What every healthcare marketer should know about TikTok

(and maybe slot machines too)

Let's face it, many of us (well the younger amongst us anyway) have been guilty of wasting too much time on TikTok. Although It only takes a little time to watch a 15-second video, there is always just one more to watch… and then another one. The next thing you know, you have just blown another afternoon. So, while it is all very entertaining, it can sometimes feel a little bit too addictive.

Even though a few brave healthcare professionals have been putting themselves out there on TikTok, this is not what we want to talk about. TikTok is a great example of how our brains can be hacked to influence behaviour. This is what healthcare marketers should be thinking about…

@dr.tommymartin There is nothing wrong with any child with delays #fyp ♬ original sound - Lucia 🌙

Dopamine – The Brain’s Reward System

Forbes referred to TikTok as "digital crack cocaine for your brain" (Koetsie 2022). According to this 2020 article, the app is so popular because it functions like a narcotic that our brains continually crave. Dr. Julie Albright of USC said, "When you're scrolling, sometimes you see a photo or anything that's delightful and it grabs your interest…your brain's pleasure center experiences that tiny dopamine boost. As a result, you want to scroll further.” According to the theory behind TikTok Brain, your brain grows reliant on the app to maintain the dopamine rush it needs.

Video games and slot machines take this a step further by making the rewards variable. This even further turns up the dopamine hit. The uncertainty of the dopamine reward can make it even more addictive. This is a key reason why slot machine players keep playing even when they are losing; they are continually looking for the dopamine surge that victory produces (Nelson 2020).

So what's in it for healthcare marketers?

Savvy healthcare marketers are beginning to tap into this idea of variable reward to deliver better health outcomes. 

Poor medication adherence is a long-standing concern for many healthcare professionals. Utilizing variable rewards has been shown to improve patient compliance. In one retrospective study from Cass et al. (2005), inexpensive incentives were offered to children receiving latent TB treatment at a public clinic. Children were given a calendar for the coming month together with a pack of stickers (one per day). Children who returned the following month with a calendar that had one sticker affixed for each day were allowed to select a small toy from a “Treasure Chest.” This combines both a dopamine hit from the incentive as well as a hit from the variable nature of having a ‘Treasure Chest’ to choose from. The treatment completion rate was shown to be significantly higher when the incentive intervention was in place (91.6%) compared to when the clinic did not offer incentives (82.3%).

Key takeaway

In healthcare, we often use incentives as part of delivering better health outcomes. We should not only think about what are appropriate incentives but further increase the dopamine by delivering different incentives over time.

At DeltaMV, we have been working with a range of healthcare clients on not only developing ethical incentives but also ways to make these more variable.

For example, in some of our work on changing diabetic patients’ lifestyles, we advised clients to not only use a range of app-based incentives to support behaviour change but also ways incentives could fluctuate. One idea was about having ‘double-point’ days where incentives were doubled randomly.

With prescribers, the incentive is often about seeing positive healthcare outcomes for their patients. We have worked with several clients on how prescribing habits can be built through ensuring regular feedback of positive patient outcomes. The reality of treatment means that these are often variable in nature.

Get in touch to learn more about the psychology of behaviour change for both healthcare professionals as well as patients.

WORK CITED:

Andrew DeLeeuwDeltaMV