Building the perfect patient avatar

I’m sure most people have heard of a customer avatar—it’s a term that seems to pop up constantly, which I find absolutely infuriating. But before we delve deeper, let’s define it properly.

What is a customer avatar?

According to trusty ChatGPT:

A customer avatar is a detailed description of your ideal customer. It’s like creating a character that represents the people most likely to buy your product or service. You give them a name, age, job, interests, and anything else that helps you understand who they are and how to speak to them.

Marketers use customer avatars to tailor their messaging, positioning, and outreach strategies. The idea is that if you speak directly to the needs and pain points of this “ideal” customer, your marketing will resonate more strongly with people who match that profile in real life.

Here are a few factors commonly used to build an avatar:

•Age: How old is your ideal customer?
•Gender: Are they male, female, or non-binary?
•Job title: What do they do for a living?
•Income: How much money do they make annually?
•Location: Where do they live (city, country, etc.)?
•Hobbies: What do they enjoy doing in their free time?
•Challenges: What problems or pain points do they have?
•Goals: What are they trying to achieve?
•Buying behaviour: How do they prefer to shop—online or in-store?
•Values: What matters most to them in life and business?

This is all pretty straightforward and useful in many industries. But how crucial is it in healthcare, particularly within the musculoskeletal (MSK) sector?

You repair boilers

Clinicians often get a bit offended by this, but ultimately, they provide a local service which, like plumbers, people use to fix things. Whether it’s something complex like an ACL or something more simple like a twisted ankle, patients show up because there’s something wrong with them.

Building the perfect avatar

Okay, so imagine you own a plumbing company. Let’s walk through the process of building the perfect customer avatar – the ideal person you want to sell to.

Using the list from earlier, we could come up with something like this:

•Age: Old enough to have a bank account
•Gender: Any
•Job title: Not unemployed
•Income: Not homeless
•Location: Somewhere you’re willing to drive to
•Hobbies: Not DIY?
•Challenges: They’re not a plumber
•Goals: To have their boiler fixed
•Buying behaviour: They pay

When you think about it, trying to create a patient avatar is, at best, pointless, and quite frankly, a waste of time.

MSK

The same applies here. Yes, I know, you’ve got a shockwave machine and want runners with plantar fasciitis or people with tendinopathy, but that’s no reason to build an avatar. It doesn’t matter if they enjoy long holidays in Barbados or if they’re family-oriented with an ethical stance on progressive taxation.

Let’s be crystal clear. Your perfect avatar is someone who’s in pain, is willing to follow your process, and has enough money to pay. That’s it.

I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense to focus on those who are 45+, as they tend to have more disposable income and, like me, break much more easily than a 20-year-old. But that’s not an avatar, nor is it what people are doing or being told to do by the marketing gurus.

So why is everyone so fixated on building a customer avatar?

People—especially those selling things—love to make the simple seem complex to justify their fees. There’s nothing better than making something appear advanced to rip people off. It’s a bit like the personal trainer who knows deep down the solution to weight loss is eating fewer pies, doing a bit of cardio, and lifting a few weights.

But that’s not complicated enough, so instead they have you standing on an exercise ball, holding a kettlebell in one hand, tied to your opposite leg with a theraband, while you try to touch your toes with the other. They’ll then throw in fancy terms like ‘functional diet’ and warn you that gluten is evil. And of course, if you don’t buy the £75 sea moss (which is actually £20, but their super-duper version is more expensive), you will die.

It’s impressive to talk about avatars and get you on board with the idea of focusing your marketing efforts on people you’d be excited to treat.

Would it be nice to see Lucy, who travels frequently for business and leisure, enjoys exclusive experiences, fine dining, and high-end fashion? She’s balancing a busy career with personal time, and always seeks products that offer convenience and sophistication. Lucy wants to maintain a sense of prestige and status through her purchases and values exclusivity and quality.

Of course, it’s nonsense because Mavis, with her chronic sciatica, is the person who most often walks into the clinic.

At the same time, you didn’t enter this field to focus your treatment so narrowly. You got into it to help people—all people. Trust and high-quality patient care are far more important than tailoring treatment to someone’s lifestyle interests. Plus, healthcare decisions are often made by families rather than one individual, so an avatar is useless here anyway.

But I want rich people!

That sounds marvellous. What do most rich people have in common? They tend to have private health cover. Now, who wants rich people?

But I spent £5k on a branding agency to come up with an avatar!

We all do stupid things. I once lost £200 in Covent Garden playing that game where you guess which ball is under which cup. At least I stopped at £200. I was young!

But I really want to focus on surfers because I love surfing.

Perfect. No problem with this at all. Except you’re in Manchester, and even if you were on the coast, we’re here to make money. And to make money, you don’t waste it trying to find a specific type of person when there are 300 people down the local pub with back pain.

But I saw a webinar saying avatars are key to success!

Webinars also claim you can make six figures in your sleep if you meditate while drinking green smoothies. Meanwhile, you’ve got 50 people in your waiting room with real problems, none of whom resemble the “motivated-by-wellness-goals” avatar from the webinar.

You get the idea. So, the next time someone advises you to create a patient avatar, just think about that kettlebell, theraband, and exercise ball.