The S-Word

After more than 25 years in healthcare brand strategy, marketing, communications, and consumer experience leadership roles, there's one thing I've seen come up again and again: simplicity. Or the lack thereof.

Nearly everyone agrees that complexity is one of the two biggest pain points for American healthcare consumers (the other being cost). Despite being a named enemy, it remains a pervasive challenge. PwC's 2025 consumer survey found that 51% of Americans believe the healthcare system is fundamentally broken. Anyone who's filled out the same intake form in the waiting room, then had to explain the same symptoms to a nurse, and then again to the doctor once they're finally in the room, knows exactly where that sentiment is coming from.

Now for one of my biggest pet peeves: brands that use simplicity as a marketing angle.

Why healthcare brands can't market their way out of complexity

I've rejected campaign pitches built around this idea more times than I can count, on both sides of the table. As a client, I've sent agency creatives back to the drawing board when simple or easy became the centerpiece of a campaign concept. As a consultant, I've had to tell clients that the simplicity story they wanted to tell wasn't one their brand had earned yet. Either way, the conversation tends to go the same direction: you can't market your way out of a bad product experience.

And delivering on simplicity isn't a matter of writing the right tagline. It requires real investment: customer journey mapping, primary research with actual patients and members, segmentation analysis, and experience design that's built around how people actually move through the system, not how an org chart assumes they do. If you haven't made those investments and done the work, don't position your brand on simplicity.

Even for the businesses that do this work — and it's not as common as it should be — simplicity and ease should be table stakes, not a differentiator. It's not consumers' fault that healthcare has lagged every other industry in consumer experience. Their expectations are shaped by every interaction they have, in every category, every day. Online shopping, streaming entertainment, hotels and travel, food delivery. These experiences set the bar. Even banking got its act together years ago, so healthcare doesn't get to claim subject-matter or regulatory complexity as an insurmountable excuse.

The data backs this up. Invoca's 2026 healthcare consumer research found that healthcare buyers are more likely to abandon a call after being placed on hold than the cross-industry average (83% versus 75%), and more likely to defect over a slow response (85% versus 79%). Healthcare consumers hold the industry to the same standard as everything else in their lives, if not a higher one.

Customer expectations are built from the totality of people's experiences, not just their experiences in healthcare. Advertising around simplicity, at this point in history, is a lot like a hotel bragging about Wi-Fi or a movie theater advertising its popcorn. It's a point of parity. Or at least it should be.

So where does that leave healthcare brands?

Simplicity is a must-have, but it belongs in the foundational work — the consumer experience itself, not in the advertising. If you've done the work to genuinely simplify how people access, understand, and pay for care, that should show up in how the experience actually feels, not in a tagline claiming it does. Brands that get this right earn trust through delivery, and trust compounds. Brands that lead with the claim and fall short risk something bigger than a missed differentiation; in a sector where 39% of consumers say they're likely to stop doing business after a single bad experience, the gap between promise and reality becomes the story people remember. Simplicity is vital to the brand health of a healthcare business. It deserves more than an ad campaign.

And so do healthcare consumers.