By John Lavey | Hammock President and COO

Mapping Experiences,written by Jim Kalbach, is a classic for marketing professionals who want to map customer experiences and design stronger ones.

The book has a wealth of practical ideas, and this one in particular has stuck with me: “When we map customer experiences, we are effectively mapping jobs to be done.” And there are three dimensions to checkoff within each job:

  1. The functional job: the practical task at hand to meet a customer’s requirements
  2. The emotional job: the feelings a person desires when completing a job
  3. The social job: how a person believes he or she will be perceived when using the solution

This got me thinking about healthcare marketing and the moment we find ourselves in. As the pandemic stretches into its ninth month, and as we face a new surge in cases, how do we communicate with people who believe we have reached the peak only to discover there is another hill to climb?

Discussions about COVID-19 are politically loaded, and frankly, exhausting to everyone. We know, for example, that emails with COVID-19 in the subject line are causing people not to open them.

So how can we map a better experience, like talking to customers (or family members) about COVID-19 when the audience doesn’t even want to think about COVID and can’t even agree on what is happening?

Here might be how we would think about the three jobs that need to be done:

  1. The practical job might be to provide the information we know is true, without predicting what may or may not happen in the future.
  2. The emotional job might be to help people feel safe and secure in what the information conveys.
  3. The social job might be to leave people feeling as if they are participating, in a reasonable way, in a solution to this ongoing problem.

What customer experiences do you need to map?

Image: Getty Images


About Hammock Healthcare Idea Email | This post is part of Hammock’s award-winning Idea Email series. Idea Emails are sent every other week and share one insightful marketing idea. Idea Email comes in two flavors: Original and Healthcare. To subscribe to the original Idea Email (general marketing ideas), click here. To subscribe to the Healthcare Idea Email (healthcare marketing ideas), click here.