Insight · Patient marketing in practice
What good patient marketing looks like in 30 seconds.
A surfer called Dave. A non-surgical knee treatment. Thirty subtitled seconds with no product talk. It looks like a consumer brand advert. It is something else: a patient-marketing artefact built on the principles taught by the University of Bath’s pain-research centre. This is the read on why it works and what every healthcare commercial leader can take from it.
The Bath principle
The patient concern cycle.
The University of Bath is one of the world’s leading centres for pain research. Their pain-communication faculty bring in clinicians and researchers from around the world to study how patients actually experience and articulate pain. Fifteen and a half million UK adults - one in four - live with chronic pain. Most of them struggle to put their experience into words.
The principle that came out of that research, and went straight into our patient-marketing playbook: patients do not want more information. They want information that acknowledges their experience. They cycle through four concerns, in roughly this order, every time pain returns.
“Will it stop the pain?”
The first question, and the only one most patients are listening for. Not how the product works. Whether it makes the thing they cannot live with go away.
“Will it make it worse?”
The second question is fear. Will the cure be worse than the disease? Will I lose months I cannot afford to lose? What gets worse if this goes wrong?
“What will it cost - to me, my family, my work?”
Recovery is the patient’s currency. Time off, mobility lost, dependence on others, the work meeting they cannot make. Patient communication that ignores this currency reads as tone-deaf.
“Maybe I am just getting older. Maybe I will put it off.”
The cycle closes here. As pain decreases, patients defer. As pain increases, they look for options. Chronic pain repeats this loop - sometimes for years before they act.
The cycle is from the manuscript’s Patient Marketing chapter, drawn from a research collaboration with Bath’s pain-communication faculty. The fuller piece lives at /painful-conversations.
The principle in practice
Dave is not a patient. He is a person whose knees stop him surfing.
The Dave the Wave thirty-second cut never names a product. It never talks about a mechanism. It does not include a single clinical claim. It opens on the water, then on Dave’s knees giving out, then on his face. Then it shows him back on the board. Subtitled, because most feeds run muted.
The asset answers question one of the cycle - will it stop the thing keeping me from the life I want - and nothing else. It does not try to answer four questions in thirty seconds. The other three questions are answered downstream, on the find-a-clinic page Dave clicks through to, on the clinician conversation that follows. The cutdown earns attention by reaching the patient at stage one with language that recognises stage one.
Our category had spent years explaining mechanism to patients who were not listening. The Dave cutdown went the other way. It started with what the patient was already feeling and let the clinical conversation come later, in a room, with a clinician who could answer the harder questions properly. That sequencing is the principle. The surfer is the artefact.
The language test
Words create barriers or words create connection.
Bath’s most useful working insight: in patient communication, the specific words you choose decide whether the message lands at all. Some words sound clinical and distant. Others sound human and immediate. Same outcome, same indication, different patient response.
Clinical / distant
“Manage your condition”
Human / immediate
“Get back to the things you love”
Same outcome. Clinical language vs human language. Bath’s research found the response curve between these two phrasings to be dramatically different.
Clinical / distant
“Treatment options for OA”
Human / immediate
“If your knees are stopping you doing what you used to”
The first speaks to clinicians. The second speaks to patients. Patients self-select out of the first before they read it.
Clinical / distant
“Indicated for early-intervention treatment”
Human / immediate
“Before surgery is your only option”
Same indication, different mouth. The right language meets the patient where their fear actually lives.
The honest read
What worked. What this single asset cannot do alone.
The campaign the Dave cutdown sat inside drove 128 clinic referrals in a month at a cost per acquisition under twenty pounds. The Dave cutdown specifically out-performed the more product-explanatory variants by a factor of three. The principle of starting at stage one of the patient concern cycle compounded across the funnel.
The honest part: a single thirty-second persona advert is an entry point, not a system. It works because it sits inside a six-stage patient-marketing programme - legal & regulatory setup first, patient-specific messaging developed separately from HCP messaging, a find-a-clinic destination, learning what works, co-branded materials, and finally co-marketing partnerships with clinics. Skip any stage and a great cutdown drives traffic into a broken funnel. The asset is the visible part. The programme is the load-bearing part.
The trap most healthcare companies fall into: they see someone else’s Dave, brief the agency for a Dave of their own, and skip the messaging stage that makes Dave work. Patient-specific messaging cannot be derived by removing jargon from clinical materials. It has to be developed from the patient concern cycle outward, in the patient’s own language. Without that foundation, the best persona advert in the world goes into a void.
The decision this sharpens
Is your patient marketing answering the right question?
The fastest test on a Monday morning. Pull up the most recent patient-facing asset your team has shipped - the ad, the landing page, the social post. Ask one question:
Does this asset answer “what is going to happen to me?” - or does it explain how the product works?
If it answers what will happen to the patient, in patient language, you have an asset that earns attention at stage one. If it explains the product, you have an asset for clinicians dressed as patient communication. The fix is rarely a redesign. The fix is rebuilding the messaging house from the patient concern cycle outward.
Want a read on your patient-facing assets?
Bring the most recent ad, landing page, or post your team has shipped. We’ll walk it through the patient concern cycle in 30 minutes and tell you which stage it’s actually answering.