Microtrends, Consumer Health Segmentation, and more ....

By Matthew Holt

I’m at a seminar put on by Silverlink (FD, they’re a THCB sponsor), but shockingly they haven’t asked me to speak! (By the way this seminar is like a rock band on tour, click here for the schedule). Here’s a quick hit on the first three speakers.

There are lots of little and new trends, reaching only 1 percent, and many contradictory. (1 percent or 3 million is a benchmark for getting in the mindset that a product or idea matters and is real). So says MicroTrends Kinney Zalesne (coauthor with Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s main pollster, and bete noir of the liberal left). That’s why consumer goods have so many different varieties (e.g. mustard a la Malcolm Gladwell). Zalesne thinks that health care companies and other marketers will have to market to everyone in smaller and smaller groups. This includes people working over age 65, people with hearing loss, and people who use doctors as consultants, whom she calls DIY docs, dutiful sons (men looking after aging relatives—17 million of them in the US). All of these groups need real close surveying and targeting. In 2006 on Long Island, for Clinton Penn targeted 196,000 voters and her vote went up 24 percent for those micro targeted versus 10 percent among those who weren't micro-targeted. Zalesne thinks that health care needs to take the baby steps to get away from the broad brush marketing, but doesn't need yet to go to micro-micro-segmentation.

Next up is Liz Boehm from Forrester. She's pretty darn smart on consumers and how it matters to health care. Their Q4 2006 that nearly half of commercially insured people have gone to their plans' web site and that 20 percent of those with a condition have gone to a social computing site (I think this data is well out of date and will ask her at a break. Others have seen a big growth here). But overall, she thinks that people just don't know about the resources available such as PHRs or in-home monitoring (50 percent have never heard of PHRs, and another 25 percent  don’t know much more than the name). But in general people would rather have fun and get fat than work out. We like instant gratification; good health isn't like that.  People dislike bad news at twice the rate that they like good news — which is why you have to pay people to take HRAs, and why you have to tailor programs and rewards to make people behave better. Liz has a lot to say about how health plans should do better segmentation, and the barriers to getting there. But her basic message is to fix the initial customer services you do (i.e. claims payment and doctor directories), and then you might have a chance. If you’re a plan thinking about this, I really recommend grabbing some of Liz’s time about how to do this.

James Taylor is a data geek who looks at the science of decisions. His firm is called Smart (enough) Systems. His idea is that you run your best strategy (the “champion”) and also run a few others (the “challengers”) and assess the data over time. That helps you make the champion the optimal, and then you keep challenging it to see if the outside world has changed. To do that, you need to add fine-grained personalization.