field notes

Expect long lines at Apple Stores today for the long-awaited Apple Watch. This year alone UBS expects Apple to sell 25 million of them, with annual shipments reaching 68 million by 2018. Apple has a tendency to swoop in and dominate markets, as it did with smartphones, tablets, and personal audio, so it's not a big stretch to expect the company to accomplish the same thing with wearables. If so, it could open up a major new digital marketing channel uniquely suited to wearable tech.

In the early March demo event, Apple VP of technology Kevin Lynch used his Apple Watch to take a call, watch a video, and open a garage door among other things. And like other smartwatches, it can do things like track your heart rate and tell you when you've been sitting around for too long. An accelerometer measures total body movement, calories burned, and number of steps per day, and there's potential for countless health related applications, which is great news for healthcare digital marketers. Here are 3 reasons why the Apple Watch will be the new marketing frontier in healthcare.

"The Pepsi Challenge is back, with a twist" reports the New York Times. But I think it's more of a much-needed update than a "twist."

The 1975 Pepsi Challenge is perhaps the most iconic representation of what marketing used to be.

At shopping malls across america, the company ran blind taste tests against Coke. Pepsi won, of course, and used it as marketing leverage for the next decade. Despite results, Coke continued to dominate the market. But how could that be? Pepsi had scientifically proven it was a better product.

This edition of Rhino Radio is a recap of the 2014 Greystone Healthcare Internet Conference presentation on "What's next in healthcare digital marketing?" 

A recent PwC study quote recently got me thinking: “As ‘patients’ behave more like ‘consumers,’ health care organizations need to deliver a higher level of personalized service, satisfaction and overall experience – or risk losing business to the competition.”

If you’re a hospital digital marketer, you need to be creating online treatment programs. Here are 5 reasons why.

Car websites have cars. Zappos has shoes and product videos. Apple has shiny gadgets beautifully photographed. Amazon has photos of products, the ability to look inside the pages of books and user feedback. Lots and lots of user feedback.

In todays overcrowded and commoditized B2B marketplace, brands are finding it increasingly harder to break through the clutter and get their messages heard.  B2B brands are trying to edge each other out by pushing and pulling messaging out to rational business decision makers and speaking loudly about their business value. 

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.