Personalized Marketing: Tracking City of Hope’s Impact, One Life at a Time
// By Lisa D. Ellis //
When a young woman named Kommah was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer, she was told she had just a 5 percent chance of surviving. Gus, a firefighter, had to forgo saving others’ lives to focus on his own fight against leukemia. Today, both Kommah and Gus have beaten the odds, thanks to care they received through City of Hope, a world-renowned medical research and treatment center just outside of Los Angeles, California. Better yet, both of them have not only survived; they are thriving.
Finding the Human Angle
These are just two of the many success stories that City of Hope uses to illustrate the power of combining cutting-edge research with clinicians who care to achieve amazing outcomes. This personalized marketing approach is part of an innovative multidisciplinary campaign called the “Miracle of Science with Soul.”
Last year, Strategic Health Care Marketing featured the launch of this campaign, which is geared to educate people in the Greater Los Angeles area and beyond, about the groundbreaking research under way at City of Hope and the innovative treatment methods offered there to fight cancer and other serious diseases. Recently, we circled back to look at the effectiveness of the campaign’s approach and to find out how it is reaching the people who can benefit from its discoveries and treatment, as well as engaging with donors to support its efforts.
Science Plus Soul Equals Miracles
Lisa Stockmon, chief marketing and communications officer for City of Hope
What we learned from Lisa Stockmon, chief marketing and communications officer for City of Hope, and Andy Semons, partner and head of strategy at Interplanetary, Inc., the advertising agency that created the campaign, is that since its inception the Miracle of Science with Soul campaign has focused on positioning City of Hope as a world leader in the research and treatment of cancer, diabetes, and other serious diseases. And the City of Hope story is being told by the actual people who both have shaped and benefited from its discoveries, which brings the messages home in a very powerful way.