For over a year now, my worldview has been dominated by issues related to mobile healthcare. When you’re in it as deep as I am, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that, to most folks, this is an entirely new field. And like any new endeavor, there are bound to be mistakes made, and wrong (or at least unproductive) paths followed.

I was reminded of this the other day when I came across the article, Healthcare Marketing Goes Mobile. It prognosticated trends in device usage (smartphones lead the way, with tablets close behind, yawn), but what really caught me was a demographic profile extrapolated from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

It wasn’t the data itself that concerned me. Instead, it was the idea that one of the wrong paths that mobile healthcare innovators might follow is one of creating products only in response to market research.

Is the best product really an app targeting 25–29 year-old urban black males with some college, making $50k–$75k a year?

Retrospectives of the life of Steve Jobs overflow with delight and admiration for his rare form of innovation. He brought the world products that, until he introduced them, we didn’t know we needed. (I didn’t know I couldn’t live without my iPad until I had one. Now you’d have to pry it from my cold, dead…etc.) Like another super-innovator, Henry Ford opined, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they’d have said ‘faster horses.’”

So the potential mistake I foresee is a company “making faster horses,” in response to polling data. For example, an mHealth developer, acting on the Pew demographic profile, deciding the best product to make is an app specifically targeting 25-29 year old urban black males with some college who make $50k to $75k a year.

I’m definitely not taking the position that market research is useless. My worry is that people will proceed cart-before-horse method and develop apps for a market based on volume (a population responding to a survey) rather than an innovative needs-based (physician/patient insight) concept.

Maren Elwood, President of OnSite Research has done some interesting research on what she calls Boomers and Zoomers, as part of OnSite’s CyberCensus 2008. Her method of research is called ethnography, where the researchers imbed themselves with those they are interviewing to get an in-depth look at their subjects in their own environment.

The quality of this research often provides richer insights into what people do, rather than simply what they say in a focus group in an unfamiliar setting.

Maren says, “On-Site has developed a new cyber segmentation based on cyber literacy, not demographics. We found that age is not what determines your level of comfort with online tools, it’s your level of cyber literacy. Many Boomers have become ‘Zoomers’, people who are comfortable with online tools, but other Boomers have given up with technology.”

Watch the Youtube clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLs8BxNpd1o

Since being exposed to her work on the difference between Boomers and Zoomers, I’ve been thinking about how important it is for health & wellness companies marketing to the Boomer generation (78 million Americans) to understand the difference between these two groups and to choose the appropriate messaging and media for each.

With a huge wave of up-and-coming Boomers hitting the half-century mark, someone turns 50 in America every 8 seconds, there is obviously going to be a slew of new products and services to accommodate them in the next phase of their lives.

A quick check on the advertisements on AARP Healthy Living section serves up a Kellogg’s^TM Live Bright ^TM Brain Health Bars advertisement and an ad link to Oral Longevity, an initiative between the American Dental Assocation and GlaxoSmithKline promoting good oral healthcare habits to older Americans.  The former ad appears to target Boomers leaning towards prevention and willing to try new products that may well serve these interests.  The latter ad appears to speak in a more traditional style educating and advising older Americans about good habits for oral care.  Each one served up on the AARP site but with distinctive styles addressing different audiences.

So it may be wise for us marketers to remember that just because someone was born between 1946 and 1964 doesn’t mean they should all be considered one huge target market. It’s not the python that swallowed the Volkswagen. And this is where it becomes interesting.

The challenge for marketers is going to be as Boomers mature we are able to identify and understand the needs of the various sub-groups within the 78 million. They see themselves as a sub-group of one, with a desire to be targetted individually not as one of 78 million.

Even though there are many high-tech tools available to us now, it won’t be worth the effort using these tools if the Boomer on the receiving end is closed to that style of message or media.

Now that the mind of the physician is being demystified we have a glimpse into how they view us as their patients. Look at the slew of books & blogs by physicians; what really happens, what they really think.

How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman provides an inside look at the physician’s mind, to help, I presume, the patient to get the most out of this relationship.  Also, add to the mix the latest online columnist for The New York Times Dr. Pauline Chen, with her Doctor and Patient column, giving readers a surgeon’s view of this dynamic relationship.

A recent LA Times article advises readers to arm themselves with information in order to get the best care. Long gone are the days of the sacred doctor patient relationship.

So why not shop around for a doctor? We have consumer reports on everything from cruises to pet food, automobiles to fitness centers.If the trend continues, and I see no reason why it won’t, employers are shifting more and more of the responsibility of healthcare spending onto the shoulders of employees, a la HRA’s (Health Reimbursement Accounts) and HSA’s (Health Spending Accounts).

I understand the reason for the shift, ever increasing health insurance premiums (think high single-digit to double-digit increases annually) that hit the company’s bottom line.

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