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Marketing Mismatch by Clive Simpkins

Marketing mismatch

When pitching a product or service to a market segment, logic suggests taking the target audience’s lifestyle and a few other odds’n ends into account so that you have a fix on likely uptake. South African medical insurance company Discovery Health’s marketing team seems consistently to screw up the manner in which they attempt to get their superbly conceptualised products to market. It’s almost as though the ideas come from one quarter and the implementation is left to a bunch of out of touch people. The ‘launch’ of their credit card offering doesn’t even bear mentioning due to the irritation it caused so many consumers - and marketingweb has played host to some of the lamentations.

Their latest great idea with stupid implementation is a pedometer. For the uninitiated, that’s a little motion-sensing device half the size of an old ‘match box’ that sits on your belt in the vicinity of your hip, and records the number of steps you take. Yes, there are other variants, but the Discovery one is worn on the belt.

British parliamentarians were introduced last year to the concept of walking ten thousand steps a day. Sounds shocking, but isn’t actually that bad. Even intentionally parking your car in an out of the way bay and walking the maximum distance to your destination in a shopping mall racks up steps pretty quickly. Studies show that people doing five thousand steps a day are doing just barely OK in maintaining some level of fitness and mobility. Fewer steps and you’re into a declining health trend with sinister consequences. So, it’s a good idea that we should get our larded backsides out of the dent on the couch and moving.

Following the Discovery call centre’s instructions, you would have found yourself, Discovery membership card clutched firmly in hand, buying (for about ninety bucks) a pedometer from ‘a participating pharmacy’. It would, when your monthly steps had been ‘recorded’ by the pharmacy, lead to you getting Discovery Vitality points – a great idea so far. It’s at the pharmacy that the marketing strategy starts to unravel.

The registration of your Discovery membership number and your pedometer requires seeing the in-house pharmacy clinic nurse. Exhale slowly. Ditto the subsequent recording of your accumulated monthly steps. Exhale very slowly. On any given day (when you’ve memorized or put her schedule of ‘duty hours’ into your PDA), you’ll find quite a queue of people (and bellowing babies) waiting for immunization shots, advice, blood pressure monitoring, glucose testing and the like. So there’s absolutely no guarantee that your special trip to the pharmacy to have your compliance with the pedometer noted, is going to produce the desired result. I tried just once. I was at the tail end of what proved to be quite a chatty line of people – some armed with pedometers. I realized that the unpredictability of consultation duration meant I’d be better off stress-wise doing the walking but forgetting about the accumulation of the Vitality points. The sheer irritation and schedule disruption in joining this quasi ‘primary health care’ queue doesn’t do it for me. And it certainly won’t for many other busy or self-employed people.

The solution is for Discovery to go hi-tech. I’d happily pay a few hundred Rand for a pedometer that can download the reading over the Internet. Or that could be ‘swiped by’ a scanner located in some sensible place like a gym or in a strategically located medical centre. The present system is a mess and all but the most tenacious of points-gatherers are surely going to have to cop out of the recording system. The lesson is simple: When you introduce a product or service, consider the lifestyle of your target audience. Consider also the logistics when it’s an ‘interactive’ device like the pedometer and factor that in before launch.

Author Info:

Clive is a marketing and communications strategist and published book author. His speciality is facilitating sustainable change in individuals and organizations. Website: www.imbizo.com

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