Adding Value in the Consumer Health Journey

Kailey Raymond: In today's world, there are a lot of complexities marketers have to overcome to ensure a frictionless customer journey. Luckily, the advancement of technology and AI is enabling us to do just that, especially in healthcare. Marketers in this field are identifying insights on how to best support consumers and deliver better health outcomes by leveraging their patient data. Moreover, these new advancements are allowing healthcare companies to take a more proactive approach towards preventative health through direct and engaging conversations with their customers. In this episode, I sit down with Bayer Consumer Health's Patrica Corsi to discuss creating a frictionless journey, how AI can accelerate capabilities and building trust with consumers.

Kailey Raymond: I'm excited to have Patricia Corsi here on the show today. She is the Chief Marketing, Digital and Information Officer at Bayer Consumer Health. She has over 20 years of international branding and digital experience across the consumer goods industry. Prior to Bayer, she had leadership roles at Heineken Mexico, Unilever, Sony Music to name a few. Patricia, welcome to the show.

Patricia Corsi: Thank you so much for having me here. I'm very excited about the topics we are going to discuss today.

Kailey Raymond: Great. Well, I'm excited for you to be joining. I appreciate the time today. I'm curious, I mentioned a couple of the roles that you've taken, leadership roles at some of the world's most notable brands. In your own words, do you wanna share about your career journey and how you got to where you are today at Bayer Consumer Health?

Patricia Corsi: Yes, for sure. So I think that the obvious funny ways, I got here one step at a time and there were no jumps in a way. I come from an entrepreneur family, but I decided to build my professional career in big multinational companies and it's almost unbelievable to me that next year I'm going to complete 30 years of career in different countries. I have lived and worked in Brazil where I'm from, where I was born, Mexico, England, Holland, and now since 2019 I live in Switzerland. I have had the opportunity and the immense opportunity to work in different industries, foods, beverages, home and personal care and health as well as entertainment in different roles, which really enables you to see the business in a very complete way. And since five years ago, I also hold the title of the Chief Digital for Bayer Consumer Health. And since last year, also took responsibility for the whole of IT for the division, which is an area that I adore. So I'm very fortunate to consistently have opportunities to learn and develop and grow in areas that I am really passionate for.

Kailey Raymond: That's incredible. So Patricia, it doesn't sound like you have one job. You actually have three jobs, so you're quite a busy woman. I'm excited to figure out how you do it, how you have the time, but also learn from your experiences. I guess based on your experience across industries, I'm wondering if there's any commonalities or common truths that you find across them. Are there any kind of words of wisdoms that you wanna impart that are kind of always true across every industry?

Patricia Corsi: I think the first thing is in most cases, we are always talking to the same consumer, not always to the same customer, but most of the time the same consumer that drinks beer, it's also the same consumer that washes his or her hair with a shampoo that uses deodorant, that plays video game in the computer. So understanding the consumer in a much deeper level is something that serves you wherever you go, absolutely in the commercial area, but also more and more in digital area. So this is one of the things. The other thing that is very useful, and it was always useful to me in the different jobs in the different countries and industries is to have this curious mindset, to have this open mind and see the world through the lenses of diversity that builds beauty. What do I mean by that? I was raised in Brazil, one of the biggest Catholic countries in the world. When you first go to a Muslim country or a Hindu country or a Shintoist country, you can either look with eyes of judgment, which is the human nature. Everything that is different than us, sounds male, speak different than us, we try to judge, but the choice of looking at it with eyes of curiosity and wonder is the one that I see that drives a lot of commonality and power in the way that you can deliver better services, products, and solutions for the consumer and customers.

Kailey Raymond: And something that I've noticed is that it really does seem like you're taking that keen eye towards diversity and that lesson that you've learned across your career and making it into these beautiful campaigns and programs at Bayer Consumer Health. So we can see those actually happening in the field.

Patricia Corsi: Yeah, look, I think some of those points are really things that you carry through life. So for example, one of the things for me that is really big and always has been to me is collaboration. I've learned collaboration in my grandfather hotel and in my father restaurants and how through collaboration you get to a much better place, not just on the end result and impact, but also on the feeling of the people involved. So for example, when I look at the role that I have today, it's a combination of the tech end-to-end as well as the commercial area. The first thing that we apply is collaboration, how do we maximize the two areas to the benefit of the consumers? And then we end up with amazing programs that connect the opportunity to deliver things in a faster way, in a more efficient way, but also in a more creative way to consumers that we wouldn't have if we were not connecting, for example, in this case, creativity, data, and technology in a way to deliver consumer service.

Kailey Raymond: That makes a lot of sense. You're definitely going to need to drive a lot of collaboration because as I understand it, you have over 170 brands under Bayer Consumer Health. Is that right?

Patricia Corsi: Yeah, we have a lot of brands because the health industry is a very fragmented industry. You have lots of local brands. With that said, we have two handfuls of global multimillion brands, and these are the ones that most of people will recognize across the globe.

Kailey Raymond: Wow, incredible. The global impact that you all have is just astounding. And I imagine one of the things that you pay pretty close attention to are those global trends as it particularly relates to consumers and how they're thinking about your business. And so I'm wondering if there's any consumer trends in particular that you're watching as it relates to building great consumer experiences.

Patricia Corsi: Yes. So this is one thing that we can't sleep on this one, especially after the past three years that we had where the changes that have happened due to COVID or political and social unrest have happened. So we need to have a very, very close proximity with the consumer. So the first thing that I'm looking in terms of trends is how do we keep this closeness? How do we create positive and engaging interactions with the consumers? And I don't mean this in a bad way, but it is a complication factor. We are in very noisy and polluted times and what I mean by that is there is so much distraction everywhere that you go in every moment of your life that is difficult to focus. So be empathic with the consumer needs. Sometimes they don't even know that there is a solution for them because there's so much noise around that they don't get that information. So one of the trends that it's important for us to understand is how do we connect and what are the solutions either it's apps, platforms, or whatever it is that can make this journey frictionless. And this is one of the most... If you ask one of the things that take my sleep at night is this, how do we make this connectivity to the consumer to better serve them and our customers in a way that is smooth and really deliver value at the time and place where it's needed.

Kailey Raymond: And I think in the answer, you're touching on a couple of different things that I think are important. The first is trust. When you're building empathy, you're building trust with the consumer. They're coming back to you and the brands they know and love that you're creating. And it's also really touching on building personalized experiences for every single one of your consumers to the best of your ability. The consumerization of healthcare, if you will, is really I think some of the things that we're touching on, so making sure that you know each individual as a human and relating it back to stories back to them and how your brands can impact their lives.

Patricia Corsi: Yeah. Look, you're touching two very important points. So let me just talk about the first one that is trust. And you were talking before about trends that we are following. One of the things that we have seen in the past decade is that the trust from consumers into brands had decreased year over year. And this is a massive problem because brands are the sponsors and the turbine behind a lot of the developments. And you even see platforms like Netflix or social media and all of this that despite of the fact that for years they said, we are not going to have advertising, they surrender to it because they start understanding that this is a means to an end. But also this is where people in most of the cases find communication, education, innovation. So you can imagine, and there is a very simple relationship between this trust and how can we help and I'm going to use our health industry as an example. When we had COVID and when we had the big crisis that people were simply not leaving their house, either to go to the doctor, to the hospital or to the pharmacy, how could they know what products were available if it was not, for example, for e-commerce?

Patricia Corsi: And of course, in the countries where we have e-commerce very well developed, then the critical question is, is the material that is in there in terms of information and education enough for this new moment where they cannot consult their doctors as they did before, or they cannot consult the pharmacist like they did before? So then the role of the brands changed. The role of the brands moved from a bit more... Like it was seeing a bit more transactional to, one, that is really supporting, two, to help me in a moment of crisis. And it's interesting enough to see that the trusting brands since COVID has increased back again after years of decreasing and shame on us and I mean in all the industry, if we don't take this opportunity to really do the job that we need to do with our brands. In our case, for example, one of our biggest categories is multivitamins and we have a number of brands and products within immunity. We need to help consumers understand that to avoid or to be better prepared, not to avoid, but to be better prepared for situations like COVID that many people say, there's something similar that will happen in another five to 10 years, we need to change dramatically the way we take care of our health. I'm pretty sure that you would say or most people would say that your health and your family are the two most important things in your life, right?

Kailey Raymond: Definitely.

Patricia Corsi: Yeah. And this is the moment where we see where habits kick in because most of the texts you read and the studies you read, what people regret the most when they're about to die, that they didn't spend enough time with their families. So between what you say and what you do, there is a difference. The other thing is health. We tend to be very reactive to our health when we know we are getting older. There are more people getting older. And this is the role that we need to play, especially now using data and technology, we can have a much more engaging conversation directly to the consumer, and maybe for the first time, change this behavior of people towards their health on being less reactive and a little bit more proactive.

Kailey Raymond: I love this insight. This is extremely interesting. And I think what you're talking about is preventative health and the education that really goes into making sure that folks understand how to take care of themselves and also perhaps even using some data points to be able to flag for somebody that might be at a higher risk for something that they might want to consult a doctor earlier than might be the typical. Taking that data points and being able to turn it into something that's educational and helpful, it decreases the load on the system, but it also increases trust with your brands.

Patricia Corsi: Absolutely. And it will create better economies and societies and communities. If you look in the US where the cost of healthcare, it's very high and the number of people that cannot afford it is also high, some of those people, if they have a backache, if they have a headache, if they have a tummy ache, they are going to struggle to lose a day off job because one day in the job will mean probably one less meal for their family. So this is where being proactive, again, going to the point where we say, what are the most important things in our life? Our family and the health of ourselves and our family. Doing these things can have the most and the biggest positive impact on the quality of life and how people get more money and more things that they need out of the work that they do.

Kailey Raymond: What I love about this industry is that the stakes are high. What you're doing is really impacting people's lives in a really profound way. And one of the things... One of the trends that we kind of keep hearing about that has this profound effect or people believe will have a profound effect as well as AI. And so I'm wondering about kind of this combination of bringing together healthcare, consumer health, AI together these two things that in theory could really impact somebody's life for the better. But as we're talking about trust, there's also a lot of reservations around AI and the ability to use trusted data and how you're going to use that. And so I just want to hear your take on the AI conversation. Are you using AI at Bayer Consumer Health? And if so, what are some of the examples?

Patricia Corsi: Yes, we are, and I'm happy to give you at least one example to share, but let me just do one step back. And I think this is one of the industries where AI can deliver so much value and impact because one of the things that we haven't discussed a lot is there has been so much hype on so many different technologies in the past 24 months and the ones that are most interesting are the ones where you can understand from concept to impact how it goes, right? And when I thinking about AI and how this massive amount of knowledge and how you can connect creativity with logic with easier scaling can really help us to bring to life a couple of things that we never thought before. So I remember when it was before COVID, so it's four years ago last time I was in China, I went to one of our strategic partners and they already were using AI through cell phones to support people to understand if they had early signs of Alzheimer because the data, the knowledge within the data, according to the time it took for you to do some movements with your cell phone could put you in a ranking between you need to talk to your doctor or there is no risk. At least observe.

Patricia Corsi: So when I look at radiology and I look at some of those things, and I don't work in these areas, but I look at this and I said, oh, this can be transformational how many lives we will preserved because of the accuracy of the machine. So I love that. The thing that I don't love as much about AI is that it's the same thing that happened with machine learning, that happened with the Metaverse, it happened with anything related to technology that people start taking technology first and not what is the technology that is the best one to solve the problems that we have at hand. And this is the approach that we are having at our business, that we are looking at technology in three simple ways. First is how to use technology to optimize daily tasks for productivity. This is very unsexy, right? So this is not something that you look and you say, wow, this is going to be the next Golden Globe Award series in that way. It's not that, but there's a lot of efficiency and productivity.

Patricia Corsi: And again, if we go back to one of the things that are affecting a lot of people that work for us is mental health and workload and this is something that can help there. So for me, actually, I'm super excited about this. The second area is really how do we accelerate the capabilities end-to-end? So when we look at some areas on marketing content generation and then you can go from this to buying media to do value added audiences and really track the creativity and the quality scores on that, I love the possibilities on this. And the last one is how do we transform this into something that build a competitive advantage? And this is one of the things that I'm very excited about that is less about data, but it's more about insights coming from data because this is a technology, AI. The principle is there's a massive amount of data. And where I am very excited about is the data is interesting, but I'm excited about the insights that are actionable that come from this data. And this, I feel very passionate to move forward on some of those.

Patricia Corsi: And to complete the answer for you, where we are using, where we are exploring this at Bayer, so we have a couple of things in place. So in terms of daily productivity, we have through our generic capabilities and partnering with Microsoft, we use co-pilot. And with that, we have a lot of data consolidation in terms of competitive information, financial information, et cetera. When we look at part on marketing content, also we have done tests last year in Germany, one of our biggest countries for content development. We are also partnering with our strategic partners like Google and Oliver to continue to use AI to be more efficient in terms of the production of assets, reducing speed and cost from briefing to assets production.

Kailey Raymond: That's fantastic. I love the way that you laid that out into kind of three different scenarios because you're right, AI can be applied in a lot of different ways to your business. The most impactful today is I agree, I think efficiencies and building workflows for your employees where you're not doing a lot of the groundwork that you had to do previously. Unsexy, but incredibly beneficial for everybody. But the impact that AI can have to take an incredibly large dataset and then pluck out the most interesting to use your word insight from that, I do think is really kind of one of the biggest things. Predictive audiences, you're making sure you understand your cross-sell audiences. So a lot of different ways to be able to leverage it for massive, massive business impacts. On that kind of subject, I'm wondering if you have any examples of the way that data is currently influencing your marketing tactics at Bayer Consumer Health.

Patricia Corsi: We do a lot of things related to data, especially on how can we be better serving the consumer need at a certain point in time. As you can appreciate, we have many categories that are seasonal categories and data plays a massive role in that. In terms of cough and cold, in terms of allergies, these are driven by seasons. So data is a powerful ally to make sure that we are at the right place at the right time serving the right consumer. So this is one thing and some examples that we have on that on how we're using it is and some examples that I love, we have partnered with the weather provider platform in some countries where we can help consumers to understand what's going to be the pollen levels before they get out of home, but also in Egypt, for example, where pollen is not issue but pollution is the issue driving allergies, then we also have partnered with technology platforms to be able to support people to know before they get home, do I need to take a Clarityn or not?

Patricia Corsi: So this is something that we are using from a data point of view. The other thing that we are using data is to help us generate insights on how to improve and be best in class and creativity. We partnered with CreativeX to make sure that we have quality scores for our creativity work as well as Matrix Lab. And this has been really powerful because if we go back to the discussion at the beginning of our chat, there's so much noise around that having creativity that gets you to stock and pay attention to it is one of the most important things because this is the way that we can land an educational message like we did with Vagina Academy or that we can land an innovation that we have with Astepro. So these are the things that we can do, but only if people stop to pay attention to what we are saying.

Kailey Raymond: And somebody who lives in New York who's had some really bad seasonal allergies recently and they planted all male trees in New York so that the fruits wouldn't drop on the sidewalks. And so here I am walking around these streets, these pollen covered streets so I can very much appreciate you using and that partnership they're using to kind of promote a lot of the products and to warn people of when they should be getting Clarityn.

Patricia Corsi: So do you say that you planted male trees?

Kailey Raymond: In New York, the rumor goes that they planted all male trees because they didn't want any fruit to drop on the streets and to have to clean that up.

Patricia Corsi: Yes, this insight comes from us actually. This is one of the campaigns that we want tree Cannes Lions this year that is called DiversiTree. So we found out that in many cities in the US, to keep the cost of cleaning the streets lower, flowers and fruits that they didn't plant a lot of female trees and the poor female trees are the trees that absorb pollen and the male trees are the ones that release pollen. And we see another opportunity in there to close the tree gender gap in the US. And with that, we are going to have less people suffering from allergies for sure.

Kailey Raymond: Patricia, you gave me one of my absolute favorite fun facts of allergy season. So I very much appreciate you for that.

Patricia Corsi: This is what I mean by data and insights. I think this is a great example of that. You have the data about the trees in the US. It's only interesting where you understand what is the repercussion of that and why it's interesting, right? Otherwise, it's just facts not wrapping in the context. This is one of the things that I love the most about how do we use data and how do we leverage it in insights.

Kailey Raymond: That's storytelling. It allows you to really activate it on a human level. That's really what it's all about.

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Kailey Raymond: I'm wondering if you have any brands or people or campaigns examples that you think about when you think about people doing it right as it relates to building great consumer experiences.

Patricia Corsi: So we talked about two, where I have a lot of bias. They kicked pollution, one, and the DiversiTree. But let me talk about some other ones that I really... I was blown away by the use of data and the storytelling on data. One is called Non-Fungible Testicles and it's a fantastic campaign done by Movember where they use NFTs to help men to take care of their health. And I found this fantastic 'cause this is the gamifying prostate care and this was fantastic. Then there is a recent one from Cadbury in India where they had a very famous actor in India which would deliver individual and personalized message to very small... In India, they have very small stores, moms-and-pops all across the country and they managed to use data and each one of their owners would have this personalized message and it was a massive success but also super smart.

Patricia Corsi: And the last one I remember was one that I saw when I was in the Jury for Cannes. It was Spotify and the other thing I love is how different channels are playing to this is. Spotify in Australia partnered with one association that helps people not to have accidents on the road and using GPS data, whenever you are getting close to a place that had a lot of accidents and you are hearing Spotify, Spotify would stop and remind you, be careful in the next bend in the last week, 300 people had an accident. And I thought that was so smart and so simple, and these are the things that really excite me about the future on data and how creativity plays a big role in them.

Kailey Raymond: I love those examples in particular 'cause they really speak to what we were talking about at very beginning of our conversation, which is really knowing your customer and being with them and being empathetic to them in their times of need when they're interested. So I really do think that those are incredible examples of campaigns. I know we just had a long kind of conversation about AI and some of the trends. I'm wondering if there's any trends that you're looking out for in the future. So 12 months from now, are there any things on the horizon as it relates to consumer data and marketing that you're watching out for?

Patricia Corsi: Look, I think privacy remains the point of attention. I worry about it. I also worried about some of those platforms where we are doing text to image and text to video and how it's going to work with the copyrights and intellectual property. I think these are all areas where we have very little information about it and we are... Everyone is moving into trying things and experimenting, which I find that this is what we should be doing. But if I'm being very basic, one of the biggest things that I'm concerned is the cost, the cost of cloud, the cost of acquisition of data. These are things that they are moving, they're growing exponentially. The more data we have, the higher is the cost for clouds. And I want to make sure that if this is the case, then we are extracting the same proportional value out of this data. Otherwise, the return on investment is not the one that we should be having.

Kailey Raymond: That's a great insight and I think it speaks to developing use cases for your data before you decide to collect it and store it forever and for always because at the end of the day, you're right, it can be really expensive to do that. And so you need to know exactly how you're going to take and to the point that we just made, action your data into interesting campaigns, programs, what have you. Last question for you today, Patricia, is do you have any steps or recommendations for somebody that would be looking to uplevel their customer experience strategies?

Patricia Corsi: Yes, but it's not going to be sexy or mind-blowing, so bear with me. And it's very simple. Focus on what helps consumer and customers, better experience either frictionless, easier. Make it simple with value added to buyer or brands to find them and then make sure that when they're using your product, you deliver against those promises. So zero glamour, zero theoretical things. It's all in the implementation and understanding of the consumer, doing something about it and making sure that what you deliver is in line with what you have promised. And you can do it in creative ways, different channels and et cetera. But if you do all the other things well, AI, machine learning, metaverse, everything else well, but you don't do this, I find it very difficult to be successful with the consumer and customer.

Kailey Raymond: It's simple advice, but it's something that can be really hard to follow, which is really just listening to your customers and making sure that you're meeting their expectations. I love that. Patricia, thank you so much for being here. It was a pleasure getting to know you and learning from you.

Patricia Corsi: It's my pleasure. Really enjoyed the conversation. Sometimes I feel like we could have stayed here discussing this for hours. Thank you.

Kailey Raymond: I agree.