Anna Bauman: Developing Consumer-Driven Health Brands to Connect With Both Patients and Providers
As DTC brands adjust to a more complex post-pandemic mediascape, consumer health tech veteran Anna Haas Bauman shares frontline lessons on brand-building from scratch.
Anna Bauman was at the forefront of DTC health tech long before the pandemic catapulted it into the consumer mainstream. After leading teams at Johnson & Johnson on the OneTouch® brand and at Align Technology, makers of Invisalign® clear aligners, she took the marketing reins at Whisper.AI, the direct-to-consumer hearing aid powered by artificial intelligence that gets better over time. She talks with The Continuum about balancing awareness, education, and customer acquisition for an innovative challenger product, the regulatory nuances of the consumer health tech space, and the fun—and terror—of building a new brand without a safety net.
The Continuum: As a marketer, you've spent your career in the consumer health tech space. What drew you there?
Anna: Both of my parents were in medicine, and I grew up in the space. My earliest memories are of my dad parking me at the nurse's station while he did rounds. I think that influenced my career direction in a few different ways.
One is that the mission of helping people is important to me—having a product and a job that really is going to make a difference. It’s also an interesting challenge to figure out the clinical, business and emotional aspects of a product for both the doctor and the patient. And I enjoy figuring out a messaging strategy that can work across both the HCP and the consumer audience. It's never boring.
At The Continuum, we’re big believers in balancing brand marketing with demand generation. As someone with a wealth of experience in direct response and performance, how do you approach brand?
My previous roles were at big, established brands, where there’s already this baseline of investment in the brand from which you can build. At Whisper.AI, I had to build a new brand without a safety net. It was a lot of fun, but it was also terrifying. Is this going to work? Are the sales coming in? I was constantly refreshing HubSpot.
My experience at Whisper.AI showed me just how powerful brand could be as a tool. At first, it was a real question of how much we should invest in the brand as a startup. Since hearing care is a very crowded category, I made the decision that we needed something special to stand out.
We built this positioning of a hearing aid that gets better over time with warm, inviting imagery that was very different from anything else in the space. That gave us such a powerful foundation, and allowed us to go up against some of the category leaders and be positioned as something new and different for consumers.
It also led to powerful PR coverage, which we could then use as social proof in our performance marketing. The brand is the foundation—that's the bedrock that you're building on. You combine that brand message with testing and performance, and that's where you get something with a lot of punch.
Having worked with global established brands and now a startup, how have you seen brand and acquisition strategy differ in those settings? Where did they overlap?
Interestingly, it's been very similar. My experience on the OneTouch brands showed me what happens when you combine brand and direct response. On OneTouch, we created a powerful brand campaign, but on every brand commercial we had a direct response phone number. That allowed us to create a touchpoint with the consumer that put them into a direct response funnel so we could nurture them. This combination kept those products at #1 in the category for quite a long time.
In the start-up world, that same approach also worked. It's just a matter of finding ways to do it without big budget linear TV or, at this point, programmatic. You're looking instead to combine PR and social and word of mouth with telemedicine and ecommerce. Moving the consumer through the funnel means combining the elements of a strong brand with an offer that the consumer really wants—in either setting, those elements drive top line revenue.
“If you put a marketing program out into the world and you put your product out into the world and then you don't listen to what consumers saying back to you, you are in trouble.”
A product like OneTouch uses a razor/razor blade model where consumers buy a monitor and then continue buying test strips. For Whisper.AI, consumers purchased a 3 year subscription that included the hearing aid and software upgrades. How did you think differently about those two consumer journeys?
From that standpoint, the two businesses are quite different. With the razor/razor-blade model, you're continuously marketing to that consumer, and there's a powerful CRM element driving that person to purchase.
Whisper.AI featured a three-year subscription. While the consumer is going to need to renew at some point, at the start of our commercialization, our focus was on converting the consumer and then giving them an outstanding experience.
A significant challenge in the hearing aid category is that hearing aids can be to be returned within 45 to 90 days of purchase, depending on the state. It’s challenging for marketers because people can take some time to adjust to something like a hearing aid, and often give up early. Your goal is to make sure that they don’t—especially with an AI-based hearing aid like Whisper that learns over time. We needed to make sure that they understood that promise, that they had a good experience, and that they had enough clinical support so that they could overcome any challenges.
“The brand piece is the foundation—that's the bedrock that you're building on. You combine that brand message with testing and performance, and that's where you get something with a lot of punch.”
At Align Technology, you built the first consumer advocacy team. What role did consumer advocacy play in plotting marketing strategy, especially for consumer health tech?
This is something about which I am passionate. If you put a product out into the world and then you don't listen to what consumers are saying back, you are in trouble—particularly if they’re saying something important about your product that you need to change. Consumer advocacy ensures that you're having a real dialogue with your consumer so that you understand what's working and what’s not.
And if something is going well, then you can also lean into that. In 2014, when we built that team, the whole idea of social listening was very, very new. Now brands are using social listening to figure out what to build next. It's a powerful link to your consumer.
It’s probably even more critical in the consumer health tech space, where your products are tangibly bettering people's health outcomes and quality of life.
From a regulatory standpoint, you have to monitor. That's why you may see healthcare brands being cautious about going into new social platforms, because you've got to have a process by which you can monitor to make sure there are no adverse events. It's not sexy, but if something is going wrong, you need to be able to get in there and make sure the consumer is connected with their doctor or emergency help. Plus you need to know what's happening with your product.
As a marketer, what percentage of your time are you thinking about the B2B/HCP audience versus a consumer audience?
On the brand side, it's been about 50/50, which is interesting because you would think that it might sway one way or the other. But if you ignore any one audience, your strategy won't work. Say you're selling to the consumer. It's great campaign, you drive the consumer into the doctor, but you haven’t talked to the doctor, or even the front desk person. The front desk person says, “Oh, I haven’t heard of that,” or “I haven’t heard good things about that.” Everything you spent on your consumer is wasted. If you don’t talk to the consumer, you won’t get them in the door with the doctor, and the doctor will say, “Well, why am I carrying this product?” So you have to make sure that you're impacting that whole ecosystem.
This was especially true with with Whisper.Ai, because as a technology, it was something new. We really had to make sure that the office properly understood how to talk about it. If the doctor was enthusiastic about it, then when the patient came in for a fitting, they were hearing the same things that they heard during outreach and that brand message was pulled all the way through.
There’s a lot of education involved with a new product and its many possible audiences. How do you balance education with acquisition as you look at your channel mix?
I think it's about finding the right educational tactics that will work. At Whisper.AI, one thing that was very interesting is that the webinar we developed for doctors was actually highly effective with consumers, which is something I would never have guessed. But everyone wanted to understand AI and what it meant for hearing aids. That education became a key acquisition vehicle: Sign-up for this webinar to learn about this tech, and then come and talk to our sales rep or try the risk free trial.
Artificial intelligence is an integral part of the Whisper.AI technology, so you’ve been familiar with what it can do for a while. Have any of the new AI tools like ChatGPT made their way into your into your toolkit as a marketer?
It's something I'm exploring. It’s been fun to see what it can already do.
The interesting thing with AI that we learned in our messaging research is that people are actually used to AI being out there. Even though a portion of our audience was the older Silent Generation, most of them said, “Oh, everything has AI. Now, what does your AI do? What is it going to do for me?” It turns out that you can’t just say you have AI—no one really cares. What is the benefit to the consumer?
That gets back to the core of brand marketing: what are you offering your consumers? And what is unique?
Looking ahead, what continues to interest you about the consumer health tech space as a marketer?
Consumer healthcare continues to be really interesting. There's so much innovation, both in terms of product changes as well as what will happen with telemedicine. Are we going to stick with it? How is it going to blend into current practice as so much of daily life moves back in person?
There is a lot of opportunity for DTC health brands. Especially now that consumers are focused on convenience across their lives. Amazon has trained us to expect one-click shopping. People have gotten really used to convenience, and the minute that there's friction, they leave that product or service. DTC health care has a lot to offer for consumers in that mindset.
March 7, 2023
