What our survey revealed about the biggest reputational drivers in healthcare

By Meredith Owen, Practice Leader – Integrated Intelligence, and Katy Hagert, Senior Group Director –Integrated Intelligence (a division of Real Chemistry)

Reputations are fickle things. They can take decades to build, but days to destroy. For healthcare brands, the tenuousness of reputation can take on added weight and importance – with both billions of dollars in R&D spend and access to life-enhancing treatments often on the line, the stakes really are that high.

But too many of today’s reputation measurement and management offerings treat healthcare brands just like any others – missing critical nuances in audience segments, baseline expectations, and reputation drivers. At Real Chemistry, we’ve developed a more tailored, industry-specific approach. Here are five key lessons we’ve learned from decades of experience working with healthcare companies at the cutting edge of science and innovation – coupled with a recent survey of 1,000 consumers and 500 HCPs designed to uncover the nuances and relative importance of reputational attributes that matter most to them.

1.       When it comes to reputation, brand leaders need to understand attitudes and perceptions of four distinct healthcare audiences.

In healthcare, it’s not enough to segment by common demographic categories like gender, age, race/ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. While our reputation attribute weighting survey revealed meaningful differences by gender and generation, differences among consumers and HCPs were more striking, and likely far more salient to brand and corporate communications’ teams efforts to influence perceptions and mitigate reputational risk. In fact, our experience with media outlets, social intelligence gathering, and primary market research strongly suggests that health care brand leaders pay attention to four core audiences when measuring and managing reputation:

• Consumers and caregivers
• Health care professionals (HCPs) and scientific researchers
• Industry professionals and investors
• Media executives and journalists

Each of these segments values different things when forming opinions about healthcare products and companies, and – perhaps more importantly – each group has different tools to further influence perception and product performance. Any reputation management program should seek to understand and engage each of these audiences in appropriately differentiated ways.

2.       Product safety and efficacy are paramount, but they’re increasingly presumed as “table stakes” that have an outsized influence on reputation primarily when things go wrong.

Not surprisingly, product safety and efficacy are foundational to any healthcare reputation. In our survey, both consumers and HCP selected “safe and effective products and services” as the single most important attribute influencing reputation, with weighted importance accounting for 20% (consumers) and 19% (HCPs) of all important attributes selected by each group. To put that in perspective, it was almost 1.5X more important than other leading attributes like trustworthiness (for consumers) or promising pipelines (for HCPs), so safety and efficacy influence reputation far more than anything else. But that doesn’t mean companies should overemphasize these points in reputation-building. Broadly speaking, they’re just assumed. It’s only on the margins that safety and efficacy can have outsized reputational influence. So, when things go phenomenally right (e.g., study results that can change care pathways) or horribly wrong (e.g., buzz around unexpected adverse events), communication teams need to be prepared to act – and act fast.

3.       Consumers view healthcare brand reputations through a lens of the here and now, while HCPs orient their perceptions more heavily toward future innovation and impact.

Perhaps the most salient insight emerging from our survey was the differences in relative attribute rankings between consumers and HCPs. While it’s probably not too surprising that consumers value affordability/accessibility (#3), patient-centricity (#4), and expanded patient/provider support (#5) more than HCPs do – or that HCPs rank a company’s scientific prowess more heavily than do consumers (promising pipeline #2, cutting-edge products #3, category leadership #4) – there are some nuances in these rankings worth noting. Taken together, these very different Top 5 reputational attribute rankings illuminate the extent to which consumers associate reputation with what a company is doing to help patients and caregivers today, while HCPs also consider how the company’s innovations may help patients and caregivers tomorrow. Similarly, these rankings seem to suggest that HCPs narrowly view a company’s reputation through the lens of its products and their clinical impact on patients, while consumers evaluate healthcare companies more holistically – taking into account anything else the company may do (or not do) to help patients get the maximum benefit from those products. Brand and communication leaders should consider ways to integrate messaging about current and future programs, and about both clinical and access innovations, to optimize the reputational impact of such narratives.

4.       That said, don’t discount the science with consumers; they value groundbreaking products and services more than you might expect.

Consumers still care a lot about a healthcare company’s scientific prowess. While they don’t rank reputational attributes like clinical innovation (#6) or category leadership (#8) nearly as high as HCPs do, consumers still need to know that healthcare companies are demonstrably advancing human health. In aggregate, those clinical attributes mattered more to consumers than things like “ease of doing business.” Net net, look for opportunities to take credit for your scientific innovations in ways that the average healthcare consumer can both understand and appreciate.

5.       Product perceptions ladder up to company reputations – especially in healthcare; in an industry centered on improving human health, positive or negative product reputations can significantly influence a company’s overall reputation for innovation, integrity, and impact.

In our survey exploring drivers of a healthcare company’s reputation, both consumers and HCPs weighed several product-specific attributes very high. Things like product safety and efficacy, product pipeline, product affordability/accessibility, and cutting-edge medicines/medical devices all feature prominently as heavy influencers of reputational perception. Especially in large and siloed organizations, brand teams and corporate communications teams must work collaboratively to ensure all reputation initiatives are aligned and synergistic. This is as true for positive reputation building efforts as it is for reputational risk-mitigation strategies when things go wrong. By understanding and messaging to each healthcare audience segment – and working more intentionally across product portfolios – companies can develop and amplify cohesive narratives with maximum reputational impact.

At Real Chemistry, we’ve developed a proprietary approach to measuring and managing reputation in healthcare. We call it Real Reputation. Rooted in our understanding of the four key audience segments outlined above, our tailored approach regularly taps into online signals, then combines that data with insights from curated healthcare audience panels and robust real-world data to measure reputation and develop data-driven strategies for building reputational value. By correlating reputational changes to changes in brand use and brand share, Real Reputation connects the dots between reputation drivers and sales in ways less healthcare-centered companies cannot.

As we look forward to all the uncertainties an election year may bring, we welcome conversations about how Real Reputation may help your teams optimize opportunities and minimize reputational risks. Contact either of us – Meredith Owen (Mowen@realchemistry.com) or Katy Hagert (khagert@realchemistry.com) – to learn more.

About the survey

Real Chemistry, an independent research organization serving the healthcare industry, conducted a 10-minute survey among a total of 1,000 consumers and 500 healthcare professionals (HCPs), then analyzed responses using a Max-Diff methodology, to uncover the reputational attributes that matter most to them. To be considered for inclusion in the study, consumer respondents had to be between the ages of 21-79 years old, and healthcare professionals had to practice within a specialty of dermatology, allergy/immunology, pulmonology, otolaryngology, rheumatology, gastroenterology, endocrinology, oncology, cardiology, neurology, nephrology, surgery (including cardiac, orthopedic, and plastic), family medicine, obstetrics/gynecology, pediatric medicine and/or be nurse practitioners. The consumer survey sample was adjusted for age, race/ethnicity, based on 2020 Current Population Survey from US Census Bureau. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 5 percentage points at a 95% confidence level. While these reputation attributes have been analyzed and scored for the healthcare industry as a whole, Real Chemistry continues to customize these attributes for our clients based on therapeutic area or healthcare business focus.