What does Taylor Swift have to do with healthcare? Read on to figure out the connection between the two.
Admittedly, I’m not a Swiftie—but I can concur that her marketing abilities are uncanny and case study worthy. Hopefully, you haven’t unsubscribed yet!
I sat down with the marketing duo from Reperio Health: Hailey Minter, Marketing Manager, and Kala Weeks, VP of Marketing and Communications, to review their latest campaign, which highlights the importance of preventive care and ties it to pop culture icon Taylor Swift.
But first, how did they get here? Let’s take a step back and understand their philosophy and context.
A picture showing Kala Weeks (left) and Hailey Minter (right).
“In B2B health tech, the buyer isn’t the only audience that matters. Your buyer may purchase the solution, but its success depends on whether the intended end-users actually use it. That means B2B marketers have to do double duty—convincing organizations to buy, while also equipping them to “resell” the value internally so their people engage," Weeks added. “In my experience, this type of content is often super sterile, overly clinical. We're gating whitepapers and reports that we hope buyers will download, so we can follow up. We often get stuck in how things have always been.”
“It’s easy with healthcare marketing to lean towards being safe. You don't want to be polarizing to a community that built its reputation on being clinically sound and rooted in data,” she added.
Beyond these challenges, it also calls into question what B2B truly means, especially in healthcare. “I still think the most important thing to infuse into marketing strategy is the psychology behind all of it,” Weeks added. “We often forget that our buyers are humans first, executives second. They scroll on TikTok, laugh at memes, and stream Taylor Swift in the background while working. All of those things can both be true at the same time.”
“The gap between where we're trying to take Reperio's marketing strategy, where we've been in the past, and where other health tech companies are is both a weakness and a massive opportunity,” Weeks added.
To better understand that, it’s important to understand when people access healthcare. It’s often a scary period of time, at a place that you’re not necessarily wanting to be at. You’re probably overwhelmed and surrounded by a clinical/medical environment, rather than at home where you’re comfortable. “With that in mind, we’re looking at these moments as enablers, allowing us to humanize health technology, bridge the personal and professional, and borrow built-in reach. We’re working on something far too important to not take our shot at earning disproportionate attention..”
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What is trendjacking? There’s a lot of definitions and terminology out there about newsjacking. For the sake of this piece, we’re going to use the definition that The Bazaar Voice uses: “a marketing strategy where brands create content based on popular topics, sounds, hashtags, or events using the relevance of these social media trends to promote their products or services.” |
“Trendjacking, for us, is inserting our brand into these timely, culturally relevant conversations so that we can humanize healthtech, earning disproportionate attention based on things that may have a throughline between our brand and what we're trying to trendjack on,” Weeks added. “This also means blending the personal and professional. And remember that we are all human beings behind the titles, and the companies, etc. It works for us because preventive care is really universal, but it's also really hard to talk about.”
It’s important to think through the relevance of a trend before hopping on it, too.
Here is an example from Charity:Water that went viral for connecting their brand that cleans water, to the color of water that people drink (which happened to be the 2024 color of the year: Mocha Mousse).
The post grabs you by surprise because you think you know what you’re looking at—until you don’t.
Another way that Reperio Health is connecting its brand to consumers is through its people. Their team. “Our marketing manager, Hailey, is a Swiss Army knife. Being a full-stack marketer, she’s able to flex across content, social, design, and distribution with speed, consumer instincts, and digital-native fluency. She doesn’t just execute, she leads. She spots trends early and bridges our brand to pipeline while keeping our marketing engine sharp and relevant.
“Pop culture moments are fleeting. Our attention span has gone from six seconds to three seconds. You really have roughly three seconds to capture someone's attention,” Weeks added. “You can't really put something fully polished out that will take three seconds of someone’s attention. Being fast isn't only about showing cultural fluency, but it's also about agility, and being a team. Being a small team makes you super nimble and able to make decisions on the fly. It also helps when you have the full support of your leadership, empowering all departments and teams to adapt similar workflows for their swim lanes.”
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Remember: Humans want more human moments. In what used to be “is it real or is it cake” is now “is this real or is this AI.” Rachel Karten, social media consultant and author of Link In Bio, has referred to the concept of “proof of reality,” relying on the notion that most people will assume some level of AI usage until proven wrong. This reinforces the importance of behind-the-scenes (BTS) footage, sharing the humans behind the work, running b-roll, etc… It breeds a whole new type of marketing content: marketing the (marketing) department. Consumers also take swift action about AI, too. We saw this with the backlash at Duolingo after their AI policies leaked. They lost a million followers on TikTok in the days and weeks that followed. Their comment sections were filled with users sharing that they broke 1,000+ day streaks in solidarity with others. |
For Reperio, there’s an element of universality to preventive care. Their target addressable market (TAM), really is everyone. “Health is a priority—or it should be a priority. How can we make it as simple, accessible, approachable, friendly, kind, —and as human as possible? This is what these moments are really helping us do. Think: This is like real life. This really happens to people across every single walk of life,” Weeks added.
“From a go-to-market standpoint, we’ve chosen to focus on selling to employers first, since these are the organizations that employ us and support us with health benefits. We believe it’s the quickest path to getting our solution into the hands of every American!”
6 in 10 Americans live with a chronic condition. 40% of Americans have 2 or more. 1 in 5 American workers care for a loved one, and many are driven out of the workforce because of caregiving responsibilities, be it children, a parent, a spouse, or another relative. These conditions impact so many people, and touch every family.
With that kind of universality, comes a responsibility to try to get in front of each demographic with content that resonates with them, that feels personal, and connects with what they go through. For Gen-Z, in particular, tapping into Taylor Swift’s influence checks all of the boxes and more.
Let’s get to the magic of the post, and dive deeper into the work that Hailey Minter did, in getting this post from idea to analysis.
“I'm not a Taylor Swift listener personally, but, being an Eagles fan, I listened to that podcast (New Heights, hosted by Jason and Travis Kelce),” Minter added. “What really caught my attention was a sound bite on preventive care that connected back to a recent company onsite.”
At that onsite, the team had shared their personal “why.” For Hailey, preventive care is personal: she lost her father to something that could have been caught with regular screenings. “My why is having that data,” she said. “If you know your numbers, you lower your risk. And that’s exactly what Taylor mentioned in the podcast.”
Taylor Swift explained that her dad, who seemed healthy and went to yearly check-ups, discovered through one test that he needed major heart surgery. “For me, the personal connection is what made me tie it back to Reperio,” Minter said. “The goal is to find natural throughlines that people trust. Taylor Swift has massive influence, and hearing her talk about preventive care made it an easy, authentic moment for us to post about.”
Why should we talk about preventive care now? According to the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, the data “show a clear decline in uptake of CPS (Clinical Preventive Services). In 2015, only 8.5% of adults aged 35 years and older received all recommended high-priority CPS, and that number fell to a mere 5.3% in 2020.” Despite innovation, advances in technology, and more, we’re reversing course on progress.
“Preventive care is universal, yet it's so difficult for people to talk about or relate to. It’s full of stigma, just like mental health. A lot of health tech companies are trying to break down those barriers, too. We're trying to help people move away from looking at healthcare as a sick care system. And move towards a self-care system that prioritizes prevention,” Weeks added.
“It really has to do with properly prioritizing trends. You can't hop on every single trend. It's not realistic, especially in health tech,” Minter added. “In my experience, a lot of the teams are two people, three people, or in some cases, one person. You have to be assertive in understanding: ‘is this trend even going to be worth us jumping on? Is there relevance to our product? Is there relevance to our mission? Is there relevance to our buyer?’”
“For me, those were all a no-brainer. There was a clear throughline. I had two hours on a plane that I could’ve spent on another campaign, but I knew this was an opportunity worth jumping on. So I hit the ground running.”
Her process was simple: to check whether Taylor had spoken about preventive care in other forms of media, draft copy and a graphic, and send it to Kala for quick approval. “I believe in progress over perfection,” Minter said. “In health tech, you have to be scrappy. The faster you get a good idea out the door, the more likely it is to land.”
“Don’t over-engineer it,” Weeks said. “In B2B marketing we often over-structure. Every idea needs an SOP or workflow. But sometimes the magic happens in the messy middle. One way to encourage it is by treating these moments as official experiments.”
“Tap two people on your team that are interested in doing these things and give them the swim lane to surface these viral moments in a special Slack channel,” Weeks added. “Also, hold yourself accountable as a marketing leader to know that polished doesn't always equal perfection,” Weeks added.
Minter added, “as long as you're able to mirror anything back to a KPI or a business goal. It's been a lot easier to test these fun ideas because then you're able to actually have a throughline to what it's going to bring back to the business.”
“Is it going to bring brand awareness? Is it going to bring new customers? Is it going to close a deal? That has really helped me with these new ideas and building trust within my teams to kind of have more creative freedom when it comes to peeling out of those swim lanes,” Minter shared.
“I joined as head of marketing—and now VP of marketing and communications—last year. To me, there's a bigger picture to all of this than trendjacking, and hopping on pop culture moments. It's not really just a social play for us at Reperio. It's more of a broader brand shift in terms of repositioning healthtech marketing,” Weeks added. “We’re moving from the dry, corporate vibe, to more of an editorial, pop culture-aware, UGC-driven, and human-centered vibe. When done right, I think it can really change the perception of our offering.”
They even chimed in with their own rationale for the Cracker Barrel un-rebrand, to start a new conversation on managing chronic conditions (and paid medical leave):
“We want to be more than a vendor in a benefits stack. We want to be a brand with a cultural pulse. We want to be a household name. We want every American to have access to our ‘little white kit’ that lets you know if you’re healthy without leaving your living room,” Weeks added. “If we’re pioneering a new model of care delivery, our marketing should mirror that innovation—culturally fluent, speedy, accessible, and approachable.”
“At the end of the day, we’re trying to breathe the ‘human’ back into healthcare. I think that anyone who reads this can probably really relate to that or has had an experience really wishing that healthcare felt a little bit more human at the end of the day,” Weeks added.
To learn more about Reperio Health, check out their website: https://www.reperiohealth.com/
Are you wanting to add more human to your healthcare content? Get in touch with Jenn today.