In the competition for attention, it can be difficult for marketers to cut through and convince consumers to visit a website. It can be even harder to persuade them to give up an hour, or several, to experience a live activation.
Recognizing this challenge, GE HealthCare (GEHC) took a different approach, bringing the activation to the audience. In this case, the company brought patient care teams across the country in a bus that provided a demonstration of its FlexAcuity patient monitoring systems.
Over the course of three months earlier this year, the bus made stops in 23 U.S. cities. Visitors to the bus were able to follow the journey of “Sarah,” a fictional patient with a uniquely engaging personal experience.
Meredith Gannon, chief marketing officer of GEHC’s Patient Care Solutions, describes the experience of following Sarah entering the hospital, making her first stop in the emergency department before being quickly moved to the operating room for a surgical procedure.
The virtual experience delivers her to a critical care environment where she begins her recovery, from there she is in a medical surgical floor and then transitioned out of the hospital, healthy and back at home.
“You get that experience as you go through the bus and as we tell her story, moving from one environment into the next,” she explains. “It’s a great way for us to highlight our adaptable and flexible solutions.”
A different kind of road show
For GEHC, one of the positives of the bus and its demonstration of patient monitoring solutions was the ability to reach a larger cross-section of healthcare professionals (HCP), like nurses, doctors and technicians. This goes well beyond the one or two department heads who might be selected to attend a healthcare conference or other industry event.
“You have to take time off to go to a conference,” Gannon says. “It’s expensive and it’s also not available to all the clinicians and everybody that works in these hospital settings. [Through the bus,] it’s invaluable that we’re able to share this with everyone.”
In addition to making the experience accessible to a wider audience, Gannon says it had another advantage — allowing care teams to continue to focus on caring for patients while giving them an opportunity to experience Sarah’s journey without sacrificing a day or two from their personal lives.
The road show launched with its first stops at the end of August and it quickly became apparent that one major adjustment would be necessary, Gannon notes.
“When we started out, we had increments of about 30-minute meetings that customers could sign up for,” she says. “It turns out they wanted to stay for 90 minutes — they wanted to continue the discussion. These conversations are where we learn, where we grow and where we develop. Those are the insights we need to bring back into our organization to be better, so extending them from 30 to 60 or 90 minutes was a no brainer.”
A possible second leg
The first tour concluded in late November, but GEHC is contemplating following it with other tours.
Gannon reports that a number of hospitals visited on the first tour have already asked that the bus return so more of their employees can experience it.
“They enjoyed the conversations and being able to touch, feel and learn about our new innovations,” Gannon explains. In addition, some customers expressed interest in following the journeys of other patients, besides that of Sarah, the star of the first iteration of the road show. This would provide both HCPs the opportunity to follow other virtual patients in various disease states.
“We’re in the process of building a plan and determining if and how we want to extend it moving forward. If we do, we will absolutely look to build out different patient experiences that customers walk through and different care pathways that they might see. Ultimately, we want to show how the GEHC innovations might apply differently during those pathways.”
When asked to reflect on why the bus journey, Sarah’s story and the multi-channel campaigns that have accompanied the tour have been so impactful, Gannon brings it back to marketing basics — knowing one’s target audience.
“We took the time to understand what’s important to our customers around flexibility,” she says. “In medical devices, we often lose the human element to marketing because it’s so technical. This campaign and the holistic program that we’re running is human, it’s touching and it’s cutting through.”
