She leaned forward and looked me in the eye. “You have to decide who you want to be. Do you really want to be the couch people?”
Having spent six months interviewing public relations and marketing professionals and firms who worked with non-profit organizations and mental health professions, I knew I was talking to the best in the business. Her comments struck me with the clarifying sting of an unwanted, but much needed, interpretation. “We can't help you until your organization decides who it wants to be,” she said. It reminded me of the clear advice I had received at the start of this project from the American Association of Public Relations Professionals' public relations professional of the year. “Before you do anything,” she had said, “your organization has to determine its message.”
What is our message? Our most typical public response as an organization is to defend Freud from his critics. Our most frequent descriptions of ourselves involve our use of the couch, free association, and dreams, with references to the unconscious mind. All of these are, of course, meaningful primarily to those already familiar with psychoanalysis. How do we respond to a busy legislator who asks who we are as he looks at his watch, or a reporter who needs a two- or three-sentence quote about psychoanalysis? How do we put the essence of the psychoanalytic experience into words for the suffering person seeking help?
First of all, not all of us are comfortable with the thought of marketing or using marketing professionals or marketing techniques. During recent focus groups conducted within the American, one out of ten members expressed distaste for the very word “marketing.” One member said, “I think getting involved in promotion and marketing puts us in the position of being salespeople.” Others suggested we might use the term “public education” to describe our project in a more tasteful manner. As one participant stated, “The challenge is to create public relations without making us superficial.”
The problem, however, is that our anti-marketing is a form of marketing. As one focus group participant remarked, “We are all marketing, even though we don't like to call it that.” In this case, what we market is our attitude. What to us is professionalism, to others is elitism.
The results of not paying attention to our “marketing” fall into two major categories. The first, which was repeated in various forms by the majority of focus group participants, is that the public suffers. As one person said, “There are people out there who are hurting and are afraid to come to us. They may not know that we are the best people to help them. They are afraid for lots of reasons. They need us to help them put aside some of their misconceptions.”
The second consequence of not marketing ourselves should not be surprising. Psychoanalysis, if it exists at all in the mind of the public, exists as a third-rate mental health profession. We were alarmed when psychoanalysis was defined in recent legislation in New York and New Jersey as a profession with lower standards than psychiatry, psychology, social work, and in some cases counseling, the clergy, and marriage counseling. We credit our enemies with these developments. However, most of our members would be surprised to learn that in major public opinion research, when the public is asked to list the most helpful mental health professions, psychiatry, psychology, social work, counseling, marriage counseling, and the clergy are all mentioned before psychoanalysis. We have been marketing ourselves, but until now we haven't paid any attention to our message.
Fortunately, our attitudes are changing. As seen in the focus groups, most of our members now feel that learning how to communicate with the public is critical to the future of psychoanalysis. As one participant put it, “If the press is going to be writing about us, we may as well have a hand in shaping the message.”
At the Annual Meeting in Chicago last May, we conducted six focus groups representing constituencies of members within the American: the Council, the Board, the foundation, the affiliates, the psychotherapy associates, and the child analytic members. The purpose of the focus groups was to determine what our members feel are the messages to be marketed in our public relations efforts. In other words, “What do we want others, in particular potential patients, to know about us?” We are in the process of analyzing the data.
Concurrent with the focus group effort to define our messages, the Public Information Committee has been working with the Committee on Psychoanalytic Practice to construct a membership survey, which you may have already received. We are asking our members, in effect, “What are the pathways by which patients find you?” [See box, this page.]
It is critical that you complete this survey. It will provide key information in defining the markets for which we will later polish and fine-tune our messages. This survey has been carefully and thoughtfully designed to provide as much information as possible but take as little of your time as possible. We appreciate your time in helping us.
By the fall we will have collected critical information on our messages and our markets.
Glenn E. Good, Ph.D., is on the faculty of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute and of Wayne State University School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry. He is co-chair of the APsaA's Public Information Committee and chair of the Strategic Marketing Subcommittee.
It will be necessary to conduct some market research on the specific targeted markets in order to fine-tune our messages to make them user-friendly. Professionals will need to test variations of the messages that we are attempting to communicate on focus group samples of the populations we are hoping to reach. This is critical if we wish our public relations efforts to accomplish our goals.
The final phase of the strategic marketing plan is the training of the Local Public Information Network. Members of each local society will be trained and educated at our Annual Meeting in May 2001 on the marketing and promotion of psychoanalysis. Each society will then have individuals who know not only how to talk to the media and the press about psychoanalysis but also what messages are helpful and what messages are not.
We have been marketing ourselves through our actions, attitudes, and silence. We will serve everyone much better by thoughtfully putting our message into words.