• by Les Luchter , Staff Writer, February 26, 2026

In a time of declining trust, institutions of all types must find new ways to engage consumers successfully.

For health insurance companies, that task is particularly daunting, notes Shannon Langrand, founder-CEO of strategy/creative agency Langrand, which has counted numerous insurers as clients during its 23-year history.

Distrust, after all, is sort of built into the insurance “equation,” she explains to Pharma & Health Insider.

“When you hire an insurance company, you’re paying premiums for a promise that ‘I’m going to be there when you need me,’” she elaborates. But too often, when consumers “are expecting insurance to show up, insurance says, ‘no, that's not covered.’ That’s difficult [for insurers] to overcome.”

But Langrand’s agency, where the health industry accounts for 85% of clients, is doing just that not only for insurers, but for healthcare facilities as well, she says.

While “the payers [insurers] have always been the bad guys and providers the good guys, recently we're seeing a trend across the board: trust in doctors is actually decreasing,” she explains.

She cites research showing “a double-digit surge in peer-driven decisions that disregard provider advice… People are looking at TikTok and talking to their friends for medical counsel more than their providers.”

 “What is really changing is a belief that the world is operating in the best interest of ‘me,’” she adds. “People don't believe that anymore.”

Getting past this new consumer mindset is easier to do for industry “disruptors,” Langrand acknowledges, as opposed to “legacy institutions who have large, complex systems and ways of doing things.” 

Langrand is proud of work her agency has done for Centivo, an “alternative health plan” that offers a “much more economical approach” than competitors via a “narrow” network of “higher-quality” doctors.

While Centivo had convinced large employers to offer its plan as an option, she recalls, it was “struggling to make that connection with consumers.”

“We worked with them on a complete rebrand,” she says, “moving to a much more purpose-driven approach to how they tell their story.” The aim: stand out due to a “strong really impassioned  human voice about the industry and what was happening.”

“It was really about taking down traditional insurance, an easy target, but not a lot of people were doing it,” she elaborates. “One of my favorite lines was Centivo quietly dismantling the status quo health plan.”

Healthcare companies in general are really wary of “a strong point of view,” Langrand says, but Centivo used that to “earn trust and encourage consumers to be willing to consider something that was to their benefit financially and in terms of quality of care.”

In addition to a national ad push, the insurer ran a campaign (sample tagline: “Spend less. Benefit more) in Dallas, Des Moines, New York, Milwaukee, Denver and southern California. The ads, she says, “focused on a mix of digital channels, including display and LinkedIn, OOH (traditional billboards), event activations, social, mall signage, radio, direct mail, and community centers.”

The results were impressive: “a 42% increase in branded searches, pretty much immediately upon launch” and, more importantly, “an increase in year-over-year enrollment by 900% in the markets that we advertised: markets [where they] had not been able to gain traction.” In addition, she notes, the branding “helped position them for $95 million in new funding.”

Healthcare brands in general need to move from “brand promise” to “brand proof,” Langrand adds, citing work the agency did for Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, which is now part of New England-centric nonprofit, Point32Health with Tufts Health Plan.

“We helped them design a new health insurance product and take that to market… with actual proof as opposed to just talk,” she explains. 

For example, she elaborates, the plan made it easier for “LGBTQ people to kind of get the fertility care they needed, removing some of the prior authorizations or restrictions. It included much stronger and deeper caregiving benefits, understanding that that's a big part of the world that we live in. It included pet insurance.” 

Marketing of the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care “Family Defines Us” campaign included digital advertising, earned media and events.

Asked to name healthcare advertisers outside her agency responding well to today’s marketing challenges, Langrand cites two healthcare providers: the Mayo Clinic (“really interesting, good campaigns that tell their story”) as well as Kaiser Permamente, for which Langrand does do work but not on the advertising side.

Finally, she notes that today's consumer mindset will “force traditional organizations to think very differently about their remit in order to build loyalty and share of wallet in a Wild West time."