From Steve Dubansky, SVP, Medical Director, Palio

Empathy is one’s ability to feel what others feel, to identify with and understand their feelings. It implies feeling with the person rather than feeling sorry for the person. Clinical psychologists speak of two kinds of empathy, cognitive and affective.

Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand what the other person is thinking: “He must be telling himself that this is a bad diagnosis.” Affective empathy is the ability to understand what the person is experiencing emotionally: “He is likely really worried by this diagnosis.”

Sir William Osler

Empathy for the patient is a key component of any successful doctor-patient relationship. As the famous Hopkins internist Sir William Osler suggested 80 years ago, “It is as important to know what kind of man has the disease, as it is to know what kind of disease has the man.” He told his students to “listen to the patient,” because “the patient is telling you the diagnosis.”

Research has shown that when doctors respond empathically, their patients are more satisfied and more motivated to adhere to treatment. Multiple studies in both the legal and the medical literature support the fact that malpractice suits are fewer when the doctor-patient relationship is strong. Data suggests that empathic physicians are less likely to experience burnout. Sadly, doctors far too often miss the opportunity to display empathy in conversations with their patients. Often they do not even leave time (notice I did not say “often they do not have time”) to have the opportunity to empathize. One makes time for what is important.

I’ve always contended that listening to the patient requires both time to be and the ability to be empathic, and sadly, both qualities seem to be continually diminishing among many practitioners. Knowledge, no matter how limited, can, albeit with a great deal of effort, often be enhanced. All MDs are not created equal, intellectually. After all, half of medical school graduates were in the bottom half of their class.

Unfortunately, I believe that empathy cannot be learned. You either have it or you don’t. Rarely, a life-changing event can make the affected un-empathic individual “see the light,” begin to sincerely care about other people, and be able to empathize. Ironically, while it cannot be taught, feeling for patients and the ability to empathize can be lost over time, replaced by a limited and limiting feeling for money, lifestyle, time off, and abject disregard for the professed reasons they entered the profession in the first place.

A study published this month in The Canadian Medical Association Journal recognizes these facts, and its authors call on medical schools to place greater emphasis on empathic communication. The authors disagree with me when they contend that, “Even though physicians differ in their innate capacities, as with any other skill in medicine, clinical empathy can be taught and acquired.” Perhaps I’m a pessimist, but twenty years teaching in medical schools has given me the polar opposite opinion. When taught, many students are able to understand the concept of empathy, and some will even practice it transiently, but for those who never had it, the recidivism rate is very high.

An assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester studied the interactions of oncologists and their patients. She concluded that showing empathy saves time for busy physicians, in part I believe because, as Dr. Osler said, “the patient is telling you the diagnosis.” She states, “When the physicians in our study made empathic statements, the patient exchanges actually took less time. When they didn’t respond empathetically, patients were likely to repeatedly raise the point in an effort to get the response.”

The study demonstrated that oncologists showed empathy in only 22% of oncologist-patient interviews where there was a chance to display it. How about this example from the study?

Patient: “I was doing a man’s labor and I was always told I had a good strong heart and lungs. But the lungs couldn’t withstand all those cigarettes …”

Doctor: “Yeah.”

Patient: “… asbestos and pollution and secondhand smoke sand all these other things, I guess.”

Doctor: “Do you have glaucoma?”

The oncologist either didn’t pay attention to what the patient said or didn’t care enough to empathize, affectively or cognitively. The doctor just went on with his review of the patient’s organ systems instead of truly hearing the patient’s regretful admission of his lung abuse. This doctor, like far too many others, talked to his patient rather than with his patient.

Perhaps you’re fortunate enough to have empathic physicians. If, like too many people, you’re stuck with doctors who have neither the time nor the inclination to empathize with you, doctors with whom you aren’t at all comfortable, simply switch doctors. After all, the clothes on your back aren’t as important as your health, and you don’t hesitate to return them if they don’t fit.

Palio is a full-spectrum global pharmaceutical and consumer advertising, marketing, and communications agency that excels in brand creation and specializes in brand strategy, product launches, global marketing, and digital and integrated media.

From Steve Dubansky, MD, SVP, Medical Director, Palio

As a confirmed, proud, self-professed Luddite, I have somewhat stubbornly resisted the onslaught of social media, preferring to use the telephone (rotary of course) or the person-to-person meeting in order to do my socializing. Keystrokes, whether 140 (tweet tweet) or more (blog blog) just didn’t do it for me.

Strongly “encouraged” to tweet and blog by my employers, I hesitatingly dipped my toe into the social media water with a few very tentative blogs and tweets. However, rather than find the anodyne experience that social intercourse usually provides, I found the experiences polymorphously frustrating. What do I say? What about this? Would that interest anyone? How do I keep it ≤140 spaces? Who even cares what I think? Paraphrasing Groucho Marx, would I ever want to “friend” someone who wastes their precious timing reading my thoughts on-line?

Most frustrating was the simple fact that I never received feedback. Never. It was akin to talking to (not “with”!) someone at a party who spends the entire time looking everywhere but at you, searching desperately for someone more interesting and/or attractive. No real conversation. Kind of like dinner table conversation when you ask your children the dreaded question, “How was school today?” What you hear, minus the “Okay,” is the sound of silence that tweets and blogs give you.

But then one day, about 2 months into my daily enforced tweeting, after posting a tweet about an Environmental Working Group report on pesticides poisoning fruits and vegetables, my epiphany came in a tweet response from “Chem React.” Just a few simple words, “Agreed. Even just on Twitter, every day-so much evidence of the scary dangers around us. But nothing happens… Time to change.”

That’s all it took to get me to realize that while I may never see their responses, there are people who are reading what I’m writing. Perhaps they dismiss it, perhaps they think it unworthy of a response, or perhaps they simply don’t have the time to respond. Doesn’t matter. It’s kind of like a party, where not everyone is interested in conversing with you. It’s even better than a party in one important aspect. When tweeting or blogging, you don’t have to see the other people ignoring you, or looking past you for more fertile social intercourse.

So rather than curse the darkness, I’ve now lit the candle and brightened my attitude about social media. The applications are just waiting to be discovered. I can see potential utility in both the pharma and medical spaces.

Just this week, the Disney Company launched a Facebook application called Tickets Together, which lets you buy tickets via Facebook. When you do, your Facebook friends get messages letting them know where and when you’re going to the movies, in this case it’s “Toy Story 3.” Tickets, not available to the “general public” till the middle of June, may be bought in groups of up to 80.

Marketers in the pharma space should readily be able to use the social media to rapidly disseminate things such as drug-related information and discount coupons. Any marketer worth his/her salt should be able to come up with even better ideas than those.

Physicians can easily disseminate health maintenance, disease prevention information to their patients. Practice-related information (appointment times, doctor is running late, meet-up support groups of similarly affected patients) presents lots of opportunities.

While I’m not completely sold on the idea, social media is here to stay. It will without doubt evolve in ways we can’t imagine. An open mind is the prepared mind, and we better be prepared because things are moving fast. This deconstructed Luddite doesn’t want to be left behind. In fact, I think I’ll blog about this right now. Oops. First I’ll have to bike to the store and pick up some ink for my fountain pen.

From Todd LaRoche, EVP, Managing Director of Creative

What’s your brand’s personality? It’s an easy-enough question to answer – just take a look at your agency’s creative brief or positioning statement, where it might state, “Brand Personality: caring, empathetic, comforting.” Or maybe it’s “confident, assertive, capable.” Or, perhaps it’s “experienced, trusted, wise.”  Whatever it is, it’s in writing and official…  and it sounds just about right based on your product’s attributes. “OK, now let’s move on to the more important elements of the brief, like the Key Thought,” you might suggest.

Hold on. If you really want to ensure that your brand has a personality, a character that will truly engage your target, let’s look a little closer.  You always want your brand to communicate with your consumer in as compelling a way as possible, in a way that might actually suggest your brand understands what it is to be human, and is something – no, someone – who your consumer would like to get to know better, someone who has a little simpatico with your consumer.

So how do you ensure that? First, recognize how important an element your brand’s personality is. If you break up a communication into “what is being said” (the content) and “how it’s being said” (the attitude), you could say the personality of your brand makes up 50% of its expression. Your brand’s personality is the driver behind how your brand speaks, so make sure you’re putting it to work appropriately to get the right message across. As an example, the words “That’s great” can mean two completely different thoughts depending on how they’re uttered – with enthusiasm or sarcasm. In the same way, it’s important to make sure your brand communications are fully leveraging the “how it’s being said” component and that they’re doing it in a way that reinforces your brand’s attitude or personality appropriately.

Second, think about giving your brand some real personality. Human experience makes for some very interesting characters and moods in general. People are three dimensional, not cardboard cut-outs. As such, your brand shouldn’t be flat. Give it some depth of character. Don’t let it be just a throwaway… a shallow personification of your product’s attributes. Just because your product works the fastest doesn’t mean your brand’s personality should be expeditious or to-the-point. Your brand is bigger than your product. Know your competitive space and your target mindset and use that knowledge to create a brand personality that will stand out and appeal to an emotional need in your audience. By rendering a deeper personality with your creative you’ll be sure to draw your audience in deeper as well.

Take the Cheetos “Orange Underground” campaign that features Chester the cheetah. It gives the Cheetos brand real personality. It might not be the kind of personality you admire, but it definitely brings a human dimension to Cheetos beyond its functional attribute, i.e. satisfying flavor. This campaign was developed because consumer research showed that it’s not just kids who eat Cheetos. In fact, 60 percent of all Cheetos consumption is by adults. Robert Riccardi, managing partner at Goodby Silverstein (the ad agency behind the new campaign), says that Chester’s mischievous new personality stems from the idea that “powering down” Cheetos as an adult “feels like a nonconformist moment. You’re supposed to be eating arugula dip, but you have a nonconforming desire.”

So, through Chester’s somewhat mysteriously dark personality, the Cheetos brand is brought to a deeply human place. Chester may only exist in our subconscious, but he does represent an inner urge that many of us express outwardly from time to time: the desire to shatter adult norms. And with that the Cheetos brand bonds with its audience at a deeper level. Here’s one of the spots.

In pharmaceutical advertising, as well, there are great examples of how bringing personality into communications can deepen the impact of a brand’s message. One that most everyone is familiar with is the “Your dreams miss you” campaign for Rozerem.

In this campaign, the Rozerem brand connects at a deeper level with its audience as it uses the quirky visual and verbal language of dreams to remind us how important they are. Sleep specialists will tell you it’s critical for humans to dream… they serve as a processor that helps us make sense of our everyday reality. But rather than asserting this through a less-engaging approach that might establish sleep’s medical importance (and therefore Rozerem’s value), this entertaining campaign lets the viewer enter a dream, as if it were a reunion of sorts, for just a few moments. It says Rozerem has a sense of humor and imagination and sentimentality that all combines to create a deeper understanding of, and care for, the viewer.

The last thing any of us wants to do is abandon our friends, and by establishing an affection between ourselves and the characters we dream through the technique of developed personalities, we welcome the Rozerem brand into our hearts and minds. Take a look.

Remember, truly persuasive, brand-building advertising compels its audience to bond with your brand at a human level. And not until your brand “feels” human will it be able to get that human commitment from your audience. To do that, don’t overlook the power of personality for your brand.