From Healthcare to Wellness: How Brands Can “Re:code” Relationships With Audiences

By Jay Patel, EVP of Experience Strategy at Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness

Wellness is not one-size-fits-all. Different patients and people—with their own health histories, behaviors, schedules, and preferences—require tailored care. And true wellness brands understand that this care should go beyond physical health. Holistic wellness requires the consideration of all aspects of a person’s wellness, including emotional, occupational, social, intellectual, and values.

The cultural need for brands to provide holistic wellness experiences is more important now than ever. A study published in 2021 found that an overwhelming 55% of front-line healthcare workers reported burnout, which is defined as mental and physical exhaustion from chronic workplace stress. In a post-pandemic world, patients and people can no longer rely just on their providers to give them the holistic care that they require. This has created a unique opportunity for brands to show up for people with relevant experiences that feel personal, to set themselves apart from competition and act as an ally to their customers and patients in pursuit of wellness.

While health brands focus on marketing a product, wellness brands build experiences that surround their customers in a way that encourages wellness beyond the transactional benefit that their product can provide. But you can’t build truly impactful wellness experiences without relevance and personalization. While relevance drives engagement, personalization creates the connection. When brands show up in places where their audiences already are, and when they create tools that connect to the peripheral aspects of the conditions they treat, they create value through relevance. When they personalize those interactions, they build a new type of relationship with their customers, one based on holistic wellness, going beyond the transactional moments, and building a connection.     

How wellness brands can fill the gaps in the healthcare industry 

Creating wellness experiences can help you create and maintain deep, lasting relationships.

How? By demonstrating that you understand your customers and want to support them in achieving holistic wellness adjacent to your core brand offering.

But before you build an experience, you need to know the person behind the patient for whom you’re building the experience. You need to know them inside and out. 

1. Decode your audience

When brands talk about the customer journey, they typically refer to a process beginning with awareness and consideration; moving through trial, compliance, and persistence; and concluding with advocacy. More often than not, a journey is never that linear. Their journey might begin with seeing or reading about the product or service, which may or may not lead them to taking action or interacting with your brand.

To decode your audience, you must align your desired business outcomes with the reality of the customer experience. This will inform your roadmap for guiding customers through each step of their unique journey. Use real world data, talk to your audiences, and formulate insights before you show up to an experience within their journey.

2. Code the experience

The next step in bringing a wellness experience to life for your consumers is coding the experience based on the insights gained from decoding your audience. To achieve this, you must create interconnected systems rather than designing for siloed channels. This means considering, at every stage in the process, what comes before, what comes after, and how each component interacts with and perpetuates the others.

For instance, if you were to create an app to support your customers in pursuing their secondary health goals to supplement your product or service, you must consider how the app fits within a larger ecosystem. This ecosystem should be designed to guide the customer along their journey toward your desired outcomes.

3. Re:code for wellness

Re:coding for wellness requires a continuous cycle of iteration. To succeed in re:coding your relationships, you must collect data from each of your experiences on how they have been received and how they performed against their initial objectives. This data should be analyzed and actioned to feed a constant value exchange which, in turn, builds the relationship.

Re:coding for wellness means your brand becomes more than a treatment option or just a drug. Instead, you evolve into a brand that plays a genuine and powerful role in your audience’s overall well-being.

As more brands choose to offer wellness-driven experiences, consumers will come to expect it. This means that providing these experiences is no longer simply a value-add opportunity, but a requirement to stay competitive.

As a true wellness brand or aspiring wellness brand, creating these experiences is fundamental in meeting and surpassing your customers’ expectations. Showing up for people at the right place and time with a message that feels personal can set you apart from the competition and help your audience feel like they are connected to you and your brand.