General idea of marketing

I’ve spent three days largely confined to my car as I delivered this year’s Boston Marathon Jimmy Fund Walk t-shirts for our team. I do a lot of thinking and planning under those circumstances and spent some of those hours refining my thoughts about how to make carcinoid/NETs better recognized by the general population. As I said in my last post, I’m not very good at marketing–but I do understand the fundamentals of the business.

…we need to simplify our terminology.

Marketing, in part, is about creating a brand identity that people will relate to and want to be involved with. It is about creating a powerful series of images and experiences that will affect people’s emotions as much–or more–as their minds. The carcinoid/NETs community has not done a particularly good job at this. We need to think about how to get better at it. And there is no harm in looking at what others have done that has caused them to succeed.

Marketing success stories

Both the Jimmy Fund and St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital have done a good job of marketing themselves to the public. Show someone either of their logos and people immediately recognize the organization they represent. Both make use of compelling narratives that put a human face–or faces–on cancer. Neither is afraid to take risks in the pursuit of building both funding and their image. Both organizations are constantly trying to stretch beyond what they think they can do.

…creating a brand identity that people will relate to…

We need to think in similar terms. Crass as this may sound, we have to think about how best to sell our disease–how best to promote its existence to a higher level of societal awareness. We need to not only seize every opportunity to tell our stories, we need to cultivate a serious image of our disease.

The branding power of names

It seems to me there are three things we need to work on in the short-term. The first–and most fundamental–is to create a single name for this disease in the public consciousness. I was at a fundraising event this weekend for our Relay for Life team. I was asked at least 100 times (and I am not exaggerating) what the name of the disease was. The lack of a single answer to that question was a problem. When I said carcinoid, people thought I  was talking about carcinoma. When I said NET cancer, some asked where the NET was–while others wanted to know what NET stood for. The moment I said I said neuroendocrine, they assumed I was talking about brain cancer. When I used all the names, they looked confused.

…we have to think about how best to sell our disease…

It’s hard to sell something when it can be easily confused with something else. It is even harder to sell something when it has as many different names as carcinoid/NETs does. ALS is short for a real mouthful of syllables, but say Lou Gehrig’s Disease and people immediately know what you are talking about. Absent a famous name to attach to the disease, a common name that puts a human face on the disease–like the Jimmy Fund did with pediatric cancer–is another way to go.

Confusion results in failure

When I started Walking with Jane, the first thing I wanted to do was put a human face on the disease. I could have gone with something involving carcinoid or NET cancer, but neither term seemed very user-friendly. The terms had no poetry to them–and neither was very human.  Carcinoid is not exactly a word the rolls off the tongue–and NET cancer is not very descriptive in the way that breast cancer or lung cancer is.

It’s hard to sell something when it can be easily confused with something else.

It doesn’t help that we’ve gone through four different names in the last four years: carcinoid, NET cancer, carcinoid/NETs, and now carciNETs. We need to find a name that works. It needs to be simple–and we all have to agree that it is the word we will use with the general public. We may know there are multiple types–and physicians may have different words to distinguish these types–but we need to realize that every time we use multiple words for what is–in the mind of the public–a single disease–we confuse our audience–and confusion is the enemy when it comes to marketing and raising awareness.

Keep it simple

There are multiple forms of lung cancer, multiple forms of breast cancer. But when people think about those diseases they see a monolith, not the variations. Each form of lung and breast cancer has a different medical name, but with the exception of mesothelioma, lay people don’t use those terms nor really distinguish among them.

The terms had no poetry to them...

If we are going to reach the general public, we need to simplify our terminology. How we speak of this cancer among ourselves is one thing. How we speak of it to the general public is something else. We need to understand the complexities because we either have the disease or are caring for someone who does. But the average person does not need that level of knowledge–and will be turned off by it if we make the disease feel too complicated.

(Editor’s Note: This is the first of a series of pieces that will approach the problem of carcinoid/NETs not as a medical problem but as a marketing problem. If we are going to increase funding for the disease, we have to think of it as something other than a medical issue. We need to make it a human issue for the general public. In my next post, I’ll discuss the power of visual imagery and logos.)