field notes

Have you ever been online researching a topic for work and then somehow 30 minutes fly by and you’re deep into a far-flung article, two or three times removed from the original topic? There is a scientific term for it: 

Fear is a powerful motivator. But as Solis Women’s Health found out, it can also be a powerful demotivator.

Studies prove it: people are incapable of making decisions without a little burst of dopamine – the brain's emotional happy juice. Smart marketers know emotion is the key.

Gone are the Mad Men days of consumers dutifully eating up marketing messages served to them on a silver platter. Today’s consumer is in the driver’s seat. But the real challenge for marketers is how to navigate consumers in the right direction and willingly engage with their brand. 

This is especially difficult when the road is littered with distractions that, ironically, we created? In Don Draper’s day, the average consumer saw 500 ads a day. Today, that number is as high as 5,000 with no shortage of boilerplate info-graphics, whitepapers, blogs, videos and microsites vying for consumers’ attention. Couple that with a serious case of device ADD and complex B2B messages – it’s no wonder that today’s marketer has trouble making connections that translate into real business value. 

Knowing how you stack up against competitors and peers in the healthcare marketplace can be extremely helpful.  You can see who is leveraging which digital tools, as well and who is leveraging those tools for success.  Geonetic recently polled 250  healthcare organizations to see how they use the Web and digital marketing to connect with their patients and communities.

Hospital website redesigns aren’t easy.

First of all, there’s the internal politics. They seem to put the needs of individuals and department agendas over the needs of the entire organization. This complication seems to affect hospital website redesigns more than any other industry.

No marketing channel is free of Marketing BS. And, as this parody beautifully points out, video can be one of the worst offenders.

According to Google, 57% of the time when we’re using a smartphone, we’re using another device. And Forbes reports that when people watch TV while working on their computer, they typically spend no longer than 5 seconds on a particular screen before shifting their focus to the other.