The Whole Person Approach to Health Marketing

By Becky Johnson, Advertising Week Writer & Podcast Host

A person searching for health information in the middle of the workday may have time to read an article and consider several options. That same person, awake at 2 a.m. with a sick child, needs something entirely different. The demographics may not have changed, but the person’s state of mind certainly has.

That distinction is central to the way Stephanie Trunzo, Chief Executive Officer at MERGE, thinks about modern marketing. In our conversation on Wellness, Work, & Wellbeing, Stephanie explained why brands need to move beyond fixed personas and consider the full person receiving the information, including the role they are playing and the circumstances surrounding them at that particular moment.

MERGE calls this approach whole-human marketing. It begins with the understanding that people are not simply patients, parents, employees, or customers. They may be all of those things, and what they need from a brand can shift from one hour to the next.

Replacing Persuasion With Something Useful

Stephanie came to the agency world from a technology background, giving her a different view of a business model that has not always kept pace with changes in marketing. Advertising, creative work, technology, and customer behavior have all evolved, but many agencies still operate within structures created for a much earlier era.

Her question is a practical one: If the agency model were created today, what would it look like? At MERGE, the answer places less emphasis on convincing someone and more on providing education, support, and relevant information when it can be most useful.

That approach is especially important in health and wellness, where confusing language can create distance between the organization and the person it is trying to help. Marketing can make complex information easier to understand without stripping away its meaning or credibility. It can also give people the language they need to make decisions, ask better questions, and share what they have learned with others.

A Persona Cannot Account for Every Moment

Traditional personas help marketers understand broad groups, but they cannot fully explain what one person needs in a specific situation. Stephanie offered the example of a working mother with a new baby. During the day, she may be calmly reviewing insurance enrollment information, while at 2 a.m., she may be holding a crying baby with a fever and looking for immediate help.

Those moments should not produce the same experience. The first may call for a clear educational article, while the second may require one button that connects her with an emergency nurse. Treating both moments as part of the same static customer journey misses the context that determines whether the information is actually useful.

AI can help organizations respond to those differences with greater precision. Rather than creating more content simply for the sake of volume, it can translate one strong idea or set of instructions into language and formats that work for different people. Translation in this case can mean another language, but it can also mean explaining something in a way that fits a person’s knowledge, circumstances, and immediate needs.

Credible Information Has to Be Findable

As more people use AI tools to ask health questions and summarize large amounts of information, health organizations need to consider how their content will be found and interpreted. A provider network may have decades of research and expertise available on its website, but that knowledge has limited value if AI systems cannot easily identify, understand, and include it in their answers.

Stephanie does not see this as a simple fight for attention. In health and wellness, making credible information available to AI is a matter of service. If trustworthy organizations do not prepare their content for the ways people now search, less reliable information may fill the gap.

Regulation, privacy, and security requirements make this work more complicated, but they do not eliminate the need to move forward. Organizations can begin by making their existing expertise clear, well organized, and easier for both people and AI systems to understand. They do not need to abandon necessary safeguards to improve how useful information reaches the public.

Whole-Human Thinking at Work

The same principle applies inside an organization. Employees are not equally productive at every hour of every day, and time spent on an assignment does not always capture the thought, creativity, or value behind the work. A timesheet can record activity, but it cannot fully measure contribution.

MERGE is exploring the idea of energy allocation as a different way to think about work. Someone may produce their best work early on a Monday, while another person may be more productive at a different time. Managing with those differences in mind allows leaders to focus on the quality and value of the work rather than monitoring when someone took lunch.

That does not mean existing agency practices will disappear immediately. Some clients will continue to request tracked hours, and long-standing expectations take time to change. Stephanie’s point is that an established model should not become an excuse to stop experimenting with better ones.

Whether the subject is a patient trying to understand medical guidance or an employee working through a difficult creative problem, the larger idea remains the same. People are complex, their needs change, and the systems built around them should make room for that reality.