A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

I switched from being a devoted coffee drinker to green tea several years ago, but once in a while I still love an excellent cup of coffee (especially when I’m in Italy – stay tuned for late October posts from the 2015 Milan Expo where I’ll be all-food-and-health, all-the-time).

One of my long-time favorite coffee brands is Lavazza, based in Italy. The company hadn’t allocated much resource to advertising in the U.S. But they are launching a new multimedia campaign in America; here’s a look at their initial video promotion…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jfx2yL6guhk?rel=0]

This ad covers many features that are relevant to how companies that service health and healthcare can touch and motivate consumers…

Tell a story. And make it authentic. “This is more than a cup of coffee,” the tale begins. We learn about the Lavazza family history, a father’s sage advice, and a son’s journey to the new world and a new life.

Entertain, engage. The video is an adventure with high production values. It’s beautiful to watch, well-casted and -acted, with a Spielberg/Indiana Jones vibe. It accomplishes much in a minute.

Teach, educate, enlighten.  We learn that young Luigi Lavazza hopped a boat and headed to Brazil, where he learned about coffee. He learned, and we learn about how coffee gets blended, a sort of curation process, bringing a selection of beans together for the perfect blend in the eyes (and taste buds) of the blender.

Inspire a call-to-action.  In this case, it’s “In life, there is always more to taste.” This tagline operates on many levels: it’s aspirational, motivational, sensual. It certainly inspires vitality and living fully.

Lavazza is experienced at marketing, and has a well-designed portal describing the company’s 120+ year history. The company’s timeline also promotes a message of sustainability, with a direct quote from Luigi: “I don’t want to live in a world where nature is destroyed.” He said this in 1935.

MediaPost covers the marketing aspects of the campaign here.

Health Populi’s Hot Points:  As health and healthcare morph into retail in the eyes of consumers, patients, and caregivers — who are taking on more financial and clinical responsibility — the industry’s stakeholders must learn from other industry sector companies that have been successful in going direct-to-consumer for products and services. Health/care can be informed by these successful organizations’ consumer-centered design ethos, after-purchase customer service approaches, and in the case of Lavazza, ad and marketing campaigns.

For health/care, we can learn from Lavazza:

• Expressing patient stories that are authentic
• Developing information and IT tools that are engaging, entertaining, based on the needs, wishes, values and capabilities of the user (patient, consumer, caregiver). Keep these “light” and make the user-experience easy and streamlined.
• Inspire. For example, the recent campaign of Dignity Health inspires me, two screenshots of which are shown here.

As I’ve evangelized ongoing, health consumers trust large retail and digitally-enabled companies as much to help people manage their health as they do health providers. The new health consumer is…a consumer.