Writing in the Monocle Daily, Tom Webb makes some astute observations on the connection between market research, brand development, and product delivery. His look at Netflix and it’s fall from focus serves lessons that can be imported into the health context. We’ll start by looking at marketing and branding and make the connection between how those two things — and the products that are at the heart of them — parallel to health systems.
Marketing and brand management might not be at the top of what health leaders or those in non-profits, foundations, or government services care about, but that is at their peril. For marketing and branding are core design activities. Their purpose is to understand, communicate, and deliver upon expectations, preferences, and desires.
There is no difference at a fundamental level between marketing a handbag or app add-on as there is opening up a new family health practice or delivering mental health supports to the community (which is different from the business and purpose of handbags, app add-ons and family practices or mental health supports).
Marketing is about communication of the elements of the thing you’re providing and connecting it to a real situation they face. As Seth Godin argues:
Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem.
Which brings us to the curious case of Netflix and Tom Webb’s article in Monocle.
Webb is reflecting on Netflix’s shift toward introducing short-form video, much akin to TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube shorts. If you’ve been on Netflix lately, you’re seeing short videos, podcasts, and many more things that resemble little of what we (or at least me) signed up for.
Webb notes that this is brand, marketing, and design research failure rolled in one:
Ask people what they want from life and their answers rarely match their behaviour. We all say that we would like to eat better, read more and spend less time on our phones. But entire industries are built to exploit our impulse for mindless scrolling and feed us food or information that we don’t really want. Today, streaming platforms are no different – and in chasing our behaviours, they risk forgetting what audiences actually value.
He points to the rise of short-form video consumption and how Netflix is confusing what people are doing, with what people want and enjoy. Speaking with Evan Williams, the documentary filmmaker, they come to note:
There is a growing recognition that doomscrolling often leaves people feeling drained and, in many cases, depressed. While it might be highly consumable, it certainly isn’t striking or enjoyable.
Further, these short-form videos undermine the very thing that made Netflix stand out among others: longer-form, consumable content. That was what made them successful. He notes:
The strongest brands create spaces where creativity finds a home.
What does this mean for creativity in health systems and the brands that represent their purpose.
In health systems, the strongest brands are those that deliver trust, quality, and care.
One example is when people wait ten hours for a hospital bed and when these wait times persist over weeks, months, and years, that is a failure to deliver on all three of those promises. This is as much a delivery problem as it is a branding issue.
Why?
Debbie Millman, professor, brand strategist, and renowned design educator and promoter (host of the long-running Design Matters podcast) writes in Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits:
Genuinely good branding involves an examination of every single way the brand, the product, and the experience is viewed. Everything that you do, everything you release, everything you say—everything is the cumulative expression of your brand.
There is nothing in this description suggests that a brand can’t be a health service or part of a health system in a non-commercial way. Branding, in this term, is what we do.
What is Netflix doing right now? How does it fit with the brand? How does Netflix, in Tom Webb’s words, find a home for creativity when it pursues something that is, given its brand, the antithesis of it?
This is happening across health systems. When people are neglected or ignored, they are uncared for.
When people aren’t seen, they are left with conditions untreated.
When people are left to struggle on their own, without tools or help, or in settings that are harmful, they are unhealthy.
When staff are treated without care, poorly equipped or prepared, or left to work in environments that will not enable them to do aspire to do and be their best, they are left feeling unprofessional.
The absence of care, treatment, health, and professionalism is what the health system brand can be if we let it. By designing with the idea of what a brand is and represents we can start to recalibrate and connect to the purpose of what health systems are. A health system without care, without treatment for real problems, or without the means of promoting health (and the professional practice that distinguished it from other forms of care, treatment, and health promotion) is not what we aspire to.
Perhaps, thinking like a brand strategist and strategic designer might improve our perspective.
A health system without care, without treatment for real problems, or without the means of promoting health (and the professional practice that distinguished it from other forms of care, treatment, and health promotion) is not what we aspire to. We design for something better.
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