Mhari Coxon

Strategic Marketing

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About Mhari

  • Mastering B2B2C Healthcare Marketing: Why the Complexity is Your Competitive Advantage

    In healthcare, nothing works in straight lines.

    Unlike traditional B2C, where brand, message and purchase path flow predictably, not linear but in a flow, B2B2C healthcare marketing operates inside a multi-layered ecosystem: patients, clinicians, payers, retailers, regulators, procurement teams and influencers all shape the final decision. Think spaghetti vs McKinsey Models.

    Having spent more than a decade building B2B2C strategies across global oral health, dermatology, smoking cessation and other OTC and Rx healthcare services portfolios, I’ve learned that success doesn’t come from simplifying the complexity. It comes from leveraging it.

    The Power of Multi-Audience Alignment

    In my early days building HCP engagement models for global brands at Philips and GSK Consumer Health, one lesson became clear:

    HCPs don’t replace consumer insight they enhance it. When I built global strategies for health brands, the breakthrough came from integrating three things:

    Clinical science, Human behaviour and Retail activation.

    HCP endorsement alone doesn’t drive category penetration. HCP endorsement combined with insight-driven consumer activation does. And the HCP values that insight as much as the evidence as almost all healthcare marketing is aligned to their outcomes of behaviour change.

    Multi-audience triangulation is the core of effective B2B2C.

    Human Benefit, Not Just Clinical Benefit

    One of the biggest shifts during my time at Johnson & Johnson was re-framing healthcare communication around human outcomes, not just functional claims.

    Take Listerine as an example. Consumers don’t buy “gingival health improvement.” They buy confidence, comfort, relief, control, normality.

    HCPs don’t recommend products based on marketing messages. They recommend them based on evidence, clarity and patient adherence potential.

    Retailers don’t activate categories because they’re passionate about oral health. They activate categories because they see incremental value, conversion potential and customer demand.

    For Nicorette it was even more complex, creating cost modeling for procurement, prescribing belief for GPs, and normalising failure as part of the road to quit for the patients. It was key all these stories worked for their audience but also complemented each other. Grounding this in patient outocmes and real life impact was the thread that saw us grow market share by 26% in our NHS prescribing.

    B2B2C marketing requires speaking all the audiences languages without losing coherence – something far too many brands overlook.

    B2B2C Journeys Must Be Designed, Not Assumed

    The learnings from my healthcare days are transferable.

    When I led customer-journey transformation at Sureserve, the impact came from mapping the entire chain -from awareness, to partner influence, to client and resident emotion, to digital conversion. Of mapping the complexity of audiences that influence the decision, CEO, Procurement, Facility management, Redsidents.

    We discovered:

    💡Friction points in service explanations

    💡Opportunities for personalised segmentation

    💡Digital hand-offs that needed to be automated

    💡Stakeholders who weren’t aligned to the same “why”

    With this clarity, growth accelerated:

    ⬆️Double digit growth in year 1 and 2

    ⬆️ x50 increase in MQLs

    ⬆️10% month-on-month engagement growth

    This wasn’t because we ran better marketing.

    It was because we designed a connected ecosystem, not a set of disconnected tactics. We designed customer journeys around end user benefit.

    Digital Transformation is a Human Transformation

    At both GSK and J&J digital transformation wasn’t about tools – it was about behaviours.

    When we transitioned a 1,000-strong HCP field team to remote detailing across global markets at the start of COVID, adoption only worked because we aligned:

    Capability

    Incentives

    Messaging

    Insight

    Content

    Technology

    Digital transformation fails when organisations assume technology alone creates change. It succeeds when teams understand why it matters, who it helps and how it elevates decision-making. Product owners need their business owner to bring the why to life.

    B2B2C Success Comes from Shared Value, Not Noise

    Every audience in the ecosystem must win:

    🏆The HCP gains clinical clarity

    🏆The partner organisation gains revenue and better patient outcomes

    🏆The consumer gains confidence and control

    🏆The brand gains trust and category momentum

    The most effective B2B2C health strategies don’t push through channels. They design value that flows across the ecosystem.

    This interconnected value creation is where brands transition from healthcare products to health solutions.

    The Future of B2B2C Healthcare Marketing

    As AI, digital personalisation and integrated care continue to evolve, B2B2C will become even more influential.

    Brands that thrive will be those who:

    ✅️Build cross-audience insight loops

    ✅️Activate journeys, not channels

    ✅️Elevate clinical truth with human storytelling

    ✅️Digitise intelligently (not excessively)

    ✅️Measure outcomes that matter to patients and clinicians

    ✅️Develop teams that can navigate complexity with confidence – adopt agile methods

    In B2B2C healthcare, complexity isn’t a barrier. It’s a competitive advantage. If you know how to use it.

  • Why Every Executive Needs Mentoring and Every Mentor Needs Supervision

    In today’s fast-moving business environment, the most successful leaders aren’t those who operate alone, they’re those who actively seek meaningful challenge, reflection, and strategic support.

    Your business can’t afford to have you siloed in your thinking.

    Mentoring at an executive level isn’t a sign of weakness; it is a hallmark of ambition, resilience, and high performance.Those with growth mindset and true leadership understand the need to keep working on team and self to stay high performing. Executives are often solo and need peers and a mentor to reflect with and plan through a business me tor relationship.

    I am an ILM Agile and Reflective Business Mentor practitioner, currently completing my level 7 executive level qualification as I type, so I would say you need me right?!

    Below is an evidence-backed exploration of why mentoring accelerates leadership impact, and why experienced mentors themselves need high-quality supervision.

    The Evidence-Based Business Case for Executive Mentoring

    1. Mentoring drives measurable career advancement and innovation

    Meta-analytic research demonstrates that mentored leaders experience higher career success, promotion rates, and creative problem solving than non-mentored peers.

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222967738

    2. Organisational performance, productivity and retention improve

    A Human Edge white paper reports that when mentoring supplements formal learning, managerial productivity increases by 88% compared with only 24% through training alone.

    A further study illustrate that mentoring strengthens employee retention and leadership pipeline stability.

    The importance of mentoring in the workplace 

    Click to access Thrive-Evaluation-Report-March-2025.pdf

    3. Engagement, purpose and wellbeing increase for both mentees and mentors

    CIPD findings show that mentoring enhances work engagement, purpose, and job satisfaction, benefits experienced not only by mentees but also by mentors themselves.

    https://www.cipd.org/en/knowledge/bitesize-research/mentoring-work-engagement/

    4. Mentoring Drives Growth, Well-being, and Capacity

    According to recent research by the Association of Business Mentors (ABM), mentoring produces substantial benefits for business leaders and their organisations:63% of executives said mentoring helped them increase headcount. 70% reported improved mental health and confidence. 72% saw better work-life balance. These results make it clear: mentoring supports both tangible business growth and the personal well-being of leadership.

    Workplace mentoring and coaching essential to boosting performance, retention, and wellbeing, ABM research shows

    What This Means for Senior Leaders

    Key Benefits of Mentoring:

    🏹Sharper strategic thinking and accelerated decision-making.

    💪Greater leadership resilience and confidence under pressure.

    🧠Improved talent development and stronger succession planning.

    ❤️Enhanced organisational culture and greater loyalty.

    💭Structured space for reflection outside the constraints of boardroom conversations.

    Evidence-Based Tips for Executives Seeking Mentoring

    Define clear goals:

    📈Align your mentoring with measurable strategic outcomes.

    Choose a mentor with altitude:

    🌎Select someone with senior-level insight and political awareness.

    Commit to structure:

    📆Evidence shows disciplined cadence improves ROI.

    Evaluate regularly:

    📊Measure progress using feedback, KPIs, and reflective tools.

    Prioritise supervision:

    🤝Senior mentors who use supervision achieve more consistent and ethical outcomes.

    Why Expert Mentors Need Supervision

    Supervision is a vital reflective practice that keeps experienced mentors operating at the highest standard.

    It provides:

    🤫A confidential space to process complex client dynamics

    👁Protection against blind spots, bias, or over-identification

    ⚖️Ethical grounding for sensitive, high-stakes conversations

    💪Emotional resilience and burnout prevention

    📖A model of continuous learning which is essential for every leader

    Evidence indicates that supervision strengthens both mentoring outcomes and mentor wellbeing.

    How mentor supervision can give you the best mentors

    Final Thoughts

    Mentoring is a strategic advantage for senior leaders.

    For today’s executive, mentoring is not an afterthought, it is a high-leverage leadership tool. When paired with structured supervision, mentoring becomes a sustainable source of influence, creativity, and organisational impact.

    If you are serious about your legacy, your growth, and your impact, investing in mentoring, both as a mentee and as a supervised mentor, is one of the smartest decisions you can make.

    It accelerates performance, strengthens resilience, and provides the clarity required to lead in volatile, fast-evolving environments.

    For mentors, supervision ensures that your impact remains sharp, ethical and deeply effective.

    Whether you are seeking mentoring or offering it, the combination of evidence-based practice and reflective support is the hallmark of exceptional leadership.

  • How I Borrowed from B2C to Work in B2B (and Won)

    The best B2B marketing is human. Storytelling, segmentation, and customer experience are no longer optional they’re the edge.

    For years, B2B organisations, and recruitment in them, insisted they were different. “Our buyers are rational.” “Purchase decisions are logical.” “We don’t need brand we need leads.”

    And for years, many of those same organisations underperformed, commoditised themselves, or struggled to differentiate in increasingly competitive markets.

    The truth?

    B2B buyers are still people. They’re influenced by emotion, narrative, trust, and perceived value just as much as B2C consumers.

    Having worked in FMCG I naturally borrowed from our best in class B2C procrsses. And it worked.

    And it keeps working.

    Here is how I apply consumer marketing principles and transformed performance, improved positioning, and helped build brand preference in a space where most competitors still relied on product sheets and sales decks.

    I Prioritised Storytelling Over Specs

    B2C has always known that emotion drives memory and memory drives preference. In B2B, brands often default to features, technical diagrams, and rational arguments. These are important hygiene factors. But senior decision-makers aren’t reading datasheets on Sunday mornings. They’re looking for clarity, confidence, and direction. Maybe even inspiration.

    So I crafted a strategic narrative:

    👁What change is happening in the market?

    💭Why are customers struggling?

    🧠What role can we play in solving that?

    The result: clearer messaging, faster internal alignment, and a brand story that actually connected.

    TOP TIP – Build your vision and reason to win around people not products. Products will change but the benefit you bring to people stays.

    I Treated Segmentation Like a Profit Centre

    Most B2B segmentation is demographic: industry, company size, maybe revenue. It’s limiting. B2C has long used behavioural and psychographic segmentation to understand motivation and value. I have applied the same techniques many times and this works particularly well in healthcare product marketing.

    💭What triggers action?

    💭Who is risk-averse vs. innovation-led?

    💭Who thinks long-term vs. short-term?

    💭Who buys based on performance vs. partnership?

    This helped us tailor content, restructure value propositions, and ultimately improve ROI because we were speaking to what customers actually cared about.

    I Shifted Focus from Funnels to Experiences

    Funnels are useful, but B2C brands win by managing the end-to-end experience — not just top-of-funnel volume. Marketing must own the end to end customer journey. So I mapped the customer journey like a service designer:

    💡Moments of truth

    💡Moments that matter

    💡Friction points

    💡Cross-functional blind spots

    💡Emotional high and low points

    To win you need aligned sales, product, onboarding, and customer success around a shared experience vision.

    The impact? Shorter sales cycles, higher conversion rates, and dramatically stronger advocacy

    I Built a Brand With Memory Structures

    B2C is the master of mental availability repeated cues, distinctive assets, visual consistency. B2B often changes its look-and-feel every campaign. Data driven focuses on fatigue. The click through dropping. This forgets that only 10% at most of your audience is ready to convert at point of Marketing.

    We introduced:

    ✅️Distinctive brand assets

    ✅️Clear visual identity

    ✅️A tone of voice with character

    ✅️A brand heart

    ✅️Category entry points designed to trigger recall

    We became recognisable — and in crowded B2B markets, recognisable is half the battle. At Sureserve we gained +5% on our competitors in brand saliency just by, well, behaving like a brand.

    I Measured Like a B2C Marketer

    Instead of asking “How many leads?” (don’t worry, I still love leads) I asked:

    ❓️What’s our share of voice?

    ❓️What’s our brand preference growth?

    ❓️How does customer behaviour change after exposure?

    ❓️Which segments drive profit, not just volume?

    B2C taught me that marketing isn’t just a cost centre. It’s an engine of commercial value.

    Key Takeaways

    🎯Human-centric marketing wins even (especially) in B2B.

    🎯Story beats specs when you’re trying to land a message that sticks.

    🎯Segmentation must go deeper than industry and job title.

    🎯Experience design is the new competitive advantage in complex buying journeys.

    🎯Brand matters more than ever because it shortcuts complexity.

    Borrowing from B2C is not a risk. It’s a strategic accelerator. You can’t afford not to.

    If B2B wants to keep up with the pace of change, to stand out in anlish world, to win saliency and not just scrabble at the end of funnel with the others, it has to think like B2C: human-first, insight-led, and experience-driven.

    That’s where the wins happen and where the next generation of category leaders will be built.

  • Combining data with emotion for success

    Yes, data drives decisions, but emotion drives purchase. The magic happens where the two meet. The best B2B marketing is human.

    Storytelling, segmentation, and customer experience are no longer optional, they’re the edge.

    Where Human Truth Meets Hard Evidence: The New Standard of Effective Marketing

    For years, B2B marketing has operated in extremes.

    On one side: data, attribution, forecasting, dashboards, funnels, and efficiency. On the other: creativity, narrative, brand building, and emotion.

    The truth? High-performing marketing sits squarely in the middle.The most commercially impactful campaigns combine real-life evidence with human benefit, proof and emotion working together to influence decision making.

    Today’s buyers/procurers don’t just want to understand your value; they want to feel it.

    Why Human Benefit Matters More Than Ever

    In saturated markets, features blur into one another. Technology stacks look the same. Service models converge. Competitors close in.What stands out is why it matters. Matters to the people behind the buying decision. Even in B2B, your audience isn’t a company.

    It’s:

    👧A Head of Operations avoiding risk

    🧔A Marketing Director under pressure to show ROI

    👩‍🦰A CTO trying to justify investment to the board

    👩‍🦳A Procurement lead trying to simplify complexity

    Their motivations are deeply human: confidence, clarity, reassurance, credibility, trust. Trust is key.

    When brands speak to those underlying drivers, results follow.

    Where Real-Life Evidence Elevates the Story

    Emotion opens the door and evidence closes the sale.

    Real-world proof transforms marketing from lofty narrative to credible commercial impact. Evidence can include:

    ✅️Customer stories that clearly articulate transformation

    ✅️Before-and-after operational impact

    ✅️Quantified business outcomes

    ✅️Independent third-party validation

    ✅️Behavioural insights and real customer language

    This is not “data for the sake of data.” This is data that makes the customer feel understood, supported, and confident. When evidence is delivered through human-centred storytelling, it becomes more than a statistic.

    It becomes a reason to believe.

    The Power of Blending Both

    When you combine emotion and evidence, you create marketing that does three things:

    1. Builds trust quickly

    Buyers see themselves in your narrative and trust grows through relatable proof.

    2. Differentiates meaningfully

    You’re not just saying what you do; you’re showing why it matters.

    3. Accelerates decision-making

    Human benefit provides relevance. Data provides justification. Together, they reduce friction.

    This blend moves your brand from simply being known to being in the salient pool and ultimately chosen.

    How to Build Campaigns That Win Hearts and Minds

    1. Start with human insight, not data pointsBefore you write a line of copy or build a dashboard, ask:

    👩‍🦰What friction is the customer experiencing today?

    🧔What are they trying to protect, achieve, or simplify?

    👧What emotion is driving their behaviour?

    Data helps you validate these answers but the conversation begins with empathy.

    2. Use evidence that proves progress, not perfection

    The most compelling proof points are simple, specific, and relatable:

    🎯 Cut processing time from 10 days to 2

    🎯 Reduced onboarding by 37%.

    🎯 Increased customer satisfaction by 22 points.

    🎯 People buy progress, not promises.

    💡 Craft narratives that frame the benefit, not the feature

    Tell them the why

    Strong campaigns don’t start with product capability. They start with the human tension the product resolves.

    Example:

    ❌️ Our platform automates compliance workflows.

    ✅️ Your team gets 30 hours a month back and compliance becomes something no one has to dread.

    Design experiences that let customers see themselves in the story

    Whether through case studies, video testimonials, interactive tools, or segment-led journeys, make the customer the protagonist, not the audience.

    Let your segmentation speak to motivations, not job titles

    Many segmentation models stop at industry and seniority.

    The ones that perform best map to: Behavior | Mindset | Maturity stage | Barriers |Triggers

    Key Takeaways for Senior Marketers

    Emotion drives action; data drives confidence. You need both.

    Human benefit is the most powerful differentiator in saturated B2B markets. Real-life evidence transforms good storytelling into credible, actionable marketing. The brands winning today focus on empathy, proof, and experience not campaigns in isolation.

    True commercial impact happens when marketing speaks to both the head and the heart.

    Some Further Reading & Useful Links

    If you enjoyed this blog then these resources dive deeper into the intersection of emotion, evidence, and modern B2B marketing:

    Harvard Business Review – “The New Science of Customer Emotions https://hbr.org/2015/11/the-new-science-of-customer-emotions

    LinkedIn B2B Institute – The 95-5 Rule & Long-Term Brand Growth https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/b2b-institute

    Ehrenberg-Bass Institute – “How Brands Grow” insights https://www.marketingscience.info/how-brands-grow/

    Google Think with Google – Behaviour and decision-making insights https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/

    Bain & Company – Customer Experience and loyalty research https://www.bain.com/insights/

    Let me know what you think

  • The Power of a Customer Journey led strategy

    Mapping the customer journey isn’t just a UX task, more it’s a strategic blueprint for growth. Here’s how I’ve used journey design and data led insight to uncover new revenue.

    From Screens to Strategy – Rethinking the journey

    Too often, organisations start journey maps as a “sticky note” exercise — a visual of screens, stages, and emotions that ends up buried in a design folder.

    Useful, yes, but not transformative.

    When done right, journey mapping becomes a hypothesis engine: a way to find where customers leak value, where friction drives churn, and where interventions can compound into measurable growth.

    At a senior level, this shift in perspective changes everything. You stop optimising for surface-level experience and start optimising for commercial outcomes — customer lifetime value (CLV), acquisition efficiency, and retention margin.

    The most successful customer experience models I have created have utilised deep human insight to create, then hard data to refine and grow.

    Data Is the Mapmaker

    To truly understand the journey, you need evidence not assumption.The richest insights come from blending data across the full ecosystem:

    Behavioural data: website events, app usage, and digital signals that show what customers do.

    Transactional data: CRM, sales, and order histories showing how they spend.

    Feedback data: NPS (or other, NPS is flawed but still commonly used), service transcripts, and reviews that reveal why they act.

    Campaign data: media impressions, ad logs, and email metrics that show how we reach them.

    Individually, these are fragments. Together, they form a panoramic view of the customer’s decision-making process which is the foundation of any credible marketing strategy. The goal is to identify causal, persistent signals: metrics that predict and influence revenue, not just describe it.

    Turning Data Into Insight – The Tech Stack That Matters

    Modern marketing is powered by two core layers of technology:

    1. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) these are the systems that unify customer identities and behaviour across channels, creating a single, actionable view of the individual.The one source of truth.

    2. Analytics & Experimentation Platforms — where models are built, hypotheses are tested, and impact is measured. If you think of the CDP as the orchestration layer (profiles, audiences, personalisation) and the analytics stack as the intelligence layer (insight, prediction, optimisation).

    They are one dimensional on their own. Their integration equals growth.

    Ask Better Questions, Get Better Data

    Insight starts not with dashboards, but with questions. As a senior marketer, I always begin by asking:

    What are the key moments that matter?

    Which moments in the journey change acquisition cost without harming long-term value? Where do customers drop off — and what’s the financial value of fixing it? Which interventions generate incremental revenue, not just clicks?

    Different questions require different analytical methods: Attribution models tell you which touchpoints matter most for conversion. Propensity models identify customers likely to act (purchase, churn, upgrade). Uplift models measure true incremental impact. What changed because of your action.The best teams blend methods rather than chasing a “perfect” model. The goal is always decision-enabling insight, not mathematical perfection.

    The Models That Matter

    Across my career, a handful of analytics approaches consistently unlock commercial impact:

    Segmentation and cohort analysis: to understand behaviour across time and target meaningful groups.

    Propensity modelling: to focus budget on customers most likely to buy or churn.

    Uplift modelling: to distinguish true responders from those who would convert anyway.

    Path analysis: to map the real customer flow and identify friction points.

    Experimentation frameworks: to test and scale proven strategies.

    Each model must produce something operational be that an audience, a trigger, or an automated rule.

    Otherwise, it’s just analysis for analysis’ sake and who has time for that.

    Turning Insight Into Revenue

    Insight has no value until it drives action.

    There are three operational principles I insist on in any data-driven growth programme:

    1. Act in real time. If a model flags a high-risk customer, the response (offer, message, or product nudge) must happen before the window closes.

    2. Make experimentation a habit. Every campaign, every journey update, every personalisation should run as a controlled test. Incremental revenue is the metric that matters.

    3. Build cross-functional SLAs. Marketing, product, and customer service must work as one to improve journey stages that drive margin.

    The Metrics That Matter to the Board

    Executives don’t want to see dashboards — they want proof of growth.The KPIs that convert marketing insight into boardroom credibility include:

    Incremental revenue per experiment – if you only report on one metric, make it this one.

    Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) vs. 12-month Customer Lifetime value (CLV ) ratio

    Retention and repeat purchase rate by cohort

    Average revenue per engaged customer

    Cost-to-serve vs. retention efficiency

    Link every journey initiative to one of these financial metrics, and marketing stops being seen as an expense — it becomes a predictable revenue engine.

    Building a Data-Led Roadmap

    For teams starting the shift from descriptive data to growth analytics, I recommend this five-step roadmap:

    1. Audit your data foundations. Fix identity resolution before building new models.

    2. Choose one journey to optimise. Focus on the highest-value moment first.

    3. Define the business question. Let that guide your measurement design.

    4. Automate activation. Link models to channels for real-time response.

    5. Scale with governance. Measure outcomes and embed learning into BAU.

    This approach ensures every data initiative links directly to incremental revenue and customer value which are the two metrics that matter most.

    The Future: Predictive Journeys and Adaptive Marketing

    The next evolution is already here: predictive journeys that adapt automatically to each customer’s behaviour and context. AI-driven orchestration platforms can now trigger content, pricing, and service actions based on real-time probability models effectively allowing each customer to follow their own optimised journey.

    As Gartner’s 2024 Marketing Data Trends report notes, “By 2026, 60% of enterprise CMOs will shift from campaign-based marketing to journey orchestration as the primary mode of engagement.”

    The organisations that master this will win not just attention, but loyalty and margin.

    Final Thought

    Data is not the destination it’s the mapmaker

    The real journey is understanding where your customers create value, and using insight to remove friction, accelerate conversion, and deepen loyalty. When leaders treat customer journeys as strategic growth systems, not UX diagrams, marketing transforms from cost centre to commercial engine. That’s how data mining and journey design uncover new revenue and why the smartest growth strategies start with insight.

    Worth a read

    1. Harvard Business Review, What You’re Getting Wrong About Customer Journeys

    https://hbr.org/2022/07/what-youre-getting-wrong-about-customer-journeys

    2. Forrester Wave, Customer Data Platforms, Q2 2024

    https://www.forrester.com/report/the-customer-data-platforms-for-b2b-landscape-q2-2025/RES182416

    3. Forrester Blog – The Perfect Multitouch Attribution Model Doesn’t Exist

    The Perfect Multitouch Attribution Model Doesn’t Exist

    5. Gartner – Marketing Data and Analytics Trends 2024

    https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-04-25-gartner-identifies-the-top-trends-in-data-and-analytics-for-2024