How can we encourage people to take action on their hearing and approach hearing healthcare solutions?
The Audira Think Tank for Hearing, founded by Curtis Alcock, recently released a whitepaper to address this topic and help hearing care professionals, clinics, and manufacturers change the perception of hearing healthcare and hearing loss.
Titled “The 4 Questions: A Framework for Creating a New Social Norm for Hearing”, the whitepaper centers around four questions that need to be successfully addressed to ensure that people consider their hearing important enough and relevant enough to take action. The paper’s framework aims to create a society with the capacity to address these questions in a way that fosters an approach response to hearing care as opposed to a flight response, which is too often the case.
According to the paper, the key to changing people’s attitudes towards hearing care and hearing instruments is changing broader social norms. The current social norm for hearing fosters a negative attitude towards hearing care and does not provide people with clear instructions on how they should manage their hearing. Any new social norm for hearing needs to give society positive answers to the following four questions:
When should I have my hearing checked?
How do I notice a reduction in my hearing range?
Who uses hearing technology and is that relevant to me?
When should I personally use hearing technology?
The 4 Questions Framework suggests a number of changes hearing clinics can make to their core outreach and marketing messages to encourage people to take action on their hearing loss.
We recently had the opportunity to ask Curtis Alcock why clinics should change their approach and adopt the recommendations in the framework.
“The 4 Questions simply applies those psychological and behavioural rules evident in the research literature to what hearing care has traditionally done. We know, for example, that people avoid things that weaken them, and approach things that empower them. So if people are currently avoiding hearing care – and therefore your clinic or mine – it means we are somehow telling society that getting a hearing test or using hearing technology weakens them. And if we want people to approach us, they have to believe those things empower them. How do we do that? That's what the 4 Questions is about: generating that approach response.
So if a clinic wishes to maintain their status quo, and do what they've always done, they will obviously get the same results they always have, with more people avoiding hearing care than approaching it. So what they're really saying is they're happy to continue deterring more people than they attract. Now to me, that sounds like the risk. That's what potentially hurts a business: seeing the cars parked in the opposite direction and continuing to go the wrong way.
MarkeTrak surveys from the Better Hearing Institute show that for every 1 person we fit with hearing aids, we currently leave 3 people behind. That 1 person will come to us anyway, because often they've reached a crisis point in their lives where they need to do something about their hearing. But what about the other 3? Because if we could find a way to reach just one of those people, we would be doubling the sizes of our clinics. How do we do that? First we need to be relevant. Then we need to send the right signals, signals that say "Approach". So how do we become relevant? How do we send the right signals? That's the purpose of the 4 Questions Framework.”
To learn more about the recommendations in the whitepaper, we suggest that you download a copy of the 4 Questions Framework.
Curtis Alcock is the founder of Audira, an online think tank that aims to create a new social norm for hearing. He is also the owner and manager of Broom, Reid, and Harris, an independent family-run hearing clinic in the UK. Earlier this year, his idea - The Three Monkeys - won the best public awareness campaign in the Ideas Competition organized by the Ida Institute and the Oticon Foundation.