Marketing to health care professionals: The challenges and opportunities

At the recent SupplySide West, Stephen Daniells caught up with Laura Troha, marketing manager for Cognis Nutrition & Health, and Corey Jansen, associate product manager from Kemin Health about the opportunities in engaging health care professionals.

Both Kemin and Cognis have extended this and are engaging health care professionals like eye doctors for Kemin’s FloraGlo lutein and cardiologists for Cognis’ Heart Choice plant sterols.

“Our message has been about the science – we want to make sure that doctors out there are aware of the science about lutein, and make sure they understand that there are essential nutrients for the eye, lutein being one of them,”​ said Jansen.

“Health care professionals are great ambassadors for our messages and consumers of course look to their physicians to give them all the information, not just from a pharmaceutical perspective but also from natural alternatives,”​ said Troha.

But could such an approach be rolled out to other ingredients? “It really does come down to credibility,”​ said Troha. “You would not expect a health care professional to promote a product where there isn’t a lot of science. To open up this sort of program, where you’re reaching directly to practitioners, wouldn’t make sense for some ingredients.”​

“A certain level of science is required in order to be successful,”​ said Jansen. “I think certainly other ingredients could look to apply this approach, but one of things we have learnt from working with eye doctors is that they want to see the science and the clinical trials.”​