Situation Analysis
Women are more likely to develop bunions than men, which can be painful and interfere with walking and exercising. But truth is, women tend to prioritize taking care of others over taking care of their own health. To make matters worse, there’s a perception that bunion surgery is painful with a long recovery time.
Treace Medical Concepts offers women an alternative, Lapiplasty®, which allows most patients to get back to their active lifestyle quickly. We needed to understand why our audience, women over 40, were choosing to suffer for years with painful bunions instead of getting them fixed. So, we dug deeper.
Turns out, women didn’t think the recovery associated with surgery was worth the reward of fixing it. So they’d avoid surgery until the pain was unbearable. For many sufferers, particularly women, taking care of others is a badge of honor, while needing help themselves (ex: recovery) is internalized as “being a burden; ”regardless of how much the bunion is a burden on them.
Campaign Objectives
Research/Planning
Based on extensive qualitative and quantitative research to understand our target, we learned that many women think bunion surgery is like “their grandma’s bunion surgery” of the past - where the bone was shaved off, recovery was extremely painful, and oftentimes, the bunion would come back. So, to them, it wasn’t worth the pain or the time it took to recover.
But that’s not the case with Lapiplasty®, a modern approach to surgery that corrects the problem from the source and gets you back in sneakers in weeks.
We spoke to surgeons and podiatrists to learn what women were saying in their practice and learned that women weren’t fixing their feet because the recovery didn’t seem worth the reward. And our target audience had lots of competing priorities, like family, jobs, kids—they couldn’t be off their feet for the amount of time surgeries of old required to heal and they rarely put their own needs first. So, they’d wait until the pain was unbearable.
Target Audience
Women over 40, as they are the most likely to have painful bunions that need to be treated.
Strategic Insight
For many bunion sufferers, particularly women, taking care of others is a badge of honor, while needing help themselves (ex: recovery) is internalized as “being a burden”, regardless of how much the bunion is a burden on them. Add to that the fear of surgery and long recovery times. It meant our audience would wait until the pain was unbearable to do anything about it. Bottom line—women in their 40s take care of everyone else but themselves, so they don’t even think a future without bunions is possible. We set out to show them that a future without bunions is possible, because it’s nothing like surgeries of the past.
Execution
Our Future You campaign shows bunion sufferers something they never imagined possible: a future without bunions. And this future could be theirs, within weeks.
Since Lapiplasty® is a modern surgery that’s unlike bunion surgeries of the past, we wanted the campaign to feel equally different in the space—a representation of the magic of what it means to get a future you never thought possible (a future without the pain and recovery times of old).
So, we brought in some magic, giving our audience a literal glimpse of the transformation that could be them with Lapiplasty. Problem is, Lapiplasty is a tough word to say, let alone remember. So, we created a campaign that didn’t shy away from the word. Instead, we turned it into a sonic branding element that when whispered, conjures a Future You—without bunions. We even have a trusted voice (surgeon) appear to deliver the key brand line: getting you back in sneakers in weeks.
The campaign features TV, social, and digital ads designed to elevate education and engagement among patients who suffer from lifestyle-limiting bunion pain. The commercial first aired on the finale of “The Bachelor” TV show after he admitted to having bunions.
Since the launch of the campaign, there has been a 475% increase in traffic to Lapiplasty.com and a 623% increase in new surgery inquiries online
