amerihealth
The healthcare CEO wanted to get her people, and sales, excited again. Our counterintuitive insight was to tone it down and talk like their customers’ brokers do, plain and simple…
“…smart, talented, wonderful intuition.“
– Judy Roman, CEO, AmeriHealth
Exec Summary
Category Thinking: Healthcare carriers see themselves as The Heroes who everyone has to listen to…
New Insight: The broker is the small-business owner’s true Hero. Employer and broker have a trusted relationship that ought not be disrupted by the carrier. Let the broker be the more credible and enthusiastic advocate of the brand. Serve, don’t usurp, this relationship, by engaging brokers and their customers in a fresher approach: simply be nicer. And let the broker be the one seen by his clients as the hero to an easier, less aggravating experience.
New Position: AmeriHealth is the hero’s hero.
Result: Launched in summer, result was record Q4 sales. More importantly for long-term, it changed the culture internally, spurring a coming together of the company’s south and north divisions and goals. Externally, a breakthrough engagement with brokers that “hey, maybe these guys really are different” and a fair new trial to see if being simply nicer to deal with will trump the larger carriers’ networks that come with the bigger headaches, aggravation and loss of productivity (in their own client relationships and sales growth).
Full Case Study
Situation: Healthcare, in general, receives low marks from its own customers on key drivers like trust and customer service. The competition had positioned themselves as “the answer (cure) to healthcare ills” or “your neighbor” or “your business partner” – in other words, as “THE Hero.” There was no credibility in these positions, and consumers rejected them outright. The other position expressed was “We’re Big” as in our network is big. But being “big,” being national, didn’t help and, in fact, fanned the flames of negatives.
Category Thinking: Healthcare carriers see themselves as the Heroes.
New Insight: Business owners saw the brokers as their most trusted partner in their healthcare plan decisions. Brokers saw healthcare carriers as the third wheel in the relationship. AmeriHealth, a relative unknown in northern Jersey, had developed a good reputation for being reliable and friendly in the south. What if we just got out of our own way? What if we recognized that it’s the broker-business owner dynamic that is sacred? What if we recognized the real “hero” to be not us, the healthcare carrier, but the broker, and standing with the broker, the business owner and physicians? What if customers, through their brokers, saw greater intrinsic value in a local, more accessible, less frustrating, less time-wasting carrier? Greater savings not just in dollars, but in time and energy and stress — than bigger, chest-beatin carriers? What if being simply nicer meant being simply healthier, less aggravated? How heroic would the broker, and by extension, the AmeriHealth brand be then?
Solution: Be the hero’s hero…with its attendant personality (and culture) of being naturally and refreshingly more down to earth, reliable, authentically local and human…in a little-big way: simply nicer.
New Position: AmeriHealth is the hero’s hero.
Result: Launched in summer, result was record Q4 sales. More importantly for long-term, it changed the culture internally, spurring a coming together of the company’s south and north divisions and goals. Externally, a breakthrough engagement with brokers that “hey, maybe these guys really are different” and a fair new trial to see if being simply nicer to deal with will trump the larger carriers’ networks that come with the bigger headaches, aggravation and loss of productivity (in their own client relationships and sales growth).
