What can healthcare marketers learn from a week literally bookended by mass shootings? 

Whenever something like this occurs, messaging from the gun-control camp often elicits cries from their ideological counterparts that they’re exploiting tragedy. Given that, on average, there is about one mass shooting every day in America, per data from the Gun Violence Archive as cited by Vox, that would mean that there really is no right time to discuss gun control. 

Nevertheless, some marketers are jumping into the fray. Last week the PR agency Edelman announced its decision to take on PR duties for the Gun Safety Alliance (GSA), a business coalition aiming to halve gun fatalities by 2025.

“For far too long government has failed to address the gun violence epidemic in this country,” CEO Richard Edelman asserted. “Now is the time for the private sector to take a stand and fill that leadership void.”

Some healthcare agencies have done so, too, like the independent firm Fingerpaint. “We are emotional storytellers. We need to tell the story,” wrote the agency’s founder, Ed Mitzen, in a 2018 blog post calling on ad agencies to use their skills to create shareable content that fosters dialogue.

In the wake of the Las Vegas mass-shooting in the fall of 2017, the Fingerpaint social media team used Facebook Connect technology to customize a video that drew from real people’s social media feeds. However, the tool, designed to shock viewers into seeing themselves and their friends as victims of a mass shooting, worked almost too well. 

“While it was incredibly creative, we felt it would be too frightening,” wrote Mitzen.

His agency has adopted a set of red lines, like refusing to work with certain political candidates, encouraging clients to adopt the gun-safety cause and devoting time and talent to pro bono work. (It’s also supported nonprofit Moms Demand Action, whose remit includes lobbying lawmakers to improve gun laws).

Can these efforts really make a dent? 

It’s a fair question, when you consider that the rate of mass shootings has been shown to be a function not of the commonly cited factors, like mental health problems, video games, racial diversity or even violence and crime. Rather, it’s a function of access to guns, as more than 100 studies have proven. The literature seems well-established on this point: curb the number of guns, and you curb the violence. 

Yet that very evidence suggests that the problem shares attributes with, and needs to be treated like, a disease. Indeed, gun violence is no different from polio or Ebola, inasmuch as humans play a key role in its spread.

I would venture that the aforementioned marketing efforts can be effective in curbing the spread of gun violence, and the pandemic playbook is one proof point. 

Consider what MM&M’s 2018 Platinum Award winner, Sherine Guirguis, the former UNICEF communications worker who helped to bring the world to the brink of polio eradication, pointed out in her acceptance speech:

“There’s no scientific achievement, no drug or medicine, that can override human behavior. People, more than anything else, will determine whether we stop or spread disease,” she said.

Just as Guirguis has successfully applied behavior and social change communication strategies to help solve some of the world’s toughest public health challenges, the effort to eradicate gun violence demands a similar response, as MM&M has previously noted. 

Yes, we need effective treatments. At the end of the day, regulatory or legislative officials will need to pass effective interventions, like smarter rules and gun-access laws. Where marketers can show the way is through the equally important need to change behavior and attitudes among clients, the general public and even among lawmakers and gun owners, whose points of view need to be heard.

The cynic in me questions the timing of Edelman’s GSA announcement, which came as the PR firm was reeling from fallout over its decision to renounce work with private-prison company the Geo Group, which has contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Edelman’s cause-driven practice, too, has hit some bumps along the road to linking purpose with profits.

However, say what you will about Edelman’s motives; the PR giant has made a statement. By encouraging businesses to join the push for gun safety, Edelman’s on solid ground on this one, backed up as it is by the firm’s Trust Barometer. 

Seventy-six percent of respondents to the survey want CEOs to speak out and lead on issues of the day and not wait for government. In addition, 80% of U.S. employees trust their employers, because trust has become local, while two-thirds of customers say that they expect brands to stand up for them.

Gun violence is a complex issue. Joining an alliance like GSA would be a meaningful way for companies to show commitment to the cause.

Life science corporations often think about causes in the context of their own therapeutic specialty. For instance, those that market products in the central nervous system space might view this as an adjacency. If a biopharma company in the cardiovascular or oncology space was to get on board, on what would they be standing? 

They’d be standing on the shoulders of their own corporate mission statements. Their own credos, and those of their agencies, often espouse values like promoting human health and well-being and thinking about health in a more holistic way.

The other typical response might be, “This is not my issue. I don’t own a gun.” Similarly, healthcare marketers have some skills that could make them influential, but why should they use them when it’s easier to disavow the issue, or write it off as being “too big” to distill down to a relevant cause?

Again, I come back to the mission statements of those organizations. This industry exists to help the world, and that means everyone, whether they suffer from some psychosis or are just concerned about their general well-being.

That makes healthcare marketers, whose skill sets have been honed by decades spent figuring out human behavior and appealing to people’s emotions and sometimes irrational priorities, the ideal marketing sub-sector to foster this nascent movement.

There have been about 2,000 mass shootings since 2012’s Sandy Hook incident in Newtown, Connecticut, when a gunman killed 20 children and six adults. If that didn’t galvanize the nation to develop a stronger response, I don’t know what will. At a minimum, it shows that conventional thinking isn’t generating the necessary changes. 

This is no time for anodyne statements or feel-good acts of solidarity with tenuous connections to a cause. It’s time for a higher level of marketing social responsibility. 

This is a priority for the nation, and some companies and brands are starting to make it their priority. Healthcare marketers, with their expertise in behavior change and unique missions, can and must encourage more to join this fight and help stem this terrible scourge.

Do you agree that gun violence should be approached like a pandemic? Should life science companies and their agencies play a role? Tell me your opinion in the comments section below. And, if you’d like to lend your creative talents to the cause, submit your work to MM&M’s recently launched social initiative on gun violence, #InspireTheEnd. 

This column will appear every Thursday. Got an issue or story tip related to healthcare marketing? Contact me at [email protected].