Healthcare advertising has its fair share of clichés - and some of the most common are expertly skewered in this recent piece from PM live, which really made me smile. It’s easy to scoff, but clichés are dangerously bewitching creatures, and creative agencies up and down the land have to battle daily against the temptation to shoot improbably beautiful, healthy-looking patients in sunlit spa hotel bedrooms – oops, sorry… NHS wards.
Sadly, many fail to resist the temptation.
More tempting even than a beautiful smiley patient, is a beautiful, smiley, angelic-looking nurse. Need convincing? Pick up any medical trade publication and see how many you can spot.
And it makes sense. We’re targeting nurses. So, what do we know about them? Well that they are in a vocation; not a career. That they are motivated by the well-being of their patients. That they are inherently caring. That they work hard putting themselves last to make the world a better place for others, and so on. All true. And it is but a short creative jump to reflect this beatific picture back at our target to let them know that our brand really gets them. Bless.
But do we? I’ve spent years talking to nurses in groups and in one-to-ones, while researching all sorts of issues, brands, products and creative concepts. And yes, I recognise those characteristics.
But they aren’t the whole picture, and they certainly aren’t the way nurses see themselves.
“Oh sh**, not the smiling angel again” is a direct quote from a recent group where we were researching some creative concepts. Nurses are professionals, they’re decision makers in literally ‘life and death’ situations, they are educated, informed experts in healthcare provision. Yes, they’re caring, but it’s one aspect of the job – and boy, do they react strongly to any concept showing a doe-eyed, Disneyfied image of a smiley nurse with her heart on her sleeve, rejoicing because she can carry on passively mopping a fevered brow because your wonder product has come along to solve the hard bit. And when I say react strongly, it’s often with hoots of derision.
It’s also not the whole picture – because, of course, not all nursing roles are the same. For every community nurse developing a long-term relationship with her patients, there’s a theatre nurse who loves her job largely because she doesn’t have to interact with the patients because they are completely anaesthetised. Or a TVN whose interest really lies in the complex, intellectual problem solving of getting a chronic wound to heal, sometimes (by their own admission) almost forgetting that there’s a patient attached to it.
So where’s the insight? Well, as always, it’s about really listening to people; not job titles. Get under the skin of what’s really going on in their everyday working life, what they talk to each other about over coffee, the language they use when they’re talking about their relationships with patients.
Creative execution and even channel are key, too. Faced with a press ad featuring a picture of a ‘real’ nurse, 90% of respondents will confidently tell you that she’s a model. Put a real nurse in a video, though, and the authenticity really shines through. (That’s something we did to great effect for Crawford Healthcare)
Real Nurses, as opposed to Disney-Caring-Nurses, are fab. Yes, they are an inherently caring. But they’re also smart, potty-mouthed, hilarious, cynical, cheesed off, and HUMAN. Try putting some of those words in your next creative brief and let’s see what we get…
