Creating Impactful Benefit Statements in Healthcare

16 Sep Creating Impactful Benefit Statements in Healthcare

What’s In it for YOU?

Fierce competition and restricted access to the O.R. continues to increase the importance of clear and consistent messaging of your healthcare products’ most impactful benefits. These efforts aren’t easy but are critical to framing your value proposition for multiple influencers and decision-makers.

With copious experience testing concepts from fuzzy front end to launch and training hundreds of marketing and R&D partners in healthcare and other verticals, I offer many ideas for starting and optimizing your work.

Regardless of which NPD process you follow, once you’ve empathized with your target and identified a solution to a key unmet need, you need to clearly articulate a benefit statement to guide you through screening, development, and commercialization of one or more concepts.

The benefit statement is the primary advantage of your product or service, or THE CUSTOMER PROMISE, i.e., What’s in it for them?

A great benefit statement must be:

Crafting strong benefit statements requires time and effort, often by a multi-functional team. However, some of the key benefits to your organization include:

Improved efficiency in getting the right products to market – weak solutions fail faster while solid ideas avoid rework delays.
Stronger internal alignment – improved communication enables multiple functions to understand the end goal and work together.
Easier planning for a smooth launch – increased confidence in forecasting of sales, production, and support required.

All these benefits ladder up to efficiency of time and work, which results in WINNING in the marketplace.

Just as one unmet need can spawn multiple solutions, each solution may produce multiple benefits.  It’s critical to understand which of these benefits matter the most, and for whom, to know where to focus your messaging strategy and communications spend.  A solid market research strategy can help you here. (Let’s talk!)

As you work on your benefit statement, you’ll want to consider these options of how to position your benefit.

Below I’ve provided healthcare examples of each of these options to get you started*:

Proven higher quality – Anthem® wellness programs make the most of your employee’s benefits. Empowered employees make smarter lifestyle choices for a happier, more productive workforce. It improves company culture and can lower costs, too. On average, care management programs were able to reduce costs by $2,044 per each engaged employee.¹

New level of benefit – Sysmex WAM™ is an enterprise-wide software solution that will take your laboratory to the next level in system optimization to improve productivity, reduce clinical errors and support a sustainable paperless environment. Sysmex WAM™ is the only software solution that is adaptable to your changing environment to help you control your future.²

Category superiority –  The ECHELON CIRCULAR™ Powered Stapler is designed to reduce leaks without compromising perfusion – resulting in 61% fewer leaks at the staple line compared to the Medtronic DST Series™ EEA™ Stapler.³

Solve a paradox – Utilize a greater range of motion than the human hand or leading laparoscopic staplers with SureForm™ 60.⁴ 

Tap into trends –  Halo Clinical Communication Platform™ helps protect patients from delays in care and clinicians from alert fatigue and burnout by unifying clinical communication across the community on a single platform.⁵

Address category negative – The MEDIVATORS line of disposable infection control products like irrigation tubing and single-use valves eliminate the need for very difficult manual cleaning and disinfection thus reducing infection risk and increasing patient safety.⁶

Unique new benefit – By providing stable pneumoperitoneum, constant smoke evacuation, and valve-free access to the abdominal cavity, the AirSeal® System reduces procedural time, costs, and hassles in ways that conventional insufflators, trocars, and filtered tubing systems simply cannot do.⁷

New secondary benefit –  The Centrella® Smart+ bed helps meet the changing needs of healthcare facilities and delivers elevated care through patient safety and patient satisfaction.⁸

After optimizing your benefit statement, you’ll need to strengthen it with one or more compelling proof points or reasons to believe, which may include claims, testimonials, recommendations, and other approaches.

Gina Derickson, Research Director, Engagious | gina.derickson@engagious.com

* Examples were taken from the listed websites. All product names, trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners. All company, product and service names used in this article are for identification purposes only. Use of these names, trademarks and brands does not imply endorsement.
Sources:
1  http://www.anthem.com/employer/health-and-wellness/
2  http://www.sysmex.com/us/en/Products/InformationSystems/Pages/Sysmex-WAM-System.aspx
3   http://www.jnjmedicaldevices.com/en-US/product/echelon-circular-powered-stapler
4  http://www.intuitive.com/en-us/products-and-services/da-vinci/stapling/sureform-60
5  http://www.halocommunications.com/halo/
6  http://www.cantelmedical.com/medivators
7  http://www.conmed.com/en/hybrid-product-landing-pages/airseal
8  http://www.hillrom.com/en-us/products/smart-beds-and-surfaces/centrella-smart-bed/