Marketing and health information consumers

One major challenge for me is that I am marketing a very similar product to two very different audience.

The product is our resource center and, most importantly, our special collection of patient education materials.


The audiences are:

• health care providers in our institution who could/would/should/do share these with patients, and
• visitors to the resource center
  

One is professional, one consumer. For the professional audience, the challenge is to create the best interface for our database so that it reliably and quickly returns relevant materials that are printable at point of care. For the consumer audience, it is all about the experience of visiting our center and interacting with our staff. This involves being listened to and receiving the right information, the right amount of information and in the right format. Tall orders.

How do we do it? for the database interface, we are in the middle of a large usability study and redesign. More on that later, though I am not able to share the actual interface with you.

For the resource center, I am energized by David Lee King who blogs about libraries, marketing and the social web. I followed his link to David Armano's blog, logic + emotion and found this beautiful and helpful diagram. You can find it, and great discussion about it and marketing to consumers here.

As for the rest of the discussion on Brand U.0 and creating a brand for yourself, it nearly caused this middle aged, midwestern, conservatively employed mother of 2 a personal crisis. Self branding is fine for uber- techy, artistically inclined single men. Let one of them try to brand me and it would be the marketing challenge of a lifetime.