In 2020, Madison, Wis.-based UW Health released a brand campaign, but a short time later took it off the air as the message, which was written in 2019, didn't feel right to broadcast to a world that was grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now three years later the health system has launched a new campaign centered around empathy and customer consumer research, this campaign, according to Lindsay Ferris, director of brand strategy at UW Health is a creative approach that isn't a 'norm' to healthcare marketing.
The campaign is inspired by UW Health's patients. Ms. Ferris told Becker's that UW Health wanted to better understand its patients' personal healthcare journey and how they feel about healthcare in general.
To gauge this, UW Health began two phases of consumer research.
"The first was an ethnographic study, meaning we went to consumers to understand the broad themes impacting them and their healthcare. Then we identified a broad set of themes from their responses," said Ms. Ferris. "The second phase was doing individual, in-depth interviews, which allowed us to really explore the themes deeply. At the end of the day, it wasn't so much a metric we focused on, as it was an insight: consumers desire to be seen and treated as individuals and found they wanted to be treated as individuals and seen as the unique humans that they are."
Through this research, UW Health began to challenge itself and its advertising agency, Shine United, to create a campaign that hadn't been done before. Together, the two organizations decided to create an animated-inspired campaign that would "paint the picture" of individual patients.
"Because UW Health is a large academic medical system with a sizable primary care practice, we wanted to tell stories about everything from the tough stuff, like pediatric transplant, to the more everyday care, but with a focus on how we help each of our patients get out of the hospital or clinic and get on with living their life," said Ms. Ferris. "The stories we tell in our campaign were inspired by the people who inspired us."
Ms. Ferris also said that because the world had changed so much since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the health system decided to wait three years to release another campaign, as it was important for UW Health to go back to its consumers and ask what they wanted.
"It was never our intention to be off the air for three years. But thanks to COVID, we knew that the world had changed and that we needed to check in with our consumers, or we ran the risk of just talking past them," said Ms. Ferris. "We wanted to start from a place of empathy, knowing that it's been a tough few years."
The campaign, which kicked off Feb. 6, will run into early June.