Imagine if you had to take a spring-loaded lancet and pierce the tip of your finger until it bleeds, then wipe your blood onto a glucose-testing strip. Picture yourself having to do that twice every day for the rest of your life. Now imagine yourself at the supermarket. Pushing your cart along, you pause in front of a shelf piled high with boxes of frosted cupcakes. It’s your moment of truth, one you know depressingly well. You love cupcakes, but your last glucose test reading was too high, and so you cannot have them.

And now imagine being back home, where you notice your gym bag resting by the front door. The mere sight of it makes you exhausted. Your doctors have made it clear: To maintain your vascular structure, you must exercise. But today you can barely summon the energy to get off the couch. You’ve been told what can happen to diabetics who don’t follow their health regimens: blindness, amputations. Not a day goes by that you don’t worry, over and over again.

Imagine.

Right now, on the 11th floor of an old brick office building at 30 Irving Place in downtown Manhattan, there are 39 people who can imagine. They can imagine all of these things, but it’s not because they’re diabetics. Most are perfectly healthy people. Yet they’ve subjected themselves to a unique, pioneering experiment. For 14 weeks, the members of this group assumed the roles of patients newly diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. They hit the gym religiously; they watched enviously as their friends ate candy bars that they could not; and they picked up a blade and forced blood from their fingers.

The aim of this experiment wasn’t to show how far medical science has come. Instead, it demonstrated how far the study of marketing has come. The members of the group are all employees of a relationship-marketing agency called Unit 7, and it is attempting to be at the forefront of what can be best described as “empathetic marketing.” In the past, marketers relied on focus groups of diabetics whom they interviewed in an attempt to guess what living with the disease was like. Since launching the program, however, some of the guesswork has been factored out; nearly half of Unit 7’s staff now has a much clearer idea of what living with diabetes is like.

This expertise is valuable to the health-related companies that Unit 7 counts among its client pool, corporations such as Pfizer, Sanofi-Aventis and Bristol-Meyers Squibb (which is currently developing new diabetes drugs with AstraZeneca). Unit 7’s leadership believed the value of this experiment went beyond what it could learn about diabetes alone; the sort of deprivations to which the firm’s marketers subjected themselves were a window into the world of any consumer forced to make health-related lifestyle changes.

A Mile in Their Shoes
Immersion exercises are not new. The 1912 classic treatise The Jungle—which eventually spurred the creation of the Food & Drug Administration—was a fictionalized account of writer Upton Sinclair’s self-immersion as a meatpacking plant worker. And, in what’s become a modern classic of immersion, in 1992 Harvard-educated, African American corporate attorney Lawrence Otis Graham took a job as a waiter at an all-white country club in Greenwich, Conn., to experience firsthand the enduring attitudes of racism. Graham’s book, Member of the Club, has become an authoritative text.

Much like their counterparts in journalism and sociology, marketers have used empathetic exercises to great effect. Ethnography (the practice of conducting consumer research by actually living with consumers) came into vogue about a decade ago, and brands like Campbell’s and FedEx rely heavily on it. “Mystery shopping” is the norm, and can be a data gold mine for brands. Bacardi, for one, routinely dispatches its staffers to bars and clubs, paying them to blend in and observe who’s ordering Bacardi rum-and how they like it mixed (or not).

According to Michal Ann Strahilevitz, associate professor of marketing at Golden Gate University, it is “Marketing 101” for an agency or marketer to find ways to insert themselves in the use of their own product: “Take the pain killer. Eat the ice cream. Use the toothpaste. It has enormous value. You need to gain insights about the products and the consumers.”

For instance, in 2002, Sun Microsystems forced employees to use its own computers, a practice then-CEO Scott McNealy referred to as “eating our own dog food.”

Today as consumer trust has eroded and ad creep exploded, Unit 7 CEO Loreen Babcock, felt such exercises needed a “deeper dive” into the minds of consumers.

Letting Life Happen
Historically, agencies faced with the directive to learn more about how diabetics use various healthcare products may have role-played for a few hours, perhaps even a whole day. Babcock felt that wasn’t enough, so she decided to run the “B-Roll Inquiry”—as the project was formally titled—for a full 14 weeks. The longer a marketer walked in the shoes of a target consumer, Babcock reasoned, the deeper and more authentic an understanding he or she would achieve. “Life could happen,” she said. “The stress of work, personal issues, holidays to deal with. It really helped us understand what it’s like.”

Fourteen weeks wasn’t just a convenient, round number. Psychology is replete with examples of how therapeutic treatment regimens such as Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs require at least three months to effect lasting behavioral changes. For the Unit 7 team, internalizing a stranger’s behavior and disposition through an empathetic exercise was mandated to take at least that long.

“We wanted it to be a realistic experience,” said Dr. Mark Spellman, Unit 7 director of research and behavioral psychology. “So we needed the project to last.”

Last, it did. And, according to Bob Lapides, who participated in the B-Roll Inquiry as one of Unit 7’s senior copywriters, it worked, too. How can weeks of protracted suffering translate to more effective marketing? Lapides recalled sitting down to write some hospital-discharge literature for Unit 7 client Plavix, which is a prescription drug given to patients who’ve suffered cardiac episodes. Normally, Lapides said, he’d have penned the kind of clinical, disinterested jargon so commonly found in healthcare literature. “I was just going to write, ‘See inside for more information,’” he said.

But after the immersion experiment, Lapides’ thinking has evolved. He said he now approaches his job with a greater sense of humanity. “I thought, ‘These people just had a heart attack. What do they really want to hear?’ I felt really connected to them. It was weird.”



In Memoriam
The B-Roll Inquiry was named after Unit 7 associate creative director Larry “B-Roll” Walken. Walken was known for his diligence in shooting a lot of supplemental or alternate ad footage, known in the industry as B-Roll material. The 20-year-veteran of Unit 7 and its former iteration LLKFB also was known to enjoy a drink or two after a hard day’s work. But last year, Walken learned he had a heart problem. Walken quit drinking. He started to get himself into shape. He did not, however, seem to know how to stop working too hard, and during one late night at the office, Walken suffered a fatal heart attack. He was 48.

That connection gave the project a very poignant twist for Unit 7 staffers. The B-Roll Inquiry was launched on Valentine’s Day. The heart symbolism was lost on nobody.

Nor was the magnitude of the experiment these co-workers were about to undertake. Unit 7’s staffers were not being asked merely to learn about diabetes; for all intents and purposes, they were being asked to live with diabetes—for three and a half months, 24/7, no breaks and no exceptions.

Marketing school hadn’t prepared anybody for things like this; things like being asked to wear a rubber bracelet that read: “I’m Out to Get Diabetes.” Or being subjected to the propaganda posters that adorned the apple-green walls of the agency (“A 9-oz. box of raisins has more sugar than two pints of Häagen-Dazs,” read one). Tote bags distributed in the conference room during the launch event came fully equipped with everything needed for the agency’s staff to get acquainted with their newly acquired malady: Gretchen Becker’s book The First Year: Type 2 Diabetes, a pedometer and a journal for recording daily food intake.

B-Roll was not merely an exercise in endurance; each employee was expected to immediately respond proactively to the disease, just as a doctor would require a diabetic patient to do. They were asked to target one aspect of their health and improve upon it. Personal choices included getting fitter, losing weight, reducing stress and quitting smoking.

Even as Unit 7’s chief, Babcock was not exempt. She chose to abandon her beloved Salem Slim Lights by visiting hypnotherapist Susan Spiegel Solovay of Brandvisioning, New York. Said Solovay, an ad exec herself who became burned out by the strain of the job: “Everyone in the agency world needs to reduce stress.”

Group Therapy
Because Unit 7’s extended-immersion program was experimental—and especially because so much of it was personal, with insights gained during private moments far removed from the office—meetings and programming were essential in order to maintain progress and gauge results.

Babcock devised weekly lunch seminars hosted by speakers ranging from Stevens Institute of Technology’s strength and conditioning coach, Steff Park, to Buddhist monk Koshin Paley Ellison from the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care. When Ellison appeared in his robes with his meditation bell, one staffer unburdened herself immediately. “I’d like to learn how to relax,” she announced. “I have no patience whatsoever anymore. I’m blowing smoke out of my ears when people piss me off.” Ellison intoned: “Take time to pay attention and witness yourself.” Then he led the group in meditation.

It was not your average agency lunch. It was, however, hampered by some of the problems any agency project encounters. After tallying survey forms that all participants were required to fill out, B-Roll’s leaders discovered that the 41% excitement rate recorded at the experiment’s beginning very quickly dropped to 10%. It turned out employees had grown increasingly depressed and frustrated by the lifestyle limitations—no candy, no smoking, etc.—that B-Roll had imposed on them. Vincent Alonzo, a Type 2 diabetic who was not affiliated with the agency but observed the programs at Brandweek’s request, related his feelings about diet and exercise: “I know it all already. It’s just the doing it part I have trouble with. Ninety-five percent of us are just slack asses whose dietary habits got us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to change.”

The loss of morale, in this case, ended up becoming a key advantage of the experiment, because these same feelings were common to real diabetic patients who had been recently diagnosed. In other words, even when employees were tired of acting, they were still empathizing. Lapides recalled one particular night when he yearned for a snack while watching TV. “I’d already had dinner,” he said. “I made the decision not to have popcorn. It made me feel sad because I couldn’t have it-but then I realized what it represented. I got a real sense of the suffering someone with diabetes has to experience for the rest of his life.”



A Flawed Experiment?
Fourteen weeks later, the Unit 7 conference room that had hosted confessions and frustrations was considerably more upbeat: It was graduation day, a reward promised early in the programming that had served as a motivating component throughout. The B-Roll grads tossed their old rubber bracelets in the air, like so many graduation caps. One landed in a bowl of dip that a diabetic would be wise to avoid, though few would begrudge these marketers the indulgence. “My mother is glad because now I can eat more pasta,” said Unit 7 CFO Andy Acampora at the commencement. “She said I was getting skinny.”

But an important question lurked just beneath the festive mood in this room packed with bobbing helium balloons and party platters. No doubt, the 14-week immersion had made these employees more empathetic human beings, but had it made them better marketers? Marketing experts aren’t so sure.

Andrew Benett, co-president of Euro RSCG, New York, said that any innovation in marketing research has merit. “It’s difficult for agencies from a research standpoint because everyone has the same data,” he said. “The challenge is to push beyond the data and really understand customers, because they’re smarter than ever before.”

Author and marketing futurist Seth Godin agreed with that viewpoint, however he had a problem with gaining insights by pretending to have a disease. “The effort of trying to feel like the person you are telling the story to is essential,” Godin said. “But it’s impossible to feel like a diabetic. It’s disingenuous. They can’t know what it’s like to live every day with the knowledge that you could be dead tomorrow if you screw up.”

Or, as Clay Langdon, planning director at McGarrah Jessee, Austin, Texas, put it: “Yes, they walked in [a diabetic’s] shoes, but they could put their own shoes on after it was over and go order that double fudge brownie.”

Which is why, in the view of New York-based consultant Simon Sinek, Unit 7 might have done just as well to conduct old-fashioned interviews: “In this case, traditional research is best. It’s impossible to empathize with someone who has diabetes. It sounds like a publicity stunt to impress their clients.”

Regardless of the program’s tactical shortcomings, B-Roll represented a pioneering shift in thinking about marketing research, in the view of Marsha Shenk, owner of Master Moves in Portland, Ore., who has worked with the agency on various projects, “Marketers think of consumers as ‘us and them.’ [Babcock] made her people the ‘us.’ No ethnographer is doing that.”

A Matter of Trust
Unit 7 plans to start marketing its immersive services and the philosophies it has gained from the B-Roll Inquiry under the moniker “Trust Relationship Management.” TRM is an evolution, Babcock said, of customer relationship management. The agency has gone so far as to trademark “TRM.”

Whether TRM represents a true evolution of marketing methodology (as opposed to an evolution of marketing terminology) is another matter ripe for debate. “Everyone is doing the same thing,” said Stuart Grau, president of Avrett Free Ginsberg, New York. “We all have to position ourselves one way or the other with bells and whistles.”

What other agencies lack is publicity, said John Palumbo, founder of New York marketing consultancy Big Heads Network. “Every agency that reads this story will think, ‘Hey we’ve been doing immersions for years.’ What those agencies don’t do is take it to the next level and get some exposure for the approach like these folks did.”

For their part, the 39 staffers who hit the gym, skipped dessert and pricked their fingers don’t feel like pawns in a publicity stunt. Most just felt healthier: Together, they worked out 719 hours and dropped a combined 148 pounds. Babcock hasn’t bought a pack of cigarettes since.

Inside the massive Omnicom holding company, which owns Unit 7, B-Roll has built big buzz for this small shop which is dwarfed in size by sister agencies BBDO and DDB. Via a taped message at the graduation ceremony, Tom Harrison, the CEO of Omnicom/Diversified Agency Services, told employees: “I only wish all our companies would do what you have done.”

Thrilled by the endorsement, the group said it was ready for the next immersion study. They even had some suggestions for the next topic. “How about amusement parks?” joked Lapides. Another employee offered: “Or an in-depth look at luxury automobiles?” Anything that doesn’t involve pricking your finger.