A Cure for the Common Campaign

Differentiating your company in a crowded market can be tough. If you offer a common product or service, you have to make potential customers see why they should choose you over the competition.

Take health care, for instance. What was the last advertisement for health care you saw? Was it a happy child on a tire swing or a white-coated physician shaking someone’s hand or something equally vague? Many hospitals and clinics offer a range of services, and it can be difficult to do justice to their offerings and indicate why you should pick one facility rather than another.

We talked to some Twin Cities health care marketing experts and learned about their most unusual and effective efforts. It turns out their strategies aren’t just good for medical clients, they can work in any industry. So here they are: five clients, five campaigns, and five valuable lessons for anyone trying to market a product or service.

They zig, you zag

Marketers love it when their clients show a little bravery. So Minneapolis-based marketing communications agency Preston Kelly must have thanked its lucky stars when it was hired by Bloomgington-based HealthPartners. HealthPartners encouraged the marketers to do something different that would set the medical services provider apart from the crowd.

And indeed, “different” would be an understatement for friendly mascot Petey P. Cup—who is, exactly as you might imagine, an anthropomorphized urine specimen cup.

“They really encouraged us to think out of the health care box,” says Mark Jenson, vice president and account director at Preston Kelly. “That led us to take this campaign into an innovative space, and led us to the development of the tag line ‘A New Way to Look at Health Care.’ Certainly having a spokes-pee-cup is a new way to look at health care.”

Petey was originally an outgrowth of a spring 2008 HealthPartners campaign in which Preston Kelly placed giant medical props—pills, syringes, specimen cups, and the like—in high-traffic areas around the Twin Cities.

“The pee cup was introduced along with it as a spokesperson,” Jenson says. “Petey, like most spokes-characters, does not speak. But he usually has information he passes out. It’s really to help break down stereotypes that health care organizations are overly serious. He has his own Facebook page, he’s on Twitter, and he probably makes upwards of 225 live appearances each year.”