Harnessing Purpose-Driven Healthcare Marketing and Consumer-Centric Strategies to Boost Brand Growth and Drive Demand
Wendy Wahl opens up about her extensive expertise in healthcare marketing and highlights the transformative power of connecting brand strategy and consumer well-being to create marketing campaigns that resonate
Wendy Wahl is Chief Marketing & Communications Officer of Guardian, where she leads marketing, communications, and customer experience to inspire consumer well-being and drive the company’s growth.
Wendy has had a long career in marketing with a focus on health care. Prior to joining Guardian, she was Vice President, Commercial Marketing at CVS Health, leading marketing strategy and implementation for the $23B Commercial Business, including member experience for their 49 million members. She also held numerous leadership roles at Aetna, including Head of Enterprise Marketing, CMO for their Consumer Business, and Head of Marketing for multiple wholly owned B2B companies and joint ventures.
Wendy started her career on the agency side with roles at Digitas, Omnicom, and Publicis, focusing on healthcare, insurance, and technology.
The Continuum sat down with Wendy recently to discuss her career and the role of brand and demand in marketing health care and financial planning products.
Can you tell us how you chose marketing and, more specifically, how you got your start in health care marketing?
My parents told me to study what I loved in college, which I thought was great advice. I’ve told my kids the same thing. That meant I was an English major and a Political Science minor and graduated with no real idea what I wanted to do. But I loved to write, so I took a job out of college as a copywriter.
I loved the writing part of the role but really did not love being on the receiving end of the edits. I realized quickly that broadening my skills to marketing strategy allowed me to be responsible for shaping not just copy but the whole business strategy, so I pivoted to a marketing track.
I ended up in health care because I wanted to market products or services that helped people. I’ve really enjoyed opportunities to work with companies on the bigger picture of selling the value of whole health—there’s such a strong link between health and happiness.
Part of my role at CVS Health during the pandemic was trying to get people—especially those in low-resource areas—to take COVID tests and then later to get vaccinated. We worked in tight partnership with the government and other large pharmacies on marketing and distribution plans. We were rolling out mobile vaccination vans and had digital apps targeting areas without easy access to our stores; we were literally delivering tests and, later, vaccines to people’s doorsteps. The ability to do such meaningful work in the health care space has given me a lot of joy in my career.
“We really try to make the connection to total health in our marketing materials to help our customers take better care of their mental, physical, and financial health as opposed to just selling a product.”
Your early career was on the agency side. Can you tell us about that?
My first agency job was at Digitas. I remember that at the time, all my friends in New York had these sexy jobs working on TV commercials, and I was working for a digital company. It was 1996; no one even understood yet what digital could do. People around me thought I was crazy for working on marketing on the internet versus on television, but I ended up gaining super valuable skills. One of my early projects was trying to help Delta Airlines sell excess inventory online using geotargeted ads. It really was cutting-edge, and it demonstrated the power of digital advertising for my clients.
I moved from Digitas to Publicis, then to Omnicom’s RAPP, where I had a big hand in building their health care practice. I worked with pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, developing campaigns that raised awareness of the dangers of counterfeit Viagra. I worked on the launch of Menactra, a meningitis vaccine produced by Sanofi Pasteur. We traveled around the country and interviewed parents who had lost their kids to meningitis, filming and developing their stories into digital content. I’m not usually a fan of using fear as a sales tactic, but this was very powerful. We had parents share how their kids were fine one day and then died the next day. Some talked about how they dropped their kid off at college and never saw them again. It was hard, but it felt like important work to be raising awareness about a vaccine that could prevent a child’s death, and the content was a powerful and effective way to raise awareness about this deadly disease and the life-saving new vaccine.
You then moved in-house at Aetna for eight years in various roles. Can you tell us a little bit about your time there?
I’ve always tried to think about navigating my career not as a ladder but rather as a jungle-gym, so I’m not just taking the next job up but maybe taking a lateral move to learn something new. I knew I wanted to be a CMO, and I knew I would need to deepen my expertise in many different areas in order to reach that level. So, I looked for roles along the way that would give me many different experiences, and my first role at Aetna was one of them.
I was hired to be head of digital, and then I took on brand, and then we launched a consumer company. This was right after the Affordable Care Act was passed and insurance exchanges were being created. I helped build an entirely new business entity from the ground up, learning about product development, data management, customer experience, call center operations, and so much more. We designed a completely new brand and digital customer experience and launched new products in 18 months, which was a crazy timeline. The stress and excitement we shared made for a tight-knit and effective team.
This was an interesting lesson for the entire health insurance industry, to be honest. On the one hand, we were wildly successful. Customers responded to our new brand, and we got more than three times the number of new policyholders than we’d forecasted. On the other hand, Aetna and many other insurers found that these newly acquired policyholders were more likely to be high users of medical care, which really upended the insurance model. That experience also taught me a lot about financial modeling and management, which has helped me to lead teams efficiently.
Then, when CVS Health acquired Aetna, I learned how to integrate businesses, teams, and capabilities. The two companies came together with the idea of transforming health care and making it more accessible. One of the initiatives I worked on was to help launch their Health Hubs, robust, in-store, walk-in clinics that could handle urgent matters like strep throat while also providing more regular care like annual gynecological appointments.
“The brand-to-demand piece for us is about being at the top of consumers' minds when they're taking big steps like buying a house, starting a family, or getting a new job. We want people to know our brand and what we stand for so that when they are ready to make a purchase, they know we are the right company for them.”
Tell us about Guardian. You’re an insurance company with health products but not a health insurance company. Can you explain what the company offers and how you approach marketing it?
Guardian was formed in 1860 when a group of German immigrants joined together to support each other by developing a life insurance business. We still sell life insurance today, but now we also offer products and services that support holistic financial planning, including annuity products and other retirement planning services. We also offer benefits you might access through your workplace, like dental, disability, and supplemental health, and we’ve recently partnered with several technology companies like Uber and Peloton to offer embedded wellness services.
Our company purpose is to inspire well-being, and that purpose has really guided the decisions we make around product development and how we show up for our customers. We've leaned into marketing ourselves as a whole well-being company, heavily leveraging our annual research study, the Mind, Body, and Wallet© Report, which looks at Americans’ overall health across three interconnected dimensions. We use content marketing and thought leadership derived from this report to connect with consumers throughout the funnel. We really try to make the connection to total health in our marketing materials to help our customers take better care of their mental, physical, and financial health as opposed to just selling a product.
“I think having creative strategy and development all in one place and measuring the effectiveness of all the work in one view has helped us to be more effective.”
Are there any interesting insights from the recent Mind, Body, Wallet© reports that you can share?
The 2025 report isn’t out yet, but one of the biggest trends we saw last year is the connection between maternity claims and mental health claims. This isn’t surprising: we know that it’s incredibly hard to be a new parent. But as a result of this data point, we wanted to create a program and platform to better support our new parent customers. We already had a maternity site that helped customers navigate their claims, but now we’re adding a lot of content that can help support our customers more holistically as they navigate parenthood.
At the Continuum, we talk a lot about brand and demand. Can you explain how you apply that to something like insurance?
My team talks brand to demand all day long. Many of the products we sell are commodity products. They run in the background of consumers’ lives. They give you peace of mind, but they're not something that you use all the time. The brand to demand piece for us is about being at the top of consumers' minds when they're taking big steps like buying a house, starting a family, or getting a new job. We want people to know our brand and what we stand for so that when they are ready to make a purchase, they know we are the right company for them.
I made two big changes to my team structure when I took this job. First, I centralized external creative agency management and over time built an in-house agency model. I also developed dashboards that would track our efforts for brand campaigns and demand campaigns in one place to see the full-funnel view. I think having creative strategy and development all in one place and measuring the effectiveness of all the work in one view has helped us to be more effective. This is especially important in a complicated model such as financial services and insurance marketing/distribution. Although we primarily sell B2B, our brand has to show up to consumers as a consumer company all the way through the funnel.
February 6, 2025
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