This week’s New York Times featured a front page business section story on the partnership between UnitedHealth Group and the Y.M.C.A. They are joining forces, together with retail pharmacies, to help people at risk for diabetes decrease their chances of developing the disease through weight loss, healthier diet and regular exercise. The Times called the partners an “odd couple.”

We’ve seen odder couples at our son’s soccer matches.

Health insurance companies are often the ideal partners for awareness and wellness programs like the one described in the article. The health-conscious and those who eat right, exercise, maintain appropriate weight and stay on top of their conditions do not file ever-growing medical claims. Talk about your motivation.

The Y has a long-standing heritage nationally and in communities for providing access to health, fitness. Add in the retail-pharmacy and pharmacists, both trusted sources, and you’ve got a winning combination.

In this diabetes program, UnitedHealth Group is paying the Y.M.C.A and pharmacists to keep people healthier. Also odd? We don’t think so. These programs cost money. The budget needs to come from somewhere. The bean counters at UnitedHealth Group must have done the math and realized that more well people will result in lower premiums all around. Further, the costs for the effort are far outweighed by the mid-and long-term financial and other benefits such as goodwill, good PR, positive relationships and, most importantly, healthier people with reduced diabetes risk.

Sometimes it’s the least likely bedfellows that result in the most meaningful partnerships. Once the value proposition is laid out, the benefits to all parties made clear, a game plan agreed and roles and responsibilities divided, it is surprising how like-minded organizations with seemingly disparate goals are.

We’ve put together very effective collaborations for our pharma clients with managed care plans, community pharmacies, retail chains, employers, employer groups, churches, non-profit health organizations, among others. Sometimes it’s a twosome; occasionally a threesome. We’ve also done foursomes. To say that there was sometimes skepticism at first would be an understatement, but in all cases, it didn’t take long for the parties to realize the upsides and team up. It’s not that we’re so clever. Our position is simply that common ground can be found when it comes to enhancing health awareness, understanding and action, regardless of the business objectives of the players. It shouldn’t matter if you’re for profit or not-for-profit so long as there’s a worthy endgame. Which makes it odd that it would seem so odd to work together.

Jeremy had a long-time client who opened every meeting with the following phrase: “Be brief. Be brilliant. Be gone.” All meetings were restricted to 30 minutes. If you couldn’t state your case in a half hour, it probably wasn’t worthwhile in the first place. He demanded from PR a smart idea, a straightforward message, and an approach for telling his brand’s story that made immediate sense and had a better than fair chance of delivering the results he was looking for. Simple, right?

Keeping it simple in public relations strategy, planning and execution has real, unassailable value. Does a new PR campaign always require a phone-book size slide deck? Is a handful of well-researched, solid facts insufficient evidence to validate a new approach? Is it always best to deliver all brand messages in every press release?

We say nay.

Simplicity should not be confused with being bare-bones or uncreative. On the contrary. The most effective campaigns are often those with the simplest messages. They are easiest to remember, seem so obvious, and the audience –from the client pitch to the end-user—gets it with little to no explanation.

Sometimes keeping it simple requires paring the core brand attributes or the key messages to just the one that speaks most powerfully and persuasively, and then linking it to what we often refer to as a “higher cause.” One example we love of this strategy at work is Tide Detergent. The higher cause: pride. The functional attribute: whiter whites. How much simpler can it get?

It can be difficult for marketers who are very close to their brands to choose one attribute or a single message. It’s like asking them to pick a favorite among their children. There is also the “scaleability” argument. In the pharma world, it can go like this: since we only have x years left on the patent, we need to tell the whole story and provide fair balance in every tactic and have the outreach be as wide as possible, as casting a wide net is the most efficient use of our limited marketing budget, and the best way to make an impact fast.

To this, we say OK. Have other elements in the marketing mix be the spaghetti and PR the meatball. We then work to land on the single functional brand attribute (efficacy? safety? mechanism of action? rapid onset? unique nature of the core ingredient?) or message (disease education? symptom awareness for self-identification) we want people (target consumers and the media) to remember most, and identify the higher cause that will not only garner media attention, but also trigger an emotional connection to spur the most likely portion of our audience (at-risk population? women as healthcare gatekeepers? key markets only?) to take the desired action (e.g. get tested, visit a website, talk to their health care provider, download and use a coupon, enroll in a program). Once at this point, the rest is simple – from the tactical plan to the integration, from execution to results measurement.

And if more convincing were necessary, imagine this…a world where all meetings were brilliant and over in 30 minutes.

Last year, I wrote an article for Pharmaceutical Executive with Chip Walker, a former colleague at a PR firm who now heads the strategy practice at Strawberry Frog, an ad agency we’re partnering with on a healthy aging initiative. The article advanced the idea that “awareness” PR efforts, typically unbranded campaigns designed to inform consumers about a disease or condition, are not enough to cut through the information clutter in today’s competitive, crowded, skeptical market, and harder for brand managers to justify given the demands on their budgets. We proposed a new approach with a more robust deliverable: an effort that reached well beyond awareness to activate the target audience, not just broadcast to it. We called this, “Creating a Movement.”

The bar is even higher today for ROI, and getting more value out of PR dollars is as important as ever. For many, increased awareness is not a sufficient endgame.

We defined a “movement” as the mobilization of a target audience for a purpose or goal they relate to, care for and actually want to do something about. A movement has authenticity, makes a powerful connection with its audience and inspires action. A movement approach shifts attitudes and motivates behavior by going beyond “health” and tapping into something deeper in consumers’ lives, thus providing a bigger platform on which to engage them. Movement strategy, vocabulary and platforms can all be employed through communications efforts tools to enhance patients’ and consumers’ feelings of authenticity about a campaign’s messages and a closer alliance with the brand, the disease, the cause, and the sponsor. Awareness evolved.

Movements are, of course, not the answer for all communications brand challenges. But if your target audiences are disenfranchised, apathetic, undecided, or frustrated with existing choices, another approach may be worth considering:

• Identify which consumers are the activists and drivers of your movement. The easiest way to answer this is to identify a group that has both a strong business value to your brand (e.g., at-risk populations with a need for your brand) and a discontent with one or more parts of the current discussion or activities taking place within the disease state.
• Consider your “basis for participation.” This is the genesis for your movement. What outcome do both you and your “Activist Base” want to achieve? What is your difference making purpose in the world? Why would people want to participate in your brand/program’s effort to achieve this change?
• Mobilize your activist base. Key to this is have a simple, central message (e.g., “get tested now” or “know your X levels (HBP, cholesterol, triglycerides, liver enzymes), “wear this bracelet” (as in the LiveStrong campaign), “expect more (control, results, cure, improved lifestyle) from your treatment” that is easy to remember, pass on and replicate. Keep in mind your aim isn’t just to expose your Activist Base to information and stories you can place in the media. THEY ARE YOUR MEDIA.
• Spread your message. This means providing the tools that not only tell the story but allow the audience to independently pass on the message to others. The endgame is to build participation and message pass-along, not just awareness and knowledge

Movements ladder up communications efforts from awareness to activation, delivering more value for the same spend. The nature of movements often make them valuable companions to DTC campaigns and the ideal platforms for partnerships with third party organizations.

After seven years in our own business and more than 50 years combined in public relations on both the corporate and agency sides, the jacobstahl principals have made the great decision to become joiners.

As my mother would say, we’re not from the joiners. After working in large, multinational public relations agencies since the early 1980s, starting our own business meant blazing our own trail and in so doing, consistently providing the kind of thinking, expertise and service we have always felt paying clients deserved. As seasoned communications professionals, we wanted to create our own set of best practices and leave behind the compromises of agency life. Playing by our own rules meant, among other benefits, having and taking the time to really learn and live the brands we were privileged to work on, and partnering with others we knew well and respected.

We’d seen the blogs posted by our colleagues at larger public relations agencies and even followed some for a while before abandoning them for blogs written by those in other areas of communications finding them of more interest, more relevant to our day-to-day working life and less self-promotional. One blog we enjoy is Larry Woodard’s from Vigilante Advertising posted on ABCNews. It’s always current, covers a range of communications issues, easy to read, isn’t just a segue to a Vigilante offering and usually contains a nugget that is worth sharing with a client. In short, a blog worth reading. If jacobstahl posted a blog, it would have to meet the same criteria or it just wasn’t worth doing.

So we waited and resisted the blog bandwagon. After all, we won’t be reporting from the World Economic Forum in Davos or from the last gathering of biotech glitterati in Silicon Valley. Our musings will mostly be from the waiting area at Penn Station and various other stations along the pharma corridor on the Acela line, gate seating in LaGuardia and airports in hub cities of American Airlines, and from our venerable offices in a non-descript building in NYC where the inspiration begins. Exotic power locations will just have to be sacrificed for thought-provoking and meaningful content.

Why have we decided to join the blogosphere now? The answer is simple and very personal. We have something to say and the time just feels right. Not very scientific, I’m afraid, but hopefully we will have called this right. In the turbulent environment of the last few years, healthcare marketers –some of whom we call our clients– have been under significant pressure to deliver bigger results from smaller budgets. What is the role of PR in this scenario? How should the practice evolve to deliver harder results and when should we push back and stand by the solids PR has always offered? What does PR success look like now? Have traditional “awareness” programs gone down the memory hole? How do corporate PR teams adjust – and direct their agencies accordingly—to the changing needs of their internal brand clients? What’s the operating definition of “patient and consumer education” when ROI is measured in sales ratios and lead generation? These and other questions warrant attention.

We are also committed to delivering a perspective here that is decidedly un-pharma-geek. Jeremy spent years on the consumer side working with major multi-national companies, many of which didn’t need TARP money. This has given him permission to advise our health care clients to look beyond what they see for ideas about building patient loyalty to their brands, and offer wackier answers to client meeting ice-breaker questions like, “If the brand was an animal, celebrity, reality show host, car, what would it be?”

Finally, and this is only meaningful for those who know us, our blog will occasionally offer a window into how working with your spouse is not only possible, it’s really OK.

Welcome to After the Run. Thanks for reading. Stay tuned.