July 26, 2005

Claire, you're right about the attention span. That's why speakers are urged to keep their remarks within that short window of attention span between commercials in prime time television. Next time you go to church, watch the congregation as the sermon reaches the seven-minute mark. They start to fade and they never come back. Count the yawns before and after seven minutes. Watch the wandering eyes, the nodding heads.

On-Site Marketing

Effective marketing begins with communications to customers and prospects and continues through the on-site experience as well. With that in mind, I was thinking of how hospitals communicate with people...because I visited made five visits to two hospitals around the weekend.

On the plus side, I found the people at both hospitals to be wonderfully cheerful and helpful, in a very genuine way. (Not the Ritz "Is there anything else I can do for you" way, which ultimately made me feel creepy in Chicago...although it amused me.)

But the experience of getting through each hospital's physicality left a lot to be desired.

Hospital design must be very challenging. There must be all kinds of technical requirements, making the flow of the building not as easy to follow as it might otherwise be. Then there are inevitably unplanned expansions that make successful hospitals look like rabbit warrens...multiple buildings and additions cobbled together in a maze.

When we go to a hospital, most of us - patients, family members, or visitors - have a certain degree of anxiety. Will I be OK? Will my mother or friend or whatever be OK? My guess is that our anxiety disorients us.

And what contributes greatly to that disorientation is the signage (or lack of it) in hospitals...especially the ones I visited last weekend. The signage is a joke. You suddenly come upon a set of big double doors that say "Do not enter!" Or you come upon a big set of doors that do not open...and then you find you are supposed to go on an intercom, but you can't find it.

On and on it goes. Even the hospital I visited twice that has had no expansion since it was built was a catacomb of deceptions and deadends.

By the time I found the patient's room, I needed more medical attention than they did.

Sometimes finding a rest room in a restaurant can be just as daunting. And the trip there can bring you by piles of dirty dishes or other behind-the-scenes images that you could really do without.

The point is that all of this wandering around can and should be a positive experience, treated with the same care and commitment as an important ad campaign. All too often it is not. And yet it's so easy to remedy.

The positive marketing experience must never end.

And Will We Ever Have Time to Think...to Contemplate??

This, from InternetNews: The few crumbs of spare attention anyone has left over from the barrage of daily media will soon be eaten up by "video snacks," little chunks of content delivered to cell phones to fill those awkward moments when no one is calling, texting, or e-mailing us.

Just shoot me.