Welcome to the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence. On today’s episode, host Sara Payne sits down with Kala Weeks, Vice President of Marketing and Communications for Ripario Health, for a compelling conversation at Health 2025. Ripario Health is transforming preventive care with at-home screening kits and instant results—delivering accessibility, convenience, and speed straight to consumers’ doorsteps. Together, they explore how bold, human-centered approaches in health marketing are breaking through industry noise and shaping the future of care. Kala Weeks shares her philosophy that all buyers are humans first—offering unique insights from her psychology background on why healthcare marketing so often misses the personal touch and how trend-driven campaigns can connect with real people, even in a B2B environment. They delve into Ripario’s innovative “trend jacking” strategies, the critical role of leadership support and team nimbleness, the delicate balance between clinical credibility and creative relevance, and the importance of listening deeply to audiences. Plus, learn why Kala Weeks believes we’re at the cusp of a preventive care revolution, and how Ripario is helping consumers overcome fear to embrace their health. Thank you for being part of the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence. The future of healthcare depends on it. Key Takeaways:

1. Human-First Marketing in Healthcare:
2. Kala Weeks underscores the importance of treating buyers as multidimensional humans, not just personas or ICPs. By infusing a psychology-based understanding of what motivates real people—both in their professional and personal lives—Ripario Health creates campaigns that are relatable and resonant, helping the industry move beyond flat, transactional interactions.
3. Trend Jacking for Disproportionate Attention:
4. Ripario Health leverages pop culture moments to make preventive care feel accessible and fun, a strategy Kala Weeks calls “trend jacking.” By connecting universal healthcare needs to widely recognized events (such as clever plays on the American Eagle jeans campaign or Taylor Swift’s candid discussions about family health), marketing efforts gain significant traction and relevance, driving brand recall and engagement even in a competitive B2B landscape.
5. Agility Backed by Leadership and Technology:
6. Nimbleness—both in team structure and campaign approval processes—is essential for capturing fleeting cultural moments. Kala Weeks shares how actionable leadership buy-in and creative liberty empower Ripario’s small team to move fast. Technology plays a vital supporting role, with custom AI tools scanning news and pop culture daily to identify opportunities, highlighting the critical intersection of innovation and strategic operations.
7. Balancing Creativity and Clinical Credibility:
8. Staying fresh and relevant doesn’t mean sacrificing trust. Ripario Health maintains clinical credibility by anchoring its messaging in data, published case studies, and well-defined content pillars. This approach allows them to be playful and bold with campaigns while consistently reinforcing medical expertise and reliability—building brand authority among clinical and consumer audiences alike.
9. Listening as a Path to Trust and Adoption:
10. Shifting consumer mindsets from fear of preventive care to embracing proactive health starts with active listening. Kala Weeks emphasizes the necessity of audience research and adapting voice and tone to build authenticity and trust. By prioritizing genuine dialogue over broadcasting, Ripario can address barriers, foster engagement, and truly put the healthcare consumer at the center—essential for thriving in today’s preventive care revolution.

Join us at the Health Marketing Collective, where we spotlight the bold voices shaping healthcare, and discover new strategies for leading conversations that move your market forward. [embed]https://youtu.be/3YMJOwQc-10[/embed] About Kala Weeks Kala Weeks is the Vice President of Marketing & Communications at Reperio Health, where she’s redefining what B2B health-tech marketing can look like—bold, human, and impossible to ignore. Known for building brands that balance creativity with measurable impact, Kala leads with the belief that fun and effectiveness aren’t opposites—they’re the formula for momentum.

Sara Payne [: 00:00:00

Welcome back to the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence. I'm your host Sarah Payne and we're coming to you from Health 2025 where we're spotlighting some of the bold voices shaping the future of healthcare.

Voiceover [: 00:00:23

The Health Marketing Collective is powered by Imprela, a communications firm built for health brands determined to lead, not follow. We partner with marketing innovators who aren't just chasing attention, they're building movements. Connect with the audiences shaping the future of care and lead the conversations that move your market. Ready to rise above the noise? Visit imprela.com that's in P R E L A dot com. Let's create something that moves the market.

Sara Payne [: 00:00:53

Joining me is Kala Weeks, vice president of marketing and communications for Ripario Health. Thanks so much for being here.

Kala Weeks [: 00:00:59

Of course. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited.

Sara Payne [: 00:01:01

Let's start off with a bit of a conversation around kind of the short story of what repairio health is and what it is you're doing in healthcare.

Kala Weeks [: 00:01:09

Yeah. So repairio helps, you know, if you're healthy without leaving your living room. So we do that by shipping a kit into your home. It's an at home preventive care kit. We can assess for heart health, metabolic health, pre diabetes, weight management. The screening takes 30 minutes. It's self guided with our app and the blood work results are instant, which is really the biggest differentiator. Right.

Kala Weeks [: 00:01:35

You know, any other at home diagnostic solution out there in the world right now still requires the blood work to be shipped out to a lab for two to four weeks of processing. And we've learned, you know, with modern day health care consumers that any wait period between health testing and health results actually results in 44% of people not following through or following up because there's that wait time. So there's just, it's such a care gap.

Sara Payne [: 00:02:05

That's amazing. Love what you're doing. Thank you. I know that you're a believer that buyers are humans first and so as marketers we need to remember to communicate to them as humans. Where do you think as an industry in general we fall short of that today in healthcare?

Kala Weeks [: 00:02:23

You know, I, I have a background in psychology, so I thought I was going to be a therapist once upon a time and, you know, quickly learned that that wasn't my path. But I infuse a lot of my learnings right from that space into how I approach marketing. And I think it's really hard to, I always like to say you get lost in the sauce of, you know, building ICPs and Personas and battle cards and making people feel like they're just two dimensional almost. And the truth is, is like, I wake up and I'm scrolling TikTok and checking Instagram and listening to Taylor Swift, like, but I'm also a marketing executive that's being sold into. And I think the shortcoming is forgetting that we're human first and that we, you know, have human things that we like in our personal lives. And, you know, being a professional and being like, who you are can be mutually exclusive. And, I don't know, you just, you. You get lost in all of the semantics of what it means to be selling or marketing into somebody and the organization that they work for.

Sara Payne [: 00:03:33

Such a great reminder. Can you share some examples of what this looks like in the work that you and your team are doing, whether it's, you know, specific content or campaigns that you have on the marketplace?

Kala Weeks [: 00:03:43

Something I'm really excited about that we've started to do is attaching ourselves to really big pop culture moments. We're calling it tread and jacking. So we're using that as, you know, a way preventive health care is universal, so is pop culture. And so we're using it as like a low barrier entry point to talk about health care and preventive health care and how to prioritize it in a way that feels friendly and fun. And a good example of that, you know, for example, would be the American Eagle jeans campaign that literally broke.

Sara Payne [: 00:04:20

Got a lot of attention. Yes.

Kala Weeks [: 00:04:22

So, you know, we ran a campaign that said, well, we heard they have great genes, but what about good cholesterol?

Sara Payne [: 00:04:28

Mm, brilliant.

Kala Weeks [: 00:04:29

Yeah. And it was fun. You know, we got to play on a lot of the messaging and the language, and it resonated because everyone saw, you know, that ad campaign coming from Gap and American Eagle, and it just gives us disproportionate attention in a way that you can't really break through the noise in traditional methods as much anymore because there's just. We're all inundated so much. So you have to find a really good way to break through. And I don't know, we like, we like to think that we're just humanizing healthcare a little bit more by approaching it that way.

Sara Payne [: 00:05:04

In order to do this trend jacking, you have to be able to move pretty quickly. Right. Because that moment happens, especially today, it happens like that and it's over. So how do you and your team build that sort of nimbleness and that infrastructure to be able to move? And the other part of this Which I think is really important is having that leadership buy in, that executive buy in, that you don't have to go through, you know, 24 layers of approvals to get something out the door. Otherwise, again, that moment has passed. So talk a little bit about that dynamic.

Kala Weeks [: 00:05:33

You know, honestly, the biggest unlock for me has been working for a leadership team that values and understands what I'm doing as a marketing leader, number one. But they also give me a ton of creative liberty. So if you don't have that, it's harder. Right. To operationalize some of those things. Most people are really shocked to find out that I was a team of one up until three months ago.

Sara Payne [: 00:05:59

Wow.

Kala Weeks [: 00:05:59

So I just hired a marketing manager who works under me. And the way that we make it happen in is staying nimble and, like, being honest with ourselves around, like, how can we make these things happen? There's a lot of talk about how marketers are leveraging AI in our work. You know, I'm a true believer that if you aren't learning how to use these tools to accelerate the speed at which you can deliver and scale, you know, the work that you're driving as a team of two, like, you are going to be left behind. So the way that we do this here is I've built an AI agent that essentially scans all of the news media, all of the pop culture moments, every single morning, and I get a report delivered via a zap to Slack.

Sara Payne [: 00:06:47

Wow.

Kala Weeks [: 00:06:47

That highlights all of the trending moments from that day that could have a. Like a preventive care angle.

Sara Payne [: 00:06:55

Yeah.

Kala Weeks [: 00:06:55

Right. Because it's not about for us jumping on every single trend. That's not the goal. Because otherwise it just becomes noise all over again. But there are moments like, you know, Taylor Swift being on the New Heights podcast, promoting her new album, where she talked about her dad. Her dad?

Sara Payne [: 00:07:13

Yeah.

Kala Weeks [: 00:07:14

You know, and he had a heart attack. And that through line was just there. Yeah. We just happened to be paying attention with the help of our AI friend.

Sara Payne [: 00:07:23

And it just happened to be Taylor Swift.

Kala Weeks [: 00:07:25

And it happened to be Taylor Swift, which is, I don't know, magic in of itself. So she. I don't know, she's. She's a marketeer.

Sara Payne [: 00:07:33

Yes. 100. A lot of great lessons to be learned from her, for sure. Yeah. I think a lot of marketers in healthcare want to be able to do this. Are you. What we're talking about here in these examples, is this largely B2C or is there a B2B component in what we're doing here?

Kala Weeks [: 00:07:52

We are primarily a B2B.

Sara Payne [: 00:07:54

Okay.

Kala Weeks [: 00:07:54

So we, you know, we sell our fit direct to employer is is who we primarily sell into right now because they typically will offer us as an alternative to, you know, sending their teams to brick and mortar labs or a physician's office with a physician's form. Right. They're using us as that annual wellness visit for their people. So it is all B2B.

Sara Payne [: 00:08:15

Wow. But again, I wouldn't have guessed that from the outside. Really?

Kala Weeks [: 00:08:19

Yeah. But again, it's because we are treating our B2B buyers like humans. Like they're real human beings that have, like, personal motivations as well.

Sara Payne [: 00:08:30

Yeah. It's a great model, I think, for people to try to aspire to, to step outside of that more traditional approach and try something different. Was there like a before and after, you know, the way you were doing it before versus the way you're doing it now, or, you know, different campaigns where you can measure sort of the performance of this more trend jacking approach versus a more traditional approach?

Kala Weeks [: 00:08:51

Yeah. You know, I also have a lot of freedom in the way that I report out impact to our leadership team. And so we're not chasing vanity metrics, which I know can be really challenging for a lot of marketers because, you know, there is this desire to like, draw a straight line of ROI from thing delivered to how that translates into pipeline or, you know, the bottom line for the business. And some of the biggest things that we haven't measured, like true ROI on, have landed us the biggest logos over the last year. Right. And so, yeah, I don't know, it does have a lot to do with the leadership team, but the onus is on us to be educating. Right. Our leaders around the shift that modern day marketing has taken because it has gone in a really different direction.

Kala Weeks [: 00:09:46

We're not on the MQL hamster wheel anymore.

Sara Payne [: 00:09:49

Right.

Kala Weeks [: 00:09:49

You know, we have to find different ways to measure success. And ultimately, you know, if your marketing is working, then you're. You're getting more clients, more people are coming inbound to you raising their hand, saying, I'm ready to buy. There's less fishing with a spear or fishing with a net.

Sara Payne [: 00:10:07

That has to be. Yes. So, yeah, I mean, building a brand in healthcare, building trust in healthcare is the long game. And having a leadership team that understands that is definitely a gift because it opens up a lot of potential and opportunity to I think, really push on creativity in new and different ways. I think one of the other challenges for health marketers as they think about taking this kind of approach is really Balancing that clinical credibility that we know is so important with that culturally relevant, maybe a little bit more outside the box approach. Tell me a little bit about how you balance those things, because you still need that clinical credibility.

Kala Weeks [: 00:10:42

Yeah. I think from a tactical standpoint, you need to decide what your content pillars are. You know, so we have four of them at ripirio. One of them happens to be like pop culture trend jacking, like more fun approaches to things. But another one of those is like, rooted in data. And, you know, we are, we do have published case studies and, you know, we don't ever want to. There's a delicate balance. Right.

Kala Weeks [: 00:11:09

Between coming off too funny and too strong and.

Sara Payne [: 00:11:14

Agreed.

Kala Weeks [: 00:11:15

You know, polarizing some of the more clinical audiences that are important to us as well. But, you know, if you have a consistent cadence that you are, you know, if it's social media is like where you're really sharing a lot of your content, if you have a cadence in place that is making sure that your content pillars are being recycled through in a way that your audience comes to expect. It's just, it just feels natural. People just, yeah. You know, adopt to like what you're putting out there and come to expect those things from you. And that's what builds brand recall.

Sara Payne [: 00:11:48

Yeah, love that. Yeah, great point. I think in the preventive care space, this is obviously a growing space. Wonderfully so, because we'd love to put more dollars into the front end versus the, you know, late stage, end stage disease treatment. Right. But I know from personal experience, friends and family, that there can be some fear about participating in this type of, you know, preventive care analysis, diagnostics, et cetera. So how do you think about that as a marketing leader, moving people from that state of fear to really embracing it?

Kala Weeks [: 00:12:22

Yeah, well, you know, when I first joined, I did an evolution of sorts of our brand voice and tone. And that has a lot to do with building trust and credibility, honestly, you know, because if you are taking a more human approach, then you want to make sure that your language and your positioning, you know, is reflective of the audience that you're trying to reach. And so, you know, I think, I think what it really boils down to at the end of the day is listening more. You know, as marketers, we have a tendency to always be like, speaking out or like pushing things out, but sometimes you need to zoom out yourself and listen and prioritize audience research to a degree. Great point. To understand, like, what that needs to look like for you in your brand's messaging, positioning, et cetera.

Sara Payne [: 00:13:16

Love that last question. What's one thing you believe about the future of preventive care?

Kala Weeks [: 00:13:23

You know, we're truly in a preventive care revolution right now, which is really, really exc. You know, 60% of US adults are walking around with one underlying unknown, chronic condition. That should scare the crap.

Sara Payne [: 00:13:39

Yes.

Kala Weeks [: 00:13:39

Out of all.

Sara Payne [: 00:13:40

Well, going back to that point about fear, I think it really does.

Kala Weeks [: 00:13:43

Yeah. And you know, people do get, you know, scared. You know, it's a little bit more comfortable. You can be okay with the unknown to a degree. Right. Like, if you know, then you have to take action. And that can be the nebulous part. It's like now, sometimes what we don't know doesn't hurt us.

Kala Weeks [: 00:14:01

Right. But what we've seen now is a country that is so sick and a system that can't keep up and is just not capable of taking care of us anymore. And so really what's exciting for me with the way that everything's being prioritized around prevention is that we're finally catching up to, like, putting the health care consumer first. Because that's really what it's all about for us is true consumer centered health care delivery. I mean, if you can order your groceries and get them delivered in an hour, or if you can string your favorite show in 20 seconds via an app, why can you not access healthcare services the same way?

Sara Payne [: 00:14:47

Great point.

Kala Weeks [: 00:14:48

So, yeah, I mean, we're, we're trying to bring the same type, type of experience to your porch that you get when you order your next pair of tennis shoes off of Amazon prime, right?

Sara Payne [: 00:14:59

Yes.

Kala Weeks [: 00:15:00

Open the door, pick it up, and you get exactly what you want.

Sara Payne [: 00:15:03

I love that. Well, thanks so much for joining me. This was really fun. I love what you guys are doing in this space. I truly do believe in the future of preventive care. So thanks for everything you guys are.

Kala Weeks [: 00:15:12

Doing in this place. I'll have to send you a kit, so you can take it.

Sara Payne [: 00:15:15

Oh, I would love that. I would love that. Thank you so much. Of course. Thanks for joining us on the Health Marketing Collective, coming to you from Health 2025 where we're spotlighting the bold voices that are shaping the future of healthcare. We'll see you next time.

Kala Weeks [: 00:15:28

Significant.