Marketing Mondays_Vania Cao: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Andreea Borcea:
Welcome to the Marketing Mondays podcast, where we explore how we can make your offerings stand out in the health and wellness space. Through conversations with thought leaders and innovators in health and wellness marketing, we’ll discuss marketing best practices, case studies, and innovative ideas to help scale your business and grow revenues with impact. I’m excited to be your host. My name is Andreea Borcea. I’m a fractional CMO and owner of the Dia Creative Marketing Agency.
Andreea Borcea:
Hi there, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Marketing Mondays. I’m your host, Andreea Borcea, CMO of Dia Creative, a digital marketing agency that specializes in health and wellness. I am here with a fantastic guest, Vania Cao, PhD, who’s worked in the commercial space for Natera and Mayo Clinic Laboratories, specifically leveraging neuroscience to really make an impact, and I am so excited to hear about that. So tell us a little bit about your background. How did you get here?
Vania Cao:
Thanks so much for having me. It’s such a pleasure to be here. I think a lot of people’s pasts wind a little bit and mine is definitely an example of that. So I started in the academic research space. I really, really have always loved animal-human behavior, even as a kid. And when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to study and focus on for doctoral research, I ended up applying for COG Sci and psychology and neuroscience programs, and so I ended up in a wonderful neuroscience PhD program, it’s a collaboration between Brown University and the National Institutes of Health. And so I got to work with some premier research scientists and really think a little bit more about the biology of how our brain actually processes learning, memory, all these interesting things that make us who we are. But in that process of being in the research space, I realized it just wasn’t the right environment for me long term, and so I ended up moving into a startup company which was within the neuroscience space, and then from there really grew my commercial experience. So I’ve been in pretty much all of the different commercial departments: support, marketing, sales, international sales, it’s been quite a ride, but I really do feel that ultimately my love of behavior and understanding it fits and meshes really well with marketing. And ultimately, in marketing, we’re trying to influence behavior, change minds, win hearts, hopefully, drive behaviors toward a joint goal. So yeah, that’s how I ended up in marketing.
Andreea Borcea:
That’s a fun journey, I love that. Especially because exactly what you’re calling out is, I’m sure when you’re getting in the room with other sales professionals and marketing professionals, you’ve got your analytics people who are just like, no, people are data. This is how many, traffic, how much we’ve sold. These are, the dots mean we’re doing well. And then you’ve got other people that are like, no, let’s tell the story and more on the creative side. But I feel like you come in with a unique perspective, thinking of the customers as human beings. Tell me a little bit more about how that’s been working since you moved into the commercial space.
Vania Cao:
Yeah, I mean, everyone has to simplify down this problem of figuring out how do we influence our audience, how do we help them make the decisions that we feel are going to benefit them? Of course, ideally using our solution or our product, or our service. But, you know, it becomes a little bit difficult to really see the impact you want to see if we’re going to become a little bit too formulaic about these things. And so when I started my professional career in the startup company, I was introduced to an excellent marketing or technology adoption lifecycle concept. Many of you out there probably are very aware of this, but I feel like it works for pretty much any market, any type of new change that’s being introduced to a particular community, and that’s of course the Crossing the Chasm concept from Jeffrey Moore, really famous and rightfully so, really, really helps us to see that when we’re marketing to an audience, it’s not a monolith, right, and it’s true for every single demographic. We know there are going to be segments within that demographic, and I really think the key and the success factors that make someone good at marketing, or organizations successful at their marketing, is how well can they segment that market, right? How well do they really understand, boots on the ground, what their audience is thinking, doing, why they are doing what they do, right? Because I think a lot of times we’ll just make assumptions or we’ll take maybe feedback at face value, but it’s really important to dig a little bit deeper, really think about who they are, what their circumstances are, all the messy things, the emotions, their mental state, right, the environmental, external factors, their intrinsic motivators, and internal factors, all of those things. Maybe not necessarily at every single strategic level, but I think it helps a lot when a marketing team is willing to look into this level of depth.
Andreea Borcea:
I love what you called out that people are messy because.
Vania Cao:
We’re so messy.
Andreea Borcea:
When it comes down to it, when you’re having these discussions about how to commercialize anything, you’re sitting there looking, it’s like, okay, well, yes, we need our personas, but really I just want to know how many I have in each persona and what I need to do, but that’s just reducing people. And I think especially when you’re in health and wellness, which is a particularly personal journey, right, you’re not selling me sunglasses, you’re not selling me perfume, you’re selling me something that could solve maybe a chronic health condition I have or resolve something that I haven’t figured out how to resolve. But there’s an easy solution your product happens to be that I just don’t even know exists or that I need, like that complication, I think requires a type of understanding that messiness that you’re talking about. Have you had to do some of that, like digging for any of your previous roles where you’ve really had to sculpt out how to find that person and talk to them and have them listen, I think is always the hardest part.
Vania Cao:
Absolutely, I mean, there’s market research, then there’s market research, right? Like really understanding, what does someone mean when they say, oh, I’m not interested or oh, I don’t have time, right, or I’m too busy for this, or I don’t have the money for this, what does that actually mean, right? And it’s so contextual, every single one of us is influenced by our local environment, our past experiences, the different knowledge, thought leaders that we respect in our own particular niche. All of these things matter, right? And if we as marketers are not taking all of that into account and we’re just kind of making these broader stroke tactics, we’re going to miss some of these important aspects and drivers of behavior. So now as an example, like in many of my roles before, we’ve had to deal with very, very busy customers. They have a lot going on and often they have a scarcity mentality, right? So kind of acknowledging, hey, in the world of our audience, they are really frazzled. They really don’t have a broad view of what success could look like. They aren’t creative because they don’t have the environment to be creative. And so often, right, if we want to start marketing something to these folks, we kind of have to realize, you know, are we marketing to the right segment at the right time? Sometimes I’ve found, at least in several of my past roles, our audience breakdown, if we’re kind of using that Crossing the Chasm breakdown, right, we have innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and the laggards, it’s sort of illustrated as an even bell curve. But I think, certain industries, those bell curves are going to be shifted, right, in a particular direction. I really think both in, say, the scientific or research space, maybe not so the pure research, but more applied research, and then certainly in the clinical and healthcare space, I feel like that we clearly know the majority of folks are not in the innovator, early adopter world. They really can’t afford to be. The environment is regulated, we need to protect patient rights and health, so clearly you’re going to have a lot of people who are conservatives, who are skeptics, who they have to be, right, in order to be successful and to do what they do best for patient health. And so if that’s the case, we also have to think about, are we marketing to them the way that we’re trying to market to like an early adopter, right? It’s not going to work because their priorities, their environment, it just doesn’t fit. So often I found that we kind of have to step back a little bit and focus a little bit smaller than perhaps sound sexy on, say, a department meeting or, you know, at an all-hands day, right? So everyone wants to hear about how we’re going to market to the largest segment, the biggest population, and we’re going to make so many more sales. But often you have to start much smaller than you really want to in order to grow into that market more successfully. So I’ve definitely seen that say in our last role. In my last role, for example, marketing to clinicians of any type, you know, that they need to follow guidelines, you know, that they absolutely respect what their medical associations want the community to be doing. And there’s good reason, right? There’s clinical data. There’s all these things that are backing up a relatively more conservative stance on what products, services, best practices they should be following for the health of their patients. And so if you are trying to market something that might be a little bit different, a little bit new, these folks are going to have a hard time with that, right? Even if we all know it’s better for the patient at the end of the day. So the tough thing to do, I think, is to know when that’s the case. Are you trying to push a segment of your market in a way that they just can’t, they can’t move in that direction? So knowing to adjust to that and perhaps to a smaller segment, maybe the leading edge of that particular segment, ones who perhaps have a personal reason to care about what your product’s impact has, right? Can we target those folks first? We know that there’s a lot of examples of, say, hooking people or using behavioral science principles to harness our natural instincts. And one of those things is pain points, right? You could talk about pain points, you can talk about triggers. They’re all essentially the same ideas. Someone has to have some intrinsic need for what you have to offer. So if we’ve been marketing something to a demographic and it’s not resonating it means we’re not hitting that pain point. So either we need to change our message or we need to hone down our audience until they are only the ones who care about what we have to offer. And for example, in this particular case, we were marketing a test that could help patients get ahead of a chronic illness. And this is something that if you hear about it, you would think to yourself, even just a person, why not?
Andreea Borcea:
Yes! Of course, I want this.
Vania Cao:
Yeah, why would I not want this?
Andreea Borcea:
Of course.
Vania Cao:
I had literally never heard of it until I started marketing it, right? So it’s such a shame in that respect. There are so many benefits to patient health and wellness that we want more people to know about, we want them to adopt, but how do we make them do that, right? And again, I think the hard thing to do is to go at it a little bit more slowly and strategically and say, hey, okay, so we know that actually, every patient would probably benefit from this type of knowledge, but we know that not every clinician is bought in. And again, if the entire ecosystem still is not quite there yet, it hasn’t been integrated into guidelines, for example, what do you do? Well, we got to start focusing a little bit more, right? So perhaps we’ve got to figure out how do we call out or how do we target or how do we attract those clinicians who perhaps have a personal reason to really care, who have made it kind of part of their own self-identity to help their patients get ahead of this particular condition. And I think we see this time and again in any type of marketing launch, right, we have to start with that right niche. And then once we collect that niche and once we own that niche, they will help us to snowball the effect to the rest of the market. So again, it’s easy to say and hard to do, I know, but it’s definitely something that I’ve seen in multiple organizations and sort of across multiple industries.
Andreea Borcea:
Yeah, I think that’s very accurate. I like that concept of starting with quality over quantity, and there’s obviously always this pressure of just like, well, let’s just market to everyone as soon as humanly possible because this is the most amazing thing and everyone will instantly get it. And you’re like, or, but I do think there’s an argument to if you start with a smaller, higher quality group to really identify what works, you’ll actually end up scaling faster than if you had started with the mass market, stumbled the entire time, until you ended up finding that quality audience anyway. So I do like that, that you’ve kind of turned that on its head, and you are pushing back against the pressure to just kind of throw everything against the wall and see what sticks, and rather like, let’s be a bit more deliberate about this, really get those almost like ambassador customers that will then grow with you and help tell your story. As you’ve been kind of doing this in a pragmatic way, are there any practical tools you’d recommend for people to better identify how to get inside that target customer’s head? Is there anything that you found is particularly effective, especially in health and wellness, where people might be a little bit less inclined to share their personal information?
Vania Cao:
You know, I wish I could say that there was some sort of magic in either customer survey, you know, voice of customer survey template or something. Honestly, I feel like I have gained a lot personally from regular interactions with our field team members, really getting a sense from them. And again, a good data sampling across regions, of course, what is exactly happening, right? What are people thinking? You of course need to know how to filter out different types of feedback from the field, but I found that if you are only listening, say to the loudest voices, you may not be necessarily hearing what the majority is experiencing, right? You’re only kind of hearing the tales. So I think it’s important to take regular stock of what’s happening out in the field, in your field force is the best way to get that information. The other thing is also to just try and get your customers, whether they are happy or unhappy, and just ask them how things are going and why, right? Asking them for feedback is really important. And again, I hope this is again a no-brainer for most marketing organizations, but it can feel a little bit like, oh, we already know what they think, right, after a little bit, or especially if you’ve been in the same field for a while, like why waste that time? I have so many other things to do. But I’ve really found that sitting down, talking to our actual customers on a regular basis, it has really provided a lot of that. We mentioned to our humanizing impact on what it is that our product or service actually provides and being able to actually use some of that same thinking, that same mentality. It helps you really again, remind yourself, where is this person, right? That psychographic component of the audience, like where do they fall? Are they the right people that we want to be targeting in our next campaign or in the growth of this particular product or service, and really thinking about, why are they saying the things that they do? I’ll give a recent example. We talked to one of our customers that was very happy using our product, and we just asked them straight up for feedback on, well, as far as marketing campaigns and tactics, here’s what we have planned. We want to offer value to our customers and they just told us straight up, I don’t have time to, for example, sit there for another webinar, right? I value my time and I want to spend my time with my family. So if you want me to pay attention to something, give me a little more value for my professional development, a.k.a clinical education, for example. So sometimes you know these things, but it can really hit home if the customer is actually verbalizing it to you. And sometimes that customer feedback is useful for you to take back and advocate on behalf of the customer to internal people for resources. So I think there’s just, there’s so many good reasons to go back to your customers, go back to your sales team and feel team and really listen and see if what you think you’re doing internally is actually having that external impact.
Andreea Borcea:
Yeah, I feel like you can always learn so much from unhappy customers, even if it’s an uncomfortable conversation, but they’re actually a great resource because they’ll identify opportunities there that you can improve on.
Vania Cao:
I was going to say the other benefit, and not that this should be a reason to do this, but when people feel heard. So for example, you mentioned unhappy customers, right? If they feel heard by you, if they feel that you’re an organization that takes the time to really listen, that can also change their relationship and how they feel about you as a brand, as an organization. And so I think it’s actually really good for community building, for building that trust and hopefully loyalty with what you have to offer.
Andreea Borcea:
Definitely, I love that. With some of the roles that you’ve had, the patient is really the end consumer, but everything has to go through a clinician. So you actually have two layers of marketing you have to do. So tell me a little bit about facing that challenge and how did you address that? Like do you primarily focus on your clinician and try to get them to be the advocate for the patient? Or do you actually have like two different layers of marketing with two different messaging to kind of get this like top-down, bottom-up thing going at the same time?
Vania Cao:
That’s a good question. And I think this is not limited to just this particular field, but it’s almost like you have a customer and then you have your customer’s customer, who is also kind of worse by default. So certainly for my work at both, mainly at Natera, but even at Mayo Clinic when I was there, you are leveraging the brand and the knowledge of a particular test and its value to a patient as you are engaging with a clinician, because ultimately the clinician is there for the benefit of their patient. So on Natera, we did primarily clinician-facing marketing, that’s also due to regulatory reasons, but certainly, we need to provide good educational material that our clinicians can provide to their patients. And again, if we’re going to be talking about something that maybe sounds a little scary, maybe it sounds a little out there for a patient, that education component, being able to support the clinician in them supporting their patient is actually key to success, because if your customer feels like they don’t know how to deal with the product, they’re going to be more reluctant to even touch it. And so absolutely, I think that’s part of actually understanding your market segment. So there are going to be, say, clinicians who maybe don’t have as much patient-facing time, so perhaps they are less likely or willing to take on something that requires more explanation for a patient. So perhaps then, you can also think about, hey, maybe there are other folks in this space who have more time with a patient or who are just, they tend to want to spend time, more time with their patients, or perhaps certain business models, again, where that education component is easier or perhaps even part of what they want to deliver to their patient. And in those cases, right, those marketing strategies and tactics might have a lot more traction and success.
Andreea Borcea:
I would definitely agree with that. We had a previous episode where a company faced something similar and actually ended up focusing on the PAs rather than the physicians because the PAs had more room. Similarly, in the dental industry, it’s like focusing on the hygienists instead of the dentists because there’s more room and they actually end up having a lot more interactions with the patients in a lot of situations because the doctors are just there to show up at the end and make sure everything’s acceptable, I guess.
Vania Cao:
Yeah, no, exactly, and I think this goes hand in hand with really just seeing our customers as humans, right? Like if we spent a day in their shoes, what is our mental state? Where can we see the message that we want to push through? Where can we see that surfacing in their mind? And if we kind of start to see that it’s kind of difficult for even the best-planned marketing tactics or strategies to filter through into the realities of that customer segment, maybe it’s time to think about trying a different niche or shifting that message or deciding, for example, are there other players and factors in their environment that would have a larger influence on them, that they could carry that message for us instead of us just trying to beat down the same door over and over.
Andreea Borcea:
Absolutely. Have you found any particular messaging works better or worse in the health and wellness industry versus anything else that you’ve kind of seen taking it from that neuroscience perspective?
Vania Cao:
It totally depends on that audience. So I’ve definitely had, the very interesting challenge of marketing to different, differently-minded folks. So there are folks who are very, very technical. So if you come at them with a heartwarming story, they’re just going to brush you off, right? They’re like, that’s a waste of my time. Give me the graphs, give me the charts. I want to see the P values, right? And so, in the health and wellness space, there might be folks like these, making decisions about, say, what laboratory they’re going to use as a vendor or perhaps a hospital system administrator, right? So there are folks who are very data-minded. That’s more of a personality thing, but it definitely affects how you’re most successful in engaging with them. So, yeah, I mean, sometimes you lead with data, sometimes you lead with that heartwarming story, though. And I really feel that in the health and wellness space, in particular, I think because as human beings we tend to be really bad at visualizing for good reasons, bad outcomes for ourselves and our health, right? We don’t want to do that, and there is a bias, a natural bias that we have as to availability of scenarios, so the more available or more accessible a scenario is in our head, the more we tend to sort of overestimate its impact. And so when it comes to bad outcomes in health, we don’t usually envision that kind of stuff, and so we tend to minimize it and minimize its potential to impact us. So when it comes to, again, helping someone understand why a preventative test is good for their health, we have to bring in those stories. We have to bring that scenario front and center because, again, humans have an availability bias. So if those stories are not easily available mentally, we don’t even think it’s important to us, we don’t even think it’s relevant, and it applies to us, and I think this is for both patients and clinicians alike. I mean, this is why in marketing we use case studies, right? Because it is basically a story. It’s a story about someone else’s success, and that, again, is fighting against this type of availability bias. Hey, you didn’t know this could happen? We’re going to tell you how it happened and how it might relate to you.
Andreea Borcea:
There’s a struggle there because they think it’s way too easy, especially when anything is called preventative. It feels like a nice to have. I’ll deal with that later. I can do that anytime. And then by, the problem is, by the time you’re ready to do it, it’s not preventative anymore. You’ve missed your window prevention.
Vania Cao:
But then at the same time, you’ve got to be careful and respectful, and data-driven. So you don’t want to overblow anything, you don’t want to scare people, and sometimes, you know, when it comes to certain types of conditions or screenings or even certain diagnostics, you can find out about something but then not have any clinical actionability, and that alone is another challenge of, okay, well, now you told this person they have whatever risk of getting X condition and now we don’t have anything or we can offer them after that. So there’s, it’s complicated for sure.
Andreea Borcea:
I do like that you brought that up because I think that’s a unique challenge in the health and wellness space, in particular, is that you not creating fear. And I do worry that there have been a few too many health companies, medicinal companies, pharmaceutical companies that have really leaned on the scare and the fear because it worked in social marketing, but I think with health and wellness, it actually has such a dangerous backlash afterwards, or results that it ends up impeding future companies, like the startups you’ve worked for, that want to make an impact, and all of these people keep thinking is just like, oh, companies are just trying to scare me, but it’s not real, and that becomes a whole another barrier you have to overcome.
Vania Cao:
Absolutely, for sure, I think it’s very, very important. I think it’s wonderful that we do have a lot of regulations, rules, policies, all to protect consumers and patients. I mean, it’s very important. And again, as marketers, it’s our job to make sure that our messages are fair and clinically actionable, and data-driven, while also trying to leverage the things that we can leverage, right, to help people make good decisions for their health. And it’s a delicate balance, it’s a dance, but I think that’s why it’s such an interesting space to be in. And you kind of mentioned as well, people might feel like, oh, this is not important to them, etc, etc, but really, I think when change does happen, everyone wants to jump on board. It’s always the beginning part. When you’re introducing something new, people are like, what is that? I don’t need that. If you can figure out how to persist and partner and develop, co-develop that ecosystem with your customers, with patients, with your community, I think there’s always a critical mass of opinion. Once you build it up to that point, then it’s the activation energy is kind of at a point where you can then just see everyone going, oh, that thing like maybe a decade ago, people were like, no way, and now they’re like, oh yeah, why haven’t you done that yet? So it’s such a dynamic journey, and I think making sure that we are always keeping our eye on where we are in that journey and then where the audience you’re talking to at the moment, where they are in that journey, that helps make sure that everyone is successful.
Andreea Borcea:
Speaking of the evolution of marketing, is there anything, in particular, you see for the future of marketing, maybe 5, 10, 20 years, especially in this health and wellness space?
Vania Cao:
You know, coming from a neuroscience background, I will say I’ve definitely seen a lot more neurology or psychology-based marketing methods being marketed and sold and discussed. And I think again, it’s one of these interesting applications of our understanding of human behavior, of emotions and mindset and decision making. We’ll have to just kind of see where it goes. A lot of this information is not new, frankly, right? Psychology has been around for a long time, knowing a lot of these kinds of psychological principles behind many marketing strategies. But we are still finding out more and more about the brain, about our decision-making processes, about different ways that people process information, how they value information, even simply how we perceive the world. There’s actually a whole spectrum of how different people perceive the world. And so I do, I’m personally kind of optimistic about how we’ll be able to be much more targeted in a respectful manner to different types of audiences. I think these days, luckily, compared to the past, it’s much more of an open dialogue if you happen to be neurodivergent. We’re finding out about new ways in which people process and think about the world and we’ll be able to take those into account, hopefully within the marketing space as well. So perhaps it’s less about what new tactic we’re going to use and perhaps a little bit more about how we continue to see and treat our audience as humans.
Andreea Borcea:
You’re talking about so much potential there that I think people have been missing for generations is, when you start considering the spectrum of humanity, and those that are neurodivergent that were largely ignored for most marketing. It’s like now if you think about it, there’s whole audiences that you can talk to now or reach out to when you start considering different ways of communicating that are more applicable to those neurodivergent communities. So let alone, there’s your win, is you now have doubled or tripled in size, all you had to do was pay attention a little bit more.
Vania Cao:
Absolutely.
Andreea Borcea:
I love that. Well, thank you so much for being on Marketing Mondays. Once again, our guest today was Vania Cao, PhD, and you can learn more about her by checking her out on LinkedIn, and that’s V A N I A C A O. And once again, I’m your host, Andreea Borcea, CMO of Dia Creative Marketing Agency. Thank you so much again for being with us here, Va.
Vania Cao:
Thanks so much for having me.
Andreea Borcea:
Thanks again for listening to Marketing Mondays. If you have any marketing questions at all, feel free to reach out to me directly at DiaCreative.com. That’s D I A Creative.com.
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