketing campaigns.
Geographic-based Intersection:
A caregiver in rural Appalachia, a single mother in Atlanta, and a retired veteran in Kentucky might all express a fear of being dismissed or forgotten by the system. Across these distinct groups, there’s a shared emotional reality driven by geographic isolation, strained access, or systemic distrust.
Why This Distinction Matters to You
Whether you’re designing campaigns for a targeted service line, a specialty clinic, a regional hospital system, or a national brand, you need to understand that emotional truth flows in different patterns:
- Across personas, emotional truth helps you navigate conversations and decision-making roles.
- Across geographies or cohorts, emotional truth helps you connect with people who may not share identities—but who share realities.
These intersections are more than trends. They are deep, durable patterns in the way people relate to illness, healing, and institutions. They reveal what’s true across differences, giving you a toolkit to:
- Unify messaging without being generic
- Anchor creative briefs in emotional relevance
- Position your brand not just as clinically credible, but as emotionally intelligent and human-first
A Real-World Example
Navigating Care Delivery Through Shared Emotional Ground
Consider Susan, an 18-year-old living with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). For years, her parents have been the primary decision-makers and caregivers—advocating, managing treatments, scheduling appointments, and interpreting medical guidance. A trusted pediatric rheumatologist has guided the family through the ups and downs of the condition, providing expertise and emotional steadiness.
But now, Susan is growing up, and must continue her care with an adult Rheumatologist. She is beginning to form her own opinions, preferences, and boundaries around her health and healthcare experience. She is starting to ask new questions, not just about medications and symptoms, but about identity, independence, and the role their condition plays in her life. Susan’s parents, meanwhile, are learning to let go, to support without controlling, to protect without preventing autonomy. And the pediatric rheumatologist faces the challenge of gracefully passing care to an adult provider while ensuring the child and family feel stable, seen, and supported in this transition.
In this moment, the needs, motivations, and fears of the child, the parent, and the clinician are not identical, but they do intersect.
- The young adult needs to feel heard, respected, and empowered.
- The parent needs to trust that their child is ready—and that the system won’t fail them.
- The clinician needs to ensure continuity, competence, and compassion in care.
The shared emotional truth might sound like:
Susan: “I need them to give me space. I can do this, I understand and need them to know that I will be okay. I’m not a child anymore. ”
Parent: “I feel like we are abandoning her… will she be okay? She is no longer a child, but an adult taking charge of her own care. Will her new doctor be good?”
Physician: “Susan is a smart child, she can handle this. I need to know mom and dad will be okay with letting go. Dr. Smith (Susan’s new adult Rheumatologist) is very competent in these situations”
We see here three divergent truths: a need for trust and independence; a fear of abandonment or failure; and a hope for self-sufficiency. This is exactly the kind of intersection where your marketing, messaging, and experience design must begin.
Because when you uncover shared truths across people who see the world differently, you’re not just bridging gaps in understanding. You’re creating the conditions for stakeholder alignment with messaging and communication that will drive behavior.
For marketers, this is the difference between speaking to one audience and resonating with many. Intersections of Common Human Truth allow you to position your content and messaging in a way that speaks simultaneously to (in the example above) the parent, the pediatrician, and the maturing patient—each with distinct roles, yet unified by shared emotional ground.
When you position your brand at the center of that shared emotional space, you become more than a marketer seeking to be a service provider. You become a trusted translator, offering a common language with emotional relevance that builds clarity, trust, and confidence among all parties involved.
This isn’t just good marketing—it’s effective behavior change.
It drives brand affinity by building empathy.
It drives better outcomes by aligning perspectives.
And it drives healthier communities by helping everyone—patients, caregivers, clinicians—speak the same emotional language on the road to better care.
These intersections are not just insights.
They are where strategy becomes human, and where marketing fuels behaviors.
David McDonald, Co-founder & CEO
As CEO of LIFT and a trained anthropologist, David brings a deep passion for human understanding to every facet of leadership. Blending empathy with innovation and data, he drives empathic, people-centered solutions that elevate the healthcare marketing profession and successful client outcomes.