What Marketing Gets Right That Mental Health Care Still Misses
Marketing figured out something about human beings that medicine is still catching up to: if you want to reach people, you have to speak their culture.
Recently, I was at a conference in Atlanta. I have always wanted to visit the city. As a big rap fan, Atlanta has always had a certain mythic status in my mind, so going there for work was even more exciting.
On the way to my hotel, I was struck by something very simple. Looking out the Uber window, every billboard felt unmistakably “Atlanta.” Clothing brands, sports betting apps, financial services, all of them were speaking the local language. Some were referencing rap, some So So Def, some small pieces of local culture you would only really understand if you lived there or followed the music.
It reminded me of something we easily forget when we stay in our own bubble. Good marketing never talks to a generic “consumer.” It talks to a specific person, in a specific place, with a specific history and culture. It takes their world seriously.
As I watched those ads, I realized what they were doing very well. They were not just selling products. They were making people feel something. They were creating a sense of “this is for us.”
Of course, being in Atlanta, I had to visit the Coca Cola museum. That is where the lesson really crystallized. Beyond the famous “secret recipe” story, what struck me most was how skillfully Coca Cola adapts its product to local tastes around the world. The core brand is the same, but the flavor, the campaigns, the positioning are constantly tuned to culture and context.
Medicine, and especially mental health care, often does not work that way.
A large part of being a healer is persuasion. Not in the manipulative sense, but in the sense of helping people see possibilities they did not see before, helping them feel safe enough to try something new. One book that profoundly changed my thinking around this is Persuasion and Healing: A Comparative Study of Psychotherapy by Dr. Jerome Frank. It frames psychotherapy as a kind of meaning-making and persuasive enterprise, grounded in the patient’s world.
That is where I think we, in mental health, still have a lot to learn from marketing. Not about “branding” ourselves, but about taking culture seriously. About understanding that treatment, to be effective, must feel like “this is for me” to the person sitting across from us.
If we truly want to be patient centered, we need to be culture centered. We need to understand people’s stories, their background, their communities, their symbols, their references. Their context is not decoration, it is the soil in which any therapeutic work has to grow.
This becomes even more urgent when we think about what is coming next. There is an entire generation growing up in a digital culture where social media, influencers, meme coins and online communities are not “add-ons,” they are central parts of identity. As a psychiatrist, I know I will increasingly be caring for people whose deepest experiences, stresses and aspirations are intertwined with that digital world.
If we ignore that culture, how can we hope to really reach them?
Now here is the paradox in my own life. People who know me know how strict I am about my relationship with social media. I do not use Facebook, Instagram or Twitter anymore. I used to, but at some point I made a conscious decision to live a more intentional and present life.
The one platform I chose to keep is LinkedIn, because I genuinely enjoy staying connected to my field, learning from colleagues and reading thoughtful perspectives. But stepping away from other platforms also means I am more distant from the front lines of digital culture. That is an interesting tension for me as a clinician who still wants to understand the worlds my patients inhabit.
So I am curious, especially for those of you who practice in mental health or medicine:
How do you intentionally connect with your patients’ culture, including digital culture, in your daily work, and what have you found actually makes a difference in building trust and engagement?
