Personalized Content Key to Earning Consumers’ Trust in Walmart As a Health and Wellness Destination
// By Jane Weber Brubaker //
Walmart’s marketing VP believes that high-quality, personalized health care content is the start to building trusted relationships with consumers, and supporting them on their health care journeys.
Notwithstanding the health care industry’s keen interest in Walmart and figuring out what its next move might be, most consumers still think of Walmart as a retail store, not a health and wellness destination. Karissa Price, Walmart’s vice president of marketing, food, consumables, and health and wellness at the time of this reporting, sought to shift that perception, beginning with content marketing.
Karissa Price, former vice president of marketing, food, consumables, and health and wellness, Walmart
“Walmart was already the center of wellness and well-being for many communities that we serve,” Price says. “We just didn’t talk about it that way. We didn’t think about it that way. We didn’t organize it that way. And we certainly didn’t communicate it that way.”
That began to change when Walmart inked a deal with Private Health News (PHN) to offer PHN’s personalized health e-newsletters and content to Walmart customers. The question Walmart needed to answer, Price says, was, “How deep into this relationship around content do we have a right to play?” A successful pilot with PHN gave her the proof she needed, and Walmart plans to expand the program in 2022.
Here, we’ll share more of our conversation with Price, and Diana Jones, communications and wellness consultant at Walmart and CEO of Petrastella Communications about the aims of the content strategy. We discussed Walmart’s larger strategy around health and wellness and learned that Walmart is very open to partnering with providers and payers in meaningful ways. “We have 150 million people who walk through our doors every week,” Price says. “So how do we use that access to drive better outcomes?”