Crucial Tools for Healthcare Marketing Segmentation

Empowering Hospital Marketing Through Patient Empathy

Understanding the intricate realities of patients, providers, and communities is paramount in healthcare marketing. This is where ethnography—a qualitative research method centered on observing and interpreting human behavior within their natural environments—proves invaluable in empowering patients through empathy. Ethnography allows us to uncover deep-seated beliefs, motivations, and emotional truths that traditional research methods might overlook.

At LIFT Healthcare, we harness the power of ethnographic insights to craft strategies that resonate on a profoundly human level—setting a strong foundation for patient empowerment as well as positive ROI. By delving into the lived experiences of our target audiences, we can decode the nuanced factors that influence their healthcare decisions. These rich, qualitative insights inform every facet of the healthcare marketing strategies we craft for our clients. This approach ensures that strategy and voice are not only data-driven but also deeply empathetic.

Central to our approach to thematically organizing these ethnographic insights is a proprietary tool that we have designed called The Five Dimensions of Emotional Truth—a foundational approach to organizing and making sense of the tremendous amount of data that is generated through ethnography and qualitative research.  

The Five Dimensions of Emotional Truth: Hopes, Fears, Motivations, Needs, and Beliefs

These thematic categories provide a foundation for understanding the emotional and psychological drivers of healthcare audiences. By organizing qualitative insights and stakeholder understanding into these five thematic areas, we cultivate a comprehensive view of the factors that shape the behaviors and decisions-making process of the communities we serve.

Needs are tacit or explicit requirements of patients and stakeholders that can be psychological, cultural, emotional, or spiritual. Needs uncover essential requirements for a patient’s well-being, comfort, and satisfaction.

Motivations can be viewed as deep desires, or a willingness to act in a certain way to accomplish a goal. These insights reveal the underlying drivers that prompt individuals to take action.

Fears are viewed as the result of threats perceived to be uncontrollable, unfavorable, or unavoidable. These insights highlight the anxieties and concerns that may hinder the stakeholder’s engagement with healthy behaviors or healthcare services.

Hopes are feelings of optimism or a desire for a particular outcome. Hopes represent the aspirations and positive outcomes individuals seek in their healthcare journeys.

Beliefs are the state of mind in which a person thinks something to be the case, regardless of empirical evidence. These important insights encapsulate the cultural and personal convictions that influence their perceptions and choices.

Coding Qualitative Data Using the Five Dimensions of Emotional Truth

The Five Dimensions of Emotional Truth serve as a robust framework for coding and analyzing qualitative data, providing several key benefits:

1. Comprehensive Understanding:

• The Five Dimensions make sense of a broad spectrum of human experiences and emotions. By categorizing data into the Five Dimensions, LIFT ensures that no critical aspect of patient understanding is overlooked, which allows for more accurate and holistic insights into patient behaviors and decision-making processes.

2. Streamlined Analysis:

• Coding data using these dimensions streamlines the analysis process, and provides research staff with a baseline of understanding before diving into a more in-depth analysis. It provides a structured first-level approach to categorizing and interpreting qualitative data, making it easier for the insights team to identify patterns, trends, and key themes.

3. Enhanced Communication:

• The Five Dimensions help the insights team quickly convey complex data in a more digestible and relatable format for clients. By organizing data into familiar and intuitive categories, LIFT can effectively communicate the findings to healthcare providers, healthcare marketers, and other stakeholders. This clarity facilitates better decision-making and strategic planning.

4. Focused Insights:

• Each dimension represents a crucial aspect of patient experience that influences healthcare decisions of the stakeholder as well as the strategic and creative focus of the marketer. By first focusing on needs, motivations, fears, hopes, and beliefs, LIFT can uncover deep-rooted factors that drive patient behavior, and then expand on thematic understanding to provide an even deeper look at the realities of the stakeholder (and how those realities impact strategy and creativity). These focused insights enable the development of targeted hospital marketing strategies that resonate with specific patient cohorts.

5. Empathy and Connection:

• Using the Five Dimensions fosters empathy and a deeper connection with patients and related stakeholders, ensuring that marketing strategies are not only data-driven but also human-centered. By addressing the emotional and psychological aspects of patient experiences, LIFT can create marketing messages and healthcare solutions that truly resonate with patients, fostering trust and loyalty.

6. Strategic Alignment:

• The insights derived from first coding data in this rigorous manner are aligned with overarching business goals. By understanding the emotional truths of patients, LIFT can develop strategies that align with both the healthcare provider’s objectives as well as the patients’ needs. This alignment ensures that marketing efforts are both effective and ethically sound.

The Versatility of the Five Dimensions of Emotional Truth

LIFT’s Five Dimensions serve as a comprehensive framework for categorizing and understanding the multifaceted experiences of patients and stakeholders. This framework is particularly effective as a first-level of thematic analysis in making sense of a tremendous amount of data that comes from ethnographic studies, where the goal is to uncover deep, qualitative insights into human behavior and decision-making processes.

Flexibility for Granular Insights: While the Five Dimensions offer a structured approach to categorizing data, they are flexible enough to allow for additional, more granular themes to emerge. For instance, within the ‘Fears’ dimension, a common fear might be the fear of pain. However, the theme of pain can be coded and thematically explored in greater detail as its own category within a study report—for example fear of stigma in the case of obesity or fear of complications in the case of knee replacement. In this situation, social stigma, pain, and complications emerge as their own categories for thematic analysis and strategic consideration.

This inductive approach ensures that:

• Specific Themes Are Not Overlooked: By allowing subcategories to emerge, LIFT can uncover detailed insights that might otherwise be missed if confined to broader categories.
• Richness of Data Is Preserved: The framework provides a high-level overview while still accommodating the depth and complexity of human experiences uncovered during ethnographic research and embedded in the source data.
• Contextual Nuances Are Highlighted: Subcategories within the dimensions help in understanding the specific context and nuances of each participant’s experiences, making the insights more actionable and relevant for healthcare marketers.

In summary, the Five Dimensions of Emotional Truth provide a robust and flexible framework for coding data in ethnographic studies. The Dimensions ensure a comprehensive capture of key aspects of stakeholder experience while allowing room for additional, more granular categories and themes to emerge. This dual capability ensures that LIFT can deliver nuanced and actionable insights to healthcare providers, ultimately enhancing the effectiveness of marketing strategies and patient engagement initiatives.

Harnessing the Five Dimensions of Emotional Truth to Build Valuable Strategy and Marketing Tools

The Five Dimensions of Emotional Truth, and more specifically qualitative insights derived from human-to-human interactions with stakeholders, are invaluable for hospital marketers and strategists aiming to create deeply relevant and impactful tools such as journey maps, service blueprints, language and context maps, and personas—tools that are table stakes for healthcare marketing strategies and campaigns.

Here’s how this approach enhances each of these tools:

1. Journey Maps:

• Deep Relevance: By incorporating insights from the Five Dimensions, journey maps can focus on more than the sequential elements of a patient’s clinical or health care path—emotional truths layer the language, experiences, and emotions of the stakeholder throughout their healthcare journey. Layering fears, motivations, and hopes allows marketers to map out each touchpoint in a journey with empathy and precision.
• Personalization: Journey maps can highlight individualized paths, ensuring that each patient segment or cohort’s unique needs and emotional states are addressed at every stage of their healthcare experience.

2. Language and Context Maps:

• Effective Communication: Insights into the emotional dimensions help create language maps that use terminology and messaging resonant with patients’ beliefs and hopes. This ensures that communication is not only clear but also emotionally engaging.
• Contextual Understanding: Context maps benefit from a detailed understanding of the cultural and personal beliefs influencing patient behavior, enabling the creation of messages that are culturally sensitive and contextually appropriate.

3. Cohorts and Personas:

• Accurate Targeting: The Five Dimensions provide a nuanced understanding of different patient groups, allowing for the creation of detailed personas and cohorts. These personas capture the specific needs, motivations, fears, hopes, and beliefs of each group, ensuring targeted and effective marketing strategies.
• Enhanced Engagement: By addressing the unique emotional and psychological profiles of each persona, marketers can craft messages and educational content that truly resonate, fostering stronger connections and higher engagement levels.

4. Impactful Marketing and Trusted Messages:

• Resonance and Impact: Understanding the five dimensions allows marketers to create messages that speak directly to the emotional core of their audience. This ensures that marketing and educational messages are not only informative but also deeply resonant and impactful.
• Increased Trust: By addressing the genuine fears, needs, and hopes of patients, marketers can build trust and loyalty, leading to more effective patient education and better health outcomes.

In summary, the Five Dimensions of Emotional Truth help marketers and strategists create tools and messages that are deeply relevant and empathetic. This approach ensures that every aspect of the patient journey, from initial contact to ongoing engagement, is crafted with a profound understanding of the emotional and psychological drivers that influence patient behavior. The Dimensions also provide a robust and flexible framework for coding data in ethnographic studies, capturing key aspects of stakeholder experience while allowing for additional granular categories and themes to emerge. This dual capability leads to more effective and impactful healthcare marketing and consumer education initiatives, delivering nuanced and actionable insights to healthcare providers and enhancing the overall effectiveness of marketing strategies and patient engagement efforts.