In healthcare marketing, patient-centricity is the key to effective communication. Understanding patient attitudes and behaviors by gathering authentic patient experience data provides actionable insight into patient motivations. Knowing what resonates with our target audience helps us ensure our communications are effective.
Scaling a patient-centric campaign globally introduces unique challenges, then, since collecting insights data in dozens of countries is time and cost prohibitive. Marketers must be efficient while still accomplishing their objective: developing relevant, resonant campaigns that convey global messaging and are appropriate to local culture. To this end, focusing insights-gathering on the largest healthcare markets makes the most sense.
Over time, we have observed significant, predictable similarities in patient attitudes and behaviors in countries and groups of countries. These trends have enabled us to cluster healthcare markets together by similarities in patient attitudes, allowing us to conduct insights research in 4 or 5 countries instead of 25 or 30—and we feel confident in grouping our local messaging accordingly.
The countries from which we gather initial patient insights are England, Germany, the United States, China, and Japan. It’s important to note that these representative countries do not encompass the whole world—not by a long shot. But they cover the overwhelming majority of key healthcare markets, so they are a fair and accurate representation of the populations we are targeting with patient communications.
The Western World: England, Germany, US
In our experience, patients in England can reasonably serve as representative of patients in other commonwealth countries (including Australia and Canada) for many conditions and disease states. Healthcare in these countries is universal with alternate access to private insurance. Because of the similarities in healthcare delivery, patients in these countries have similar experiences interacting with physicians and react comparably to healthcare marketing messages.
Insights from German patients often closely mirrors patient attitudes and behaviors we see in northern and western Europe. Though German healthcare is structured slightly differently than some other European healthcare systems, German patient attitudes and behaviors are good barometers (or at least serve as a good starting point) for understanding patients in the rest of western and northern Europe. These findings can then be verified with local country management to uncover any particular differences.
Patient attitudes in the United States differ from those of other countries where access to healthcare is universal and affordable. Therefore, US insights can only reasonably represent themselves. The US also includes such a large and diverse population that it makes sense to gather focused insights there, and to only use those insights to influence US-facing communications materials.
The Eastern World: China and Japan
In addition to finding similarities, it is also important to note where patient attitudes are dramatically different. While China and Japan are often geographically linked together as part of APAC, their healthcare systems could not be more different. Patients’ expectations for care within these systems is very different, and so to gather relevant insights into these patient populations, they have to be treated as wholly separate. This is not to say that China and Japan patient attitudes and experiences are indicative of other APAC countries’ patient attitudes, but since these are by far the largest markets in Asia, we prioritize them when looking to be efficient in gathering insights.
Gathering insights is not about deciding what picture to show—it’s about finding what will motivate to your patient. In developing these key messages for patient communications, doing that kind of work across dozens of countries is often not practical. Our country groupings lead to assumptions that save time and money and, in our experience, have proven to be accurate.
