Chris Carberg

Most clinics and physicians have never received a marketing diagnosis. That means you've been spending before you truly understand. In healthcare, you'd never prescribe treatment without running diagnostics. Yet in strategy, you'll jump straight to “treatment”: ads, websites, campaigns - without knowing the underlying condition. The result? Money wasted. Symptoms masked. Growth stalled. That’s why the first step in our Marketing Strategy Dx (MSDx) is The Dx: It’s a simple but structured audit and diagnosis of your current strategy, patient flow, and market position. Just like a clinical diagnosis, it uncovers: - Where your pain points really are (not just where they appear to be). - Which efforts are working versus which are just draining your resources. - The “hidden comorbidities” or blind spots in your branding, messaging, or targeting that compound the problem. When you understand first, you treat smarter. And in marketing , as in medicine, diagnosis isn’t optional. It’s the foundation for real outcomes. Interested in the other steps in our Marketing Strategy Dx? I'll share more tomorrow. #MarketingStrategyDx

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Why isn’t branding talked about more in behavioral healthcare? I’m not sure—but it should be. And it will be. Branding hasn’t always been the biggest priority for centers, but that’s starting to shift. The days of launching a generic website and expecting the calls to roll in are fading fast. As the industry continues to grow, your brand—your story, your reason, who you are and what you stand for—could be exactly what makes someone choose you. In the long run, branding might be what separates the programs that last from the ones that don’t. Every industry has brands people trust. Behavioral healthcare shouldn’t be any different. If you want to lead, not just survive—build a brand that actually means something. Just remember, you never get a second chance to make a first impression ⚡ #Branding #BehavioralHealthcare #BrandingInBehavioralHealth

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"This image is an optical illusion—your brain fills in gaps, makes assumptions, and sees what it expects." Organic marketing works the same way. Many businesses assume if they don’t see instant results (likes, shares, conversions), then it’s not working. But that’s a misread of how influence builds. Organic marketing is about trust compounding over time. It’s the steady visibility that creates familiarity. It’s positioning without shouting. It’s showing up consistently, so your audience doesn’t just remember you—they start to rely on you. While paid ads can generate clicks, organic earns credibility. And in a noisy market, credibility cuts through better than volume. #OrganicMarketing #MarketingStrategy #TrustBuilding #ContentMarketing #BrandPositioning #LinkedInGrowth

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Your customers are not lab rats. Today a lot of marketing is boiled down to just marketing communications. And even sophisticated voices reduce consumers down to mindless zombies, upright incarnations of B. F. Skinner's lab rats. See, it isn't just about making people "remember the brand in purchase situations". That is the desired outcome, not the road there. It isn't just that "one effective exposure is enough". There is a lot more to the story, including: Emotional and narrative elements can create peaks in experience that anchor an ad in memory. According to the peak-end rule, people judge and remember experiences (ads included) largely by the most intense emotion (peak) and the ending. Campaign analytics confirm that ads generating strong emotional peaks are more likely to be recognized and recalled later. (e.g. System1) But there is more. Memory is not a file cabinet. British psychologist Frederic Bartlett forcefully argued against the prevailing "storehouse" model, which posited memories as static, retrievable things. Instead, he showed that memories are actively reconstructed, built anew each time they are brought to mind. This is almost 100 year old knowledge, but people still think of the brain as a file cabinet. In this way, a vivid ad (or story) can make consumers believe they experienced something in childhood that in fact was fictional. In one experiment, adults shown a Disneyland advertisement featuring Mickey Mouse became more confident they had personally shaken Mickey’s hand as a child; another ad even made people “remember” meeting Bugs Bunny at Disney (impossible, since Bugs is not a Disney character). And multiple exposures told in different ways will of course built richer, stronger associative networks. A brand that is recalled for a purchase situation in under 5 seconds will be "mentally available", yes, but what if another brand is recalled in 0.5 seconds and from more diverse cues to boot? Mental Availability isn't a binary 0 or 1 thing. So while making sure the ads are emotional, it is not enough. You have to care about story and meaning - as the memory is remade (not retrieved) it is shaped to fit what we think we need. So emotion is a step along the way - but the real core is that of utility. Does the new brand memory give me a better way of navigating the world to get what I need and want? We see that creative ads are 40 times and more effective than lackluster ones, and we see brands like Netflix, Tesla, Spotify, Uber and others grow at a pace that far outpaced their ad budgets - because they made people want to remember them, rather than forcing it. The irony is that when marketing started obsessing over evidence and scientific proof, it started ignoring most of the science of how people actually think and remember things, often dumbed down to classical conditioning. But people are not rats.

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