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The Affordable Care Act: Marketing to the MVPs

by Philip Atkins, account director and health care practice leader

In my last post, we covered the scenario where companies cut loose their employees—your members—to seek their own health insurance as an individual. As an health insurer, you’ll want to capture as many of those newly released individuals as you can, but if you focus solely on them you will miss a smaller but still desirable market:  the highly valued (and therefore highly compensated) employees.

You can expect some companies to continue to provide health insurance benefits to highly compensated, often executive, employees (the MVPs). Marketing to MVPs is a different ballgame than marketing to general consumers, and you need to be prepared to make the adjustment.

What is different?

• They have a higher expectation of service and lower tolerance for problems
• They have less patience to go through the transition and search process
• They expect more and are willing to pay more for more and better services

The key is to learn:

• What the services the MVPs want
• What lengths are they willing to go to obtain those services
• What their service expectations are

We propose 3 steps to prepare your firm to market to these MVPs.

STEP 1: Qualitative research among MVPs

Use focus groups to probe what expectations these affluent customers want health insurers to meet around a) products, b) services, and c) customer service. A typical plan for this step involves:

1. Invest in 2 to 4 focus groups at an average price of $7,000 per group.
2. Keep the number of participants to no more than 8 or 9, so you can drill down more on each topic.
3. Expect the report of findings to describe a menu of products and services that customers use now, as well as those that they wish they had. The report should also describe the strengths and weaknesses they perceive in these products.
4. The report should also provide details on expectations that a health insurer’s customer service must meet, along with pain points that they have experienced with your customer service and how they would like your department to fix them.
5. A sense of which ideas, needs, and expectations are most important and least important. This is essential to help you decide about which ones you pursue.

STEP 2: Internal planning session

Once you have a report describing the conclusions from the focus groups, have an internal planning session to determine which concepts and ideas you should pursue. Essentially, this is where you decide which of the consumer expectations you care to meet—and where you screen out the common expectation of “I want premium stuff for not a lot of money.” 

The deliverables from your planning meeting include:

1. A menu of ideas that you feel you can deliver on and that are worth pursuing
2. A revised and refined version of each of those ideas, based upon the feedback given in the focus groups from Step One.
3. Planning for a quantitative research study (step 3 below) designed to validate consumer interest in each of the ideas and determine a priority of importance.

STEP 3: Quantitative research to validate concept appeal

The third step is important because it validates the previous 2 steps. You quantitative research should pull together a representative and statistically significant sample of MVPs to get their feedback on polished concepts from step 2.

A starting point for your quantitative research could look like this:

1. Use an online survey—it is easier to reach the affluent MVPs this way
2. Use a minimum of 380 respondents, screened with qualifying questions
3. Have descriptive concepts written for each idea presented, but avoid using sale or advertising language
4. Depending upon your concepts, a monadic approach could be advisable

The results

By testing your concepts in this manner, and making decisions based on that data, you can:

• Avoid spending time and money on the wrong resources and products
• Get the right products and programs to market quicker
• Improve acceptance and acquisition of highly-valuable customers
• Beat your competition with a tailored product the MVPs actually want

Most importantly, you can reach marketing and revenue goals faster. A can’t-miss final result in a highly competitive environment.