Celia and I belong to our church choir. She sings soprano, and I sing bass. Although we are at opposite ends of the scale, so to speak, we have medical technology in common, for Celia is an optometrist. The other day before a choir rehearsal, I asked her what was new in her field, and she replied that intraocular lenses (IOLs) keep getting better and better. Myopia reduction remains an area of hot pursuit. Then Celia said something that made me set down my sheet music and listen more closely. "An area I’m especially interested in," she said, "is embodied cognition."
Embodied cognition. Now that sounded like something a marketer should know about. So I did a little digging, and it turns out that it is. Embodied cognition is a philosophy with roots going back to Immanuel Kant (the "Critique of Pure Reason" guy) that holds that the nature of the human mind is determined by the form of the human body. Form over function. For example, in experiments, subjects who held a pencil in their teeth to force the muscles of a smile understood pleasant sentences faster than they understood unpleasant ones. Conversely, those who forced facial muscles into a frown took longer to comprehend the pleasant sentences.
In other words, there is empirical proof behind McLuhan’s famous aphorism. Sometimes the medium really is the message. If you can use media to make your audience smile or laugh, they may be more receptive to the good news in your ad, your brochure or your mobile app.
This may sound like intellectual navel-gazing, but there are powerful implications here for how we medical marketers can improve our ability to motivate try-or-buy decisions among physicians. We take in every type of information through our five senses. Our brains receive, perceive and store all that information. Embodied cognition says that the more you can appeal to those senses, the more likely it is that your audience’s brains will assign your messages to the thumbs-up folder.
You can view a smart, funny and moving explanation of how this happens in the brain in “Advertising for the Amygdala,”a recent blog posted by my KHJ colleague Jessica Churchill.
As for the optical world itself, there is all sorts of good news. Visit one major player, Abbott Medical Optics [http://www.amo-inc.com/], and you’ll see that IOLs really are getting better. You’ll also learn that Abbott now has a laser to create curved arcuate (bow-shaped)incisions in corneal surgery, something previously done with a hand-held blade and something of a Holy Grail in cataract surgery for many years.
And if you’d like an even more positive experience, hear Abbott Medical Optics’ President James Mazzo speak at the upcoming Big 100 Roundtable West in Irvine, Calif., next month. We of KHJ will be there to present The New Rules of Medical Device Marketing. You’ll like what you see and hear. What do you think?
This is the Brand and Beyond™ blog, a new resource for the medical device industry. Brand and Beyond™ is sponsored by KHJ, headquartered in Boston, MA. KHJ is a strategic brand activation firm that is passionate about helping people see and realize what’s possible for themselves and the world around them.