This week’s lecture discusses the mission statement for a company and how the marketing in medical devices must align with this statement across departments. What stood out to me was how marketing is often treated as a separate entity from design. However, I think both are about understanding people. Medical device design takes into account human factors to make sure that the device is safe, compatible, and actually usable in the real world. I think marketing should follow this same pathway, taking in human feedback from the public itself to send the correct message or to alter the message to the correct one. This would allow marketing to be as properly managed as design documentation.
For the Widget marketing plan that Dr. Simon shared with us, there was a focus on brochures and digital outreach. If these exact marketing materials were reinforced with user feedback data, then marketing would be more effective. Marketing would become more educational instead of advertising, which is more beneficial to the public in the long run and will even bring in more profits through transparency. Should regulatory agencies like the FDA begin requiring user feedback data to support marketing claims? How would this be effectively achieved, and how would such a big influx of data be handled in order to effectively market, profit, and educate the consumers? Do you think AI could be integrated into this, or would there be a privacy issue?
Great post, @dev-doshi! I really like how you connected the mission statement, design process, and marketing together. I completely agree that marketing shouldn’t be treated as a separate function. At the end of the day, both design and marketing are about understanding people’s needs and making sure the final product is both useful and trusted. Bringing user feedback into marketing could definitely shift it from just “advertising” to being more educational and transparent, which would build long-term credibility for both the product and the company.
I also think your point about regulatory agencies requiring user feedback data is really interesting. It could raise the standard for marketing claims and ensure that the messaging reflects real-world experiences. The challenge, of course, would be managing that huge amount of data, but AI could absolutely help here by identifying trends and summarizing insights without exposing sensitive information. Privacy is a valid concern, but with the right safeguards and anonymization techniques, I think it’s possible to integrate AI while protecting users.
Overall, I believe that integrating real user data into marketing could make medical devices not only more trustworthy but also more aligned with actual clinical needs and patient expectations. It’s a more patient-centered approach that benefits everyone involved.
Marketing and design are different disciplines within industry, but have commonality in the sense that they both strive to understand the people using their product. Design has to take into account human factors like ease of use and clinical applications, and in the same regard marketing also has to take this into account when marketing the product to customers. If companies were to include user feedback, this would change the way in which they market their products and shift the focus from persuading consumers with claims about the product to demonstrating the efficacy of the product through consumer data. The FDA could have a major role in mandating this approach by requiring user feedback or customer experience to validate marketing claims which comparable to what they already do with safety or performance validation in QA/QC environments. The main concern with this is would be safely storing and securing feedback data which would require large investments into infrastructure and new requirements that would allow the data to be traceable and compliant with regulations involving consumers privacy. AI could very well automate this process and could systemically identify trends within the feedback data quicker than a human could. However, many in the public may be against providing data to an AI system out of fear that their data may be breached as has been seen before with AI data system. I think for me personally, I am a little more hesitant on the implementation of AI models to entrust sensitive information to due to the privacy issues you initially mentioned in your question. With that said, I think implementation of customer feedback into medical devices would be a great idea as it improves public understanding of the product but also is a more ethical and evidenced backed mode of communication between medical device companies and consumers.
You can make medical device marketing more ethical and accurate by doing a human-factors testing, something similar to testing that's done during device design. Before releasing ads about the product to the public, companies could first show them to a select few of their target audience and observe how people actually interpret the information. If the test group for any reason misunderstands a claim or assume a feature works differently than intended, the company can fix the messaging before it reaches a wider audience beforehand. What should be the threshold of a misunderstanding that a consumer can have before a company needs to revisit its marketing content? Should it be based on how many people have the misunderstanding? Or how critical the misunderstanding can be?
To answer the question of what should the threshold of misunderstanding be, if you define a misunderstanding to be critical based on a risk that it poses to consumers through misunderstanding marketing content, then yes, that is an appropriate way to identify when marketing needs to be reevaluated. If the marketing causes unsafe decision making as a result of claims made during marketing then there is a critical error in the marketing strategy. Evaluating marketing content based only upon the amount of people affected by the misunderstanding is not an effective nor safe strategy. The best example I can think of is a wearable medical device that tracks heart rate. If it is marketed as just for tracking heart rate, then there should be little issues with misunderstanding. If the device is marketed for tracking heart health, than it can be misinterpreted as a device which can alert the consumer about issues with their heart, when in reality it cannot. Simple wording designed for attention can become risks in the market, which is why human factor testing for marketing is important as mentioned.
