#016 · 07 January 2024

Hello everyone – a very happy new year to you all!

Did you have a wonderful, restive, and joyous break? Tell me what you got up in the comments.

I spent pretty much all my time with the family in Mallorca. We ate delicious food (and some pretty ropey stuff too), visited beautiful little pueblos, soaked up all the sun possible, and naturally, I consumed my body weight times over in Spanish wine. This was the first time we took the children away at Christmas. Now we’re tempted to make it a tradition. Zero drama, less pressure on the big day, less pressure on ‘the presents’, and NO cold, wet, miserable days.

I’m so excited to bring you the very first CULTURx newsletter of 2024. Instead of containing the usual round-up of the latest healthcare in culture news and inspiring creative campaigns, I thought I would kick the year off with a round-up of the consumer and healthcare trends and insights reports that have caught my eye.

Love them or loathe them, they can be a great starting point for building a strategy, whether that’s getting a quick read on the market and the mood of the people. So, take them with a pinch of salt, spot opportunities that your brand could play into and see what ideas spark for the year ahead.

…And I’m going to avoid as much generative AI as possible here, because… duh.

Let’s jump straight into 2024 🥂

If you are short on time, CBS’s Health Watch provides a light read on expert predictions for health and wellness in 2024. And whilst there’s nothing groundbreaking here in terms of trends, there are some good umbrella buckets with some thought-provoking examples of these trends playing out.

First in their list of trends (and my personal favourite, and common feature in this newsletter) is the Ozempic “ripple effect”. The drug has had a phenomenal impact on culture and that’s set to continue. Particularly for snack makers and fast-food chains, and it’s also influencing NPD in trending weight-loss ingredients such as berberine.

GWI expects the global conversation around women’s health to intensify in 2024. Again, no surprises here. Regardless of whether your brand is specifically in the women’s health sector, considering that women make up part of your workforce, all companies need to stay tuned in to this conversation.

To that end, I encourage you to take a read of the fourth trend reported in the piece – Consumers want practical measures for women’s health. It calls out important evidence of how women’s health is vital to the global economy and how supporting women’s health simultaneously supports their economic power. It also highlights that men are also advocating for workplace policies that prioritise women’s health.

In its annual healthcare trends report, creative agency Smith+Jones hangs its hat on disruption. It states that this stems from the undeniable fact that the industry has experienced a seismic shift from patient empowerment to consumerism (and not forgetting the role of AI).

Trend two, Beyond Advertising: The Role of the Patient Journey in Brand Perception, caught my attention. Whilst this report is focused on hospital brands specifically, the lessons resonate across all healthcare brands in my opinion. “Healthcare is not merely about providing medical treatment, it’s about delivering care in a way that makes patients feel valued, respected, and comfortable.”

It reminded me of something I wrote for a client back in 2022. In healthcare, we often think more about a good experience for the patient as convenience, accessibility, and affordability. But people want and expect more when it comes to their healthcare because that’s what they get from consumer brands.

For many people, medications and medical devices are intrinsic to their daily lives, almost like an extension of their identity. Your brand isn’t a commodity but a constant touchpoint, and so it requires a holistic view of the entire experience.

As conferences play a significant role in healthcare communications, it is worth taking a snoop at Amex’s forecast for 2024.

If you can get past all the in-report advertising, you’ll find some good nuggets, from the importance of simplification to sustainability and DEI strategies.

The actionable takeaways (pages 40-43) are somewhat textbook but if you move on to event marketing trends (pages 44-47), there are some important lessons in the relationship between marketing teams and events teams- if these are separated in your organisation.

Of these, I urge you to focus on the point about success. Congresses remain a key date on many healthcare brands' agendas, particularly for building awareness and engagement among key customers. That said, is there alignment internally on what success looks like? Do you have clear objectives for Congress? And, how are you gathering data to measure that? Did you take learnings from previous events across your business that you can feed into your activity and do you share that more widely within your organisation?

There are a lot of moving and often disparate parts across healthcare organisations when it comes to events. Post-pandemic we’re now in an era of reset for events, so make sure 2024 is the year you bring teams closer together.

HT to Rob Fuller, Head of Strategy at VCCP Health for this one. He tells me that inspiration for his year ahead comes from reflecting on the success of others from the year before. And if there was ever a list for that, I can see why he chose this one! It boasts a list of 100+ people that got us to utter the words ‘I wish I had done that, made that, invented that, thought like that, changed that’.

And the list isn’t short of cultural icons (Taylor Swift and Sir David Attenborough) through to people making waves in creativity, communications, science, health and wellness.

My faves on the list:

Comedian Rhod Gilbert – sharing his cancer journey through the Channel 4 documentary Pain in the Neck for SU2C

Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock – the space scientist who’s done wonders for science communications through the BBC’s The Sky at Night and in 2023 saw the release of a Barbie doll to celebrate her efforts to champion science for girls

Writer and TV Presenter Charlie Brooker for his work on Black Mirror – the defining piece of pop culture about 21st-century technology.

And if that wasn’t enough, here is some other stuff that isn’t strictly all healthcare, but has kept me entertained and thinking at the turn of the year:

🍑 Pantone’s colour of the year 2024 is peach fuzz

🤵 The Oxford Dictionary word of the year for 2023 was ‘rizz’

🩲 And speaking of rizz, everyone has gone wild for Jeremy Allen White (Ther Bear, Shameless) in Calvin Klein’s latest underwear campaign. 

🌟 I’m still working my way through the list of Forbes 30 under 30 in healthcare, there are some amazing profiles, organisations and innovations.

🤼 14-year-old me is overjoyed to see the return of The Rock to WWE – the nostalgia trend is still going strong for 2024.

🦩 Studio Ghibli’s latest masterpiece, The Boy and the Heron is in cinemas now, I caught it on Thursday night – another beautiful story, exploring the theme of grief through fantasy.

I’m feeling energised about the year ahead. I’ve been reflecting rather than overwhelming myself with over-ambitious New Year’s resolutions and goals. I love this space that I’ve created as an outlet to write, and it brings even more pleasure knowing that people enjoy reading it too. So how can I keep you reading more in 2024? Tell me about what you like, and topics you’d like me to cover. Perhaps I could bring in other voices too? All thoughts and hot takes are welcome.

Before I go, I’ll leave you with a little haiku I wrote about the importance of reflection before jumping into the year ahead:

        Your reflection tells

              a story about more than

              what’s in front of you.

Until next time ✌️

EML

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Finally, a word on Substack – I am watching the news closely to see if the company will change its stance on allowing publishers of extremist content to monetise themselves on the platform. There is a huge amount of pressure mounting, and it seems Substack is at a crossroads. The time may come over the next few weeks when I need to look for a new home to publish CULTURx.

Read more about the situation here.