…then perhaps it’s not just advice for everybody—including healthcare marketers—to seriously consider, but also something to ponder.

Yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told University of Pennsylvania graduates to find themselves by giving analog living a shot.

“See me, feel me, hear me…” Ah, Tommy. Great album, silly movie, and curiously relevant almost 40 years later.

This might also seem relatively ironic coming from somebody that works at a company that identifies itself as an online healthcare marketing group.

Since we are a small company, one might think that we have more flexibility than a large company in regards to being able to sustain a personal feel to our business.

However, like a large hospital, we face many of the same challenges of time, money and other resources that are often best tackled with e-mail, conference calls, etc.

Rediscovering the Five Senses

Rather than preach about what you can be doing to engage your own clients, customers and patients in a non-virtual context, here are the ways AVID Design tries to use the “five senses” to elevate and promote real relationships with our own clients and customers:

• See: Whenever possible, we prefer to visit clients, even if they are out-of-state. Sure, a little time may be lost with waiting to clear airport security lines and renting cars, but the value of being on-site with a client, seeing their facilities and matching faces to those countless e-mails is almost always rewarded with a successful project.

• Hear: More than just a sense, this is increasingly becoming a skill, especially in a hyper-mediated culture where we can selectively hear what we want with screening calls, filtering e-mails and always being able to say what we want—when we want—with tweets, Facebook updates, etc.

Although we are a number of things—designers, programmers, consultants, etc.—we are also a service provider, and the key to great service is to listen to what clients need and want.

• Touch: This relates more to “see,” especially with being able to shake a client’s hand and the meetings, dialogue and work that follow. There’s a reason why the handshake is such a powerful icon of business.

• Smell: Hard to make any kind of cogent argument about this sense!

• Taste: Also hard to make an argument, at least in a literal sense. But in a figurative sense, it certainly reinforces Schmidt’s suggestion, especially when considering it in a customer/client context.

By getting to see, hear and touch your clients and patients, you can better appreciate their “tastes”—or put another way, you can better understand their goals, ideas, styles, etc.

AVID Design prides itself for being a personable partner as much as with being a cutting-edge design and marketing group. Find out how you can start enjoying our unique quality of service!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Computers & Technology, Marketing, Pop Culture, Things 'n' Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.