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Botched Healthcare Branding
by Kevin Burke, Monday, December 16, 2013 10:49 AM
Healthcare in the United States is a mess for numerous reasons, and many institutions are attempting to apply their fix. Buried in this mess is a healthcare topic that is rarely discussed. It emphasizes:
- Prevention of illness as
the primary focus.
- Treatments aimed at causes rather than symptoms.
- Treatments that are highly individualized and that use the least invasive and least toxic therapies.
- Treatments that support natural healing of the body.
- Treatment of the entire person.
These features are easy to embrace, and they help address many
issues that exist in today's healthcare environment. But there's a big marketing and branding problem in the U.S. It is not the problem of
just one company but an entire industry. That industry in the U.S. is most often called
alternative medicine. Just the term “alternative” points to the branding issue. Other terms
often used to describe the industry are Natural Health, Integrative Health, CAM (Complimentary and Alternative Medicine) and Holistic Health. The complexity continues because each of those labels is just an umbrella term to describe a variety of common and lesser-known treatments. Some treatments are self-administered, such as
dietary changes, meditation, and taking herbs and vitamins, while others require a practitioner, like massage, acupuncture, reflexology and chiropractic treatment. This complexity reflects the lack of consensus on how the industry defines itself. Compare that to the conventional healthcare industry, which has "surgery,"
"pharmaceutical drugs," "doctors," "nurses" and "therapy," each distinctly embedded in its own industry lexicon. Now that's good marketing! Because the alternative medicine market is still undefined, resulting in inconsistencies and fragmentation, people struggle to understand what it has to offer. In fact, 60% of U.S. adults have
not tried
any type of alternative medicine treatment, according to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a division of the National Institute
s of Health, an
example of just how significant the branding issue is. Some believe that the lack of adoption is related to treatment effectiveness.
Granted, alternative medicine is often thought to include a broad range of therapeutic approaches, from the highly studied and reliable to the more questionable and faith-based. Without making
judgments on effectiveness, I contend that the primary issue is one of marketing. In many countries worldwide, alternative medicine is the
primary medicine. For instance, traditional Chinese medicine has been in use for more than 2,000 years, and Ayurveda, which originated in India more than 3,000 years ago, continues to be widely
accepted. The first school of medicine in North America began less than 250 years ago, yet the medical practices of thousands of years
are considered only an alternative in the U.S. That's a marketing communication problem if I ever saw one! I am not trying to suggest that
modern Western medicine should be pushed aside, or that alternative medicine is appropriate for all health issues. But it sure seems that when it comes to people's health choices in the U.S., the
scales have tipped far in one direction, thanks to powerful marketing by the newcomer and poor marketing by the incumbent.