Marketing health issues to men remains a challenge

When Dr.Mark Gunderson launched his Age Management Institute in Reno a couple of years ago, a friend in the medical profession guessed that the institute would draw largely from men.

Guess again.

Eighty percent of Gunderson's patients are women, and he's working hard to market his practice to men.A few weeks ago, for instance, he targeted men for a seminar about agingrelated medical research.

"Men," Gunderson says in an echo of medical marketing professionals across the board, "are hard." The challenge of marketing health services to men, professionals say, arise from the very nature of the American male.

"Men tend not to focus as much attention on their health issues.

They tend not to think much about it," says Stephanie Kruse of KPS3, a Reno marketing agency that's working closely with Saint Mary's Health Network.

The upshot:Women tend to make many of the health care decisions for the men in their lives.

Phyllis Freyer, vice president of marketing communications at Washoe Medical Center, notes that Gunderson's recent age-management seminar that targeted men drew a fairly large audience of women as well.

"The men brought along their co-decisionmaker," Freyer says.

"Women often drive a lot of the decisions."

That doesn't mean, however, that medical marketing can make a direct appeal to women, telling them to get the men in their lives down to the doctor's office.

For one thing, Kruse notes, men like any other demographic group are sensitive to being labeled.

So instead of appealing directly to women, marketing professionals sometimes look to create advertising that works for both genders.

Last autumn, for instance, Saint Mary's purchased billboard space at the University of Nevada, Reno, football stadium to deliver a strong message "Real Men Don't Cry" with a visual that appealed to women and a headline that cut across genders.

Effective messages that target men, Kruse says, often have a surprisingly strong emotional content something on the lines, for instance, of wanting to be alive to see children finish college.

The reason? "Sometimes," she says,"you have to break through the psychological callouses." Another successful strategy for some health-related organizations involves marketing to men through wellness and diseasemanagement programs, which often are part of their workplace health benefit.

That strategy is growing in importance, Freyer says, as the health-conscious Baby Boomers begin to age and use more health services.

"Men are starting to take a greater interest in their own health," she says.

And the medium can be just as important as the message in delivering health care information to men.

Freyer says, for example, that health newsletters delivered via e-mail to men at their workplaces sometimes prove an effective marketing tool.

Gunderson says he's noticed, meanwhile, that men are far less inclined than women to talk among each other about their medical experiences.

That means, he says, that marketing of his Age Management Institute to men requires a heavier investment because he doesn't get the benefit of much free word-of-mouth advertising.

"How do I get my men patients?" he asks.

"Through my women patients." Curiously, Kruse says, the same men who are reluctant to listen to healthrelated marketing messages or make decisions about their own health show little reluctance to make decisions as executives called upon to choose health plans for their companies.

Nationwide, the challenges of marketing medical services to men don't draw much attention.When gender is discussed at all as a marketing question, it's more likely to arise in questions about marketing information about heart disease traditionally viewed, contrary to the evidence, as a men's problem to women.