Promoting your services might matter…if it were 2006
When explaining ServingOverSelling and the call for health systems to reallocate funds from promotional marketing to other activities that actually help patients and communities, one of the first questions I often get goes something like this:
“But what about promoting our services? That’s essential in helping people understand the care options they have in their community.”
Is it essential people in any community understand where to receive care, what their care options are, who delivers what services, etc.? Absolutely. Is promoting your services through advertising an effective way to meet that need? Sorry to say, but absolutely not. And honestly, it’s not even really close. But in case someone in your organization still clings to that notion (that billboard-begging neurosurgeon, perhaps?), here are five reasons why promoting your services so consumers understand their care options is a waste of resources for health systems:
Joe Public Doesn’t Care About Your Hospital – Maybe you’ve heard this one before. But consumers aren’t walking around wondering about what your health system is doing, what cool new piece of surgical equipment you’ve just bought, or who has the best options for care. They’re not doing that because the vast majority of people do not need a new provider of care the vast majority of the time. When your message promoting your system or your services is not relevant to someone, it’s not realistic to expect them to see, value, retain and remember that message. People have too many other things to think about, worry about, or do. (If you want the full case for Joe Public Doesn’t Care About Your Hospital and haven’t read the book, shoot me a note at chris@bearing287.com and I’ll be happy to send you a free PDF copy.) And forget about expecting them to act on your ads promoting your services – remember, they don’t need care.
Joe Ain’t No Encyclopedia Brown – We’re not asking consumers to just remember one product, service or brand – we’re asking them to remember multiple services. Clayton Christensen wrote in his book The Innovator’s Prescription that the average tertiary care academic medical center manages over 100 pathways of care. Are we going to promote all of those to consumers? Let’s just limit it to the top service lines that typically are granted marketing budgets, say oncology, orthopedics, cardiology, neurology and primary care: do we think consumers who have no need at any given time for any of those services will retain information about any one of them, let alone all five?
The Obvious Influences – Over the course of my career as a health system marketer, the factors that influence patient decision making when it comes to selecting providers have barely changed. They are, and have almost always been, inertia (aka staying within their current system of care), word of mouth (aka friends and family), physician referrals, location, in-network insurance inclusion and, over the past 15 years, social media (which in fundamental ways is just another form of word of mouth). Research has been done time and time again on what influences patients and their decision making, and advertising barely makes the list in those studies, if at all. (Here’s just one example, an academic study from 2022, if you need hard evidence.) So even when consumers are seeking care options, they are not relying on your promotional marketing to guide that decision.
It Costs a Ton to Be Lucky – Now, none of this means your advertising won’t have any impact on patient choice. You could get lucky, for example, running an advertising campaign to promote your orthopedics services and having someone see your ad right after they’ve twisted their ankle. That definitely happens, but boy, is it expensive to be lucky. In Joe Public II: The New Paradigm, we ran an example for a medium-sized hospital in a medium-sized market using actual data and showed that TV advertising promoting surgery services in that market would be relevant to 2,600 people out of the 2.5 million exposed to the advertising, or just 1 in 1,000. That’s like paying to drag the Atlantic Ocean with a 10,000-mile-long net just to catch the rare North Atlantic Deep Eyed Puffer Fish. No matter what analogy or metaphor you’d like to use, the takeaway is the same – promoting hospital services through advertising is nearly always a waste of money.
It’s Not 2006 Anymore – Gone are the days when the only real way to inform patients of a hospital’s services was to promote those services. Why would we think consumers would reference our advertising when they have our websites, social media, independent quality and rating sites, and search to help them understand their options? (Note we still support health systems using SEM, because with that form of promotional marketing, you’re helping those who are actively seeking care, which does qualify as “serving.”) Those options have all been around for more than a decade, reducing the value of promoting health system services over that time. And all of those will be dwarfed by the power of AI to help patients find care. According to a Pew Research Center study released in August, one third of Americans surveyed use AI chatbots for help with health or healthcare. In 2025, a PwC study found that 73% of consumers said they are using or are interested in using AI-powered care navigation tools that recommend the right provider or care setting. Given AI is still in the first inning in terms of widespread consumer adoption, these numbers will only continue to grow. It’s one reason why the hottest conversations in healthcare marketing right now are around how to manage the growing importance of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), how AI agents will be deployed to help consumers in the care journey, and what the future of websites will hold. It all should make spending money on billboards or TV spots to promote your services feel fairly quaint.
We need to retire the idea of qualifying promotional marketing as “serving” because we think we’re helping patients find the care they need. Our advertising does a very bad job of helping potential patients understand their care options, through no fault of our own – that’s just the way this business works. And with the advent of AI, it is becoming even more difficult to defend spending money on these efforts. Now, if you could just convince that neurosurgeon he doesn’t need his own billboard, you’d be set.