Netflix recently released the latest Bear Grylls interactive adventure. Viewers can make decisions along the way with each decision producing a different outcome. Targeted to a younger audience, the show teaches both survival skills and critical thinking, while still being entertaining for all ages.

Health care consumers aren’t very different from Bear’s viewers. They are constantly faced with decisions big and small that have ramifications on their well-being.

Much like television executives, health plans and health plan teams analyze data and trends and do their best to create programming that drives desired behaviors. While television targets its content to viewer demographics, managed care organizations target their content and programs to health cohorts – shared conditions, similar behaviors, predisposition to adverse events, and so forth.

Persona-based marketing

Most health care marketers use cohorts to create personas – fictional, generic profiles of a consumer based on data and research. Persona-based marketing utilizes these profiles to tailor content and offerings that drive specific actions and behaviors.

A good persona defines key characteristics at a granular level and combined with good outreach, takes the consumer through a series of linear, sequential steps toward the desired outcome. We all interact with persona-based marketing every day. In fact, if you are reading this, you are likely one of our personas.

While persona-based marketing is a more personalized approach than traditional mass marketing, it is often still missing a person at the center driving the choice and decisions of their experience.

Person-centered marketing

 While fundamentally we are all called to know our consumers and meet them where they are, marketing to a health plan’s member base should look very different than marketing to a traditional B2C consumer base.

There is an opportunity for health plans to take a page from Netflix and Bear Grylls. Health plans can provide an individualized path for their consumers to take using data as a starting point and then reflected through unique circumstances and choices along the way. We refer to this as person-centered marketing.

The practice of person-centered thinking is rooted in the foundational principle that every individual has the ability to move towards desired health and wellness goals when the proper conditions are present. In turn, person-centered marketing is highly individualized to unique behaviors and actions, ultimately allowing the consumer to drive what happens next.

Achieving desired health outcomes

 By providing multiple paths for a consumer to choose a desired action and behavior, health care programs, content, and outreach all have a much better chance of creating healthier outcomes.

Health plans and their teams start each day with compassion and the desire to help others. The key to supporting your health plan’s members is to meet them where they are in their journey, understand their individual goals and circumstances, and to continue to innovate.