Welcome to the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence.

On today’s episode, Sara Payne sits down with Misty Ladner, Senior Vice President of Consumer Marketing at Wondr Health, to explore the intersection of science, storytelling, and empathy in healthcare marketing. Together, they unpack what it truly takes to motivate people to engage with their health, translating awareness into lasting action. Misty brings decades of experience in designing digital programs that tackle obesity and chronic disease, always with a focus on building trust, changing behavior, and humanizing healthcare.

Our conversation covers everything from the fundamental differences between tech marketing and healthcare marketing, to balancing creativity and compliance, behavioral science-backed approaches to consumer engagement, and the evolving role of AI and data personalization in building meaningful and effective marketing strategies. We dive into real stories of impact—like Teddy’s transformation—and highlight how marketing leaders can anchor strategy in compassion and measurable consumer outcomes rather than just transactional metrics.

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. Trust Is the Cornerstone of Healthcare Marketing
2. Misty breaks down the fundamental difference between tech and healthcare marketing: while tech often leans on delight and convenience to drive adoption, healthcare is inherently personal and emotional. Building trust is non-negotiable—it’s the foundation that enables patients to take action, especially when dealing with vulnerable topics like weight loss and chronic disease. Wondr Health’s approach emphasizes empathy, thought leadership, and the creation of personal mirrors: “We have helped people like you—so we can help you.”
3. Personalization Drives Long-Term Consumer Engagement
4. Rather than treating marketing as a transaction, Misty and her team root engagement strategies in behavioral science and behavioral economics. By understanding each individual’s intrinsic and extrinsic motivators—the “my why”—Wondr Health personalizes not just their product, but every touchpoint, reward, and message a consumer encounters. Moving toward one-to-one personalization, operationalized across the entire lifecycle, is key to helping people stick to their health goals and achieve lasting change.
5. Data and AI: The Path to Scalable Customization
6. Success in personalized engagement relies on scalable technology. Misty shares how Wondr Health is investing in AI-driven platforms and unified datasets to power true one-to-one communication—from email to SMS to live coaching. AI allows marketers to move beyond broad population segments to individualized experiences, orchestrating communication across channels and continuously optimizing based on real-world data.
7. Consumer Outcomes Must Anchor Metrics and Strategy
8. Healthcare marketers often fall into the trap of treating engagement as a set of transactional metrics—open rates, clicks, retention. Misty urges leaders to keep consumer health outcomes at the center: sleep, energy, joy, and confidence are as important as clinical results. Wondr Health’s culture and business reviews start with participant stories and testimonials, tying business objectives directly to consumer impact and clinical outcomes.
9. Humanizing Strategy: Keep the Individual Front and Center
10. Above all, Misty advocates for approaching every campaign as if you’re speaking to a loved one—your mother, aunt, sister, or child. Marketers must remember that behind every data point is a person with a story and a motivation. Relevance, empathy, and connection build trust and drive the real, lasting change healthcare brands aspire to create.

Don’t miss Misty Ladner’s hard-won, “OG marketing” wisdom: avoid falling in love with your own ideas, stay open to learning (and being wrong), and fight assumptions about your audience—for instance, the best outcomes in weight loss may come from surprising cohorts. In healthcare marketing, the human element isn’t just a differentiator—it’s the engine of success.

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and thank you for joining the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence. The future of healthcare depends on it.

Welcome back to the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence. I'm your host, Sarah Payne, and I'm bringing you fascinating conversations with some of the industry's top marketing minds. Today we're talking about what it takes to motivate people to act. Anyone can attract an audience, but getting someone to actually engage with their health is the real challenge many of us face. And my guest today knows this better than anyone. Misty Ladner, senior vice president of consumer marketing at Wondr Health, has built her career around understanding what motivates people to take action, especially when that action involves their health. From helping flight attendants understand their insurance at 35,000ft to designing digital programs that tackle obesity and chronic disease, Misty's work sits at the intersection of science, storytelling, and empathy. Together, we'll talk about what it takes to motivate people, from awareness to activation.

And how marketing leaders can balance creativity, compliance, and compassion to make healthcare more human. Misty, welcome to the show.

Great. Great to meet you, Sarah.

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 inprela.com let's create something that moves the market.

Likewise. Thanks so much for doing this with me. I'm excited to dig in on this topic. I know it's one that a lot of marketing leaders struggle with, are passionate about. You know, spend a lot of time thinking about. One of the things that really struck me about your perspective is how you differentiate between tech marketing and healthcare marketing. And you've said that in tech, delight drives adoption, but in health care, trust drives the relationship. What does that look like in practice?

I think in healthcare marketing, it's very personable. It's very. It's emotional, it's personal. You're meeting people sometimes at the most vulnerable, scary points of their lives, right? And so being able to connect with people emotionally to create that safety, that trust, that relationship, it's foundational to helping people take action for. For their. For their health. In tech marketing, it's. It's less about emotion and more about delight.

It's more about making their lives easier, helping them be faster or quicker or more entertained. And that. That vulnerability, that trust foundation isn't necessarily as much of a requirement.

Can you talk a little bit about how you approach that in your role at Wonder Health and really thinking about building trust. What are some of the things that you and your team are doing to build that trust?

Absolutely. So when we're talking about weight loss and obesity, I'm not sure you could get a more vulnerable topic, a more vulnerable health care topic, and being able to come at it from a place of empathy, of understanding, of thought leadership to make that connection and to help people who have maybe tried and failed many, many, many times, maybe they have lost and gained know in a cycle throughout their. Their adult life. So being able to establish ourselves as a trusted resource for them, we've been around a long time. We, you know, we have clinicians, we have health coaches. We. We have had immense success with helping people just like them and creating that mirror for them. Being that we have helped people like you, we can help you.

Here's the program to follow and you can be successful with us.

I love that. Yeah. There's something not every marketer has the fortune of having a. I'll call it relatively targeted or niche audience. Right. Where you can say with authenticity, like, we serve you, we get you, we know you. We've been down this pathway before with others who are just like you. Follow this, you know, recommended path and.

And this will work for you too. And I think you're 100. Right? Right. Like that. That does speak to people. And, you know, I could see where that. That is very. Has been very successful for you.

All right. And it's, you know, being able to point to the fact that it's. It's clinically based, it's based in behavioral science, it's clinician le. It is not a fat diet. It's not a crash diet. It's not a diet at all. Right. You don't have to give up your favorite foods.

This is all about teaching and enabling skills that will last your lifetime. It's not a quick fix.

Right?

People, I think really, they're not looking for a quick fix. Right. They're looking to change their lives. And they want. They crave a solution that they can trust will help them be successful. It won't be easy, it won't be fast. But with. With Wonder Health, we can help you learn the skills and have the support that they need to attain their.

Their personal goals.

Love that. How do you. Let's talk. Dive in a little bit more around this idea of engagement and like, how do you people get people to not just sign up, but to stick with it? Right? I mean, people. You're right. People Want the long term, you know, lifestyle change. And yet as a society, you know, being similar in age here, like we've grown up in this, this quick fix sort of mentality. Right.

And so there is a little, I feel like tides are starting to shift a little bit at the society level. There's an understanding that you, you need to be in this for the long haul. But how do you guys address that from a marketing perspective of getting people not just to sign up, but to stick with it?

Right. Lots of different ways. So we are wonderhealth has been very much, as I said, based on behavioral science. Our program is based on that. And in addition to that, it's not just our product, but it's how we engage individuals that is also based on science. So behavioral economics concepts gain framing is a big thing and making that a personal approach. So being able to understand an individual's motivators, why are you looking to lose weight? Is it because you have a chronic condition? Is it because you are aging and you want to get your health on track? Being able to understand why, get to the why of the individual and wrapping that in not just to the product, but to the marketing that supports the product and the consumer's experience. Experience with WonderHelp, in addition, intrinsic and extrinsic motivators.

So again, getting back to the my why with the intrinsic motivators, but having an entire rewards component, a wraparound our product to help people reward themselves for taking the specific actions needed to be successful and to help them reach their outcomes, their goals. Having that just be embedded in the product as well as the marketing component that supports that. We've been very much focused this year in particular on getting to that one to one personalization and operationalizing that across the life cycle of our participants. So understanding again, an individual's my why, building that or embedding that into their entire experience to help them be much more successful, but also taking that all the way through the marketing. So understanding the message that resonates with an individual, the creative that resonates, the frequency of touch points, the channel that they most respond to, and being able to operationalize that into the future has been a huge focus for us going looking into 2026.

Wow. Yeah. Kudos to you all for doing that. I mean, that's quite an undertaking, but a very thoughtful, customized approach that I'm sure is delivering from an ROI standpoint. And maybe we'll, we'll come back to that. But I'm, I'm wondering too how you may be leveraging AI to help support that, that customization process.

Oh, that is 2026, Sarah. Absolutely. So being able to operationalize at that one to one personalization level absolutely needs to be, we need, we need to be able to leverage AI. It's just, that's the only way that we can scale that. So we are just kicking off an implementation for replacing our email platform, which has a lot of the AI capabilities that we need, that's attached to our product platform and really creating that, that shared data set that we can get to that one to one personalization. So that's a major focus of Wonder Cloud going into next year.

Awesome.

It.

And you are again, somewhat fortunate in that, you know, they're, they're engaged with your platform and so they're sharing certain info, there are certain behaviors that they are exhibiting that you are able to then track Right. And monitor and create that very unique customized profile to them. Right. What, what about the front end though? Like, let's say, you know, before I sign up, right. When you were trying to top a funnel, you're trying to get my attention to get me to sign up. How are you looking at bringing that level of, you know, you talked about that emotive component. What is their. Why, if you don't know it yet, how are you guys sort of bringing that towards the top of the funnel when you may not know that level of detail yet about someone?

Oh, that's a great question. So, so we leverage the data that we do have. So a lot of times we'll be getting eligibility files from our clients so we can understand some basic information of the eligible population. A big one. You know, age, of course, gender is another one. Industry. A lot of times we'll have industry and understanding how those basic elements of data can help us craft an appropriate message for these different segments. So creating cohorts and customizing or personalizing the message and the imagery based on those cohorts to create content that appeals to those individuals, that gets them interested, that gets them educated and really creates that awareness so that when an individual is ready to take action and start the enrollment process, that they know who we are, what we offer them, and that we have created that trusted relationship already to help them be successful in the product.

Love that. As you think about your approach to consumer engagement, if you think about it in terms of like a framework, what are the key sort of principles that you think every health care marketer needs to consider when they're, they're thinking about their approach to consumer engagement?

Oh, this is a sidebar one okay, so tell me more about where you're. You're going with this one. So framework for engagement or acquisition or.

Engagement is what I was thinking. I realized we jumped from engagement to back to acquisition and now we're kind of back to engagement again. So apologies for that confusion there. But no, I was thinking engagement and I was thinking it doesn't have to be super formal, but it was more, it's more like advice. Right. If you had advice for other health marketing leaders who are, who are really trying to have an objective to focus more on engagement, where they should start or what they should be thinking about, and if you want me to reframe the question, I can certainly do that too. And I could say, you know, like going back to the engagement piece.

Sure. So I think that the framework that I would approach healthcare marketing to consumers is one, get the best data that you possibly can get to understand your audience. Right. That's the big enabler to knowing your eligible population, your engaged population, and then be be able to continue adding to those that insight of the individual. Knowing who you are talking with, speaking with, interacting with, will help you craft content that resonates to the individual. And creating that trusted relationship again, always going back in health care, it's about trust, right. You're talking with people, you're interacting with people who are allowing you into really vulnerable places of their lives. Right.

And their relationships. And so creating that personalized the interaction will allow you to create that trust, which will allow you to create an engaged relationship with that consumer.

I love that. What do you think is one of the assumptions or misperceptions marketers have when it comes to driving health engagement?

That it's transactional.

Good one. Yeah, I love that.

It's not actionable. Right. Your, your KPI cannot end at a open rate, a click rate, vision rate, and adopt a retention rate. Right?

Yes.

You have got to keep your eye on what the consumer's goal, the individual's goals are. If it's they want to sleep better, they want to live longer, they want to feel better, they want to feel confident.

Right?

All of those things. As a healthcare marketer, especially a consumer healthcare marketer, that is your end goal. And so you really have to balance the business objectives with the participants or the consumers objectives and hold those equal. Right. If you merely focus on the business objectives, you, you will be doing a disservice to consumer.

Such a great point. I'm going to personally go back and re listen to this a few times. Such a great point. We. So I'm curious when you walk into your quarterly, you know, business review or monthly business review, and you know, I'm not, not asking you to, to disclose things you can't, but so you're saying that you are very much focused on the impact marketing has had in your consumer outcomes. Like, that's amazing. Yeah, that's absolutely amazing.

We leave or we lead every all hands meeting, every advisory board meeting, every, every large scale meeting is led with a participant testimonial. We always are. That is our anchor, that's our foundation as a business is to understand how our, our product, our solutions are, are impacting the lives of our participants. That, that is our North Star. Those that experience is tied to clinical outcomes which are tied to business objectives and business outcomes which are tied to our clients business objectives and outcomes. So there, there is no silo between each of these segments of individuals. Everything is tied together with the core and the foundation of our consumer.

I love that. That's so great. I wanted to talk about a specific story of one of your customers that I saw on social media. His name's Teddy. And I noted in this post he's someone who's lost £100 with wonder health. And what I loved about the story and the post wasn't just this amazing, impressive number and how he's improved his health, but this goes back to your point earlier. It was more about what he gained in energy and in joy. And there was a line in the post about like, that's the real ROI of behavior change.

And that's what really hit me. And I just, you know, I wondered if you could comment on how you, you know, kind of bring some of that into your marketing while also balancing the clinical side and the clinical, you know. Right. There's a balance. You want to talk about the clinical outcomes, but also the, the emotional part that is maybe someone's personal goal too, on a, on a bigger level of having more energy or more joy in their life.

Right. And actually those are things that we formally measure as part of our solution. So we measure impact on sleep. We measure impact on many different components that they feel more confident in. I love that their health or their, you know, their ability to manage their weight, their anxiety. So those are all formally baked in metrics within the Wonder Health solution suite.

Wow. What a gift from a marketing perspective.

Right, right, right. It's, it's, it's something that we can broaden how we relate to people and how we can fit within their personal goals of what they're looking to do with their lives. And with their health. So being able to tap into. Again, tapping into the my.

Why?

Right. Usually an individual, yes, they want to lose weight, but it may not be the driving objective. It may be that they have a comorbidity. Right. They have diabetes, they have heart disease, etc. That is their main objective. And weight loss is the mechanism for them to improve their health, to improve their compliance with their diabetes or etc. And so being able to have more in our toolbox to relate to these folks, it just makes it so much, you know, easier to establish those relationships and to relate to them.

Yeah. And it just unlocks a lot of richness from a storytelling and a content perspective. You know, what a. What a dream, like I said for you and your team, I. I noticed that you're certified in change management.

Yes.

And how does that discipline influence your approach to consumer marketing? And Right. It's change management, it's behavior change. Like, how are you sort of bringing those things together? That. That was a really fascinating background that has to be incredibly valuable to you and your role.

Absolutely. It really helps with the storytelling in how and what to serve up in terms of content. So I'm PROSCI certified in change management, and one of the methodologies is called Adkar. Right. So awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, reinforcement. It's a very structured methodology. And so when you're looking at behavior change with consumers and health and changing an individual's behaviors to achieve their goals, it's a perfect way to structure our content. Right.

So top of funnel awareness that this is available to you. Wonderhealth is available to you. It's part of your benefits. There's no cost to you. It's provided by your employer. And continuing that drumbeat of awareness, messaging, desire, if an employer has an incentive tied to their participation in Wondr Health, talking about the percentage of weight loss that they can expect to see, tying in their other comorbidities that they might have, really focusing that on our cohorts as that is the acquisition funnel. It just falls right in line, creating that desire of the individual knowledge. How does Wonder work? So getting into the nitty gritty of what they can expect ability.

Here's your enrollment flow. We talk to them in lots of different communication channels. They can enroll 24 7. We have health coaches that can help them if they get sick, stuck. They can skip the insurance step if they have coverage through their employer or their carrier. And then once they do enroll and they have the success, keeping them engaged with the product, ongoing reinforcement nudges, motivators to help them be successful.

Love it. So great. You guys are doing so many things just so well, you know, from. From where I sit and listening to you talk about this. But obviously we all always have opportunities to improve, right, and take things to the next level. And you've already talked about, you know, adopting AI in 2026 as part of this, you know, quest to improve customization and, you know, communication to these individuals who are using your platform. What is, what else is on your sort of wish list for your team and the organization? Having been down this pathway, learning a lot, what else do you all sort of want to. Want to stretch toward that you feel other marketing leaders could also draw some inspiration from in their own programs of how to take it to the next level?

I think what I'm really excited about coming up is enhancing the data that's available to us, so bringing in more of the elements from within our product with what we learn of an individual through multiple different sources and really creating a holistic identity of each person, a profile of the individual, and making meaningful use of that cohesive approach to omnichannel orchestration. So across push notifications, across sms, across coach interaction, so the live services, across email, across print, so all of the different channels and our product having that be orchestrated at the individual level and just uber personalized to help them move them along and help them be successful achieving their clinical goals. That's what I'm super geeking out about. And it's really hard as a marketer, right? Your data is all over the place. You may not get it refreshed as often as you want to. It could be siloed or from data that's being generated from the product. And having the ability to have a total lifecycle lens and be able to tap all of that data in a meaningful way is just really exciting. And being able to have the tools in place and the functionality in place to operationalize that huge lift.

Nobody does a great job with it learning. It's really hard. But with AI and machine learning and putting the right tools in place, we can get there, right? We're making progress. We're moving the needle with establishing cohorts. Now we have to take it to the individual level and stitch together all these disparate data sources and connect them with all of our marketing channels.

Love that. No small feat indeed, right? Always room for some improvements. But yeah, very impressed with the work that you guys are doing over there. I wanted to switch gears a little bit because I'm a huge fan of some of your posts on LinkedIn. For those of you who don't follow Misty on LinkedIn, you definitely should because she offers these wonderful posts she calls OG marketing and advice, which are wonderful little gems of wisdom, if you will.

Hard. Hard earned gems.

Yes, hard earned gems. I wanted to close out by sharing a few of those and just asking you to reflect on those a little bit. You've said don't fall in love with your idea. Why is that so important for marketers and healthcare today?

Yeah. I think when you fall in love with your ideas, you become blinded to new information. And that new information could be that the path that you're going down is not the right path. Right. You're making a mistake or you need to shift directions, or it could be.

That.

There'S opportunity for optimization. Right. When you fall in love with your ideas, you start going down a path and you do. You don't slow down and you don't. You don't learn and you don't flex. If you be. If you're open to taking in new insights, you become supercharged.

Yes.

You can change directions, you can change. You can, you can change your path. You get smarter, you get faster, and the outcome becomes more likely to become a success. Right. Don't have your blinders on. Be open to being wrong. Being wrong is so fun. Right? If you, if you are open to being wrong, you're open to learning and you're open to doing it better.

Right. And we all want to be better. We all want to optimize, we all want to be successful. So be open to being wrong. Love that about being wrong.

Great advice. It's that growth mindset. Right. And I 100% agree with you on that. That's a great one. Let's look at another one here. You've said be excited for the journey of getting smarter, which is kind of similar theme, but a different question though. What's something that you've learned recently that changed your perspective?

Oh, goodness. Let's see. I can tell you. Let's see. Making an assumption with a popular. So I'll. I'll give you a specific one. So don't do this.

Okay. Don't do this. I learned the hard way there was a population. This was not with Wonderhell. This was previous role. There was a population in a state that typically would have a very. A large Hispanic population. Right.

And we assumed that bilingual would be. Would resonate. Right. And we were wrong. We were wrong. We had a net negative impact to our conversion.

Oh.

By making this assumption. Right. Another would be an assumption that only women are interested in weight loss solutions.

That's a good one.

Okay. I would say within wonder, the. The. The cohorts that show the most weight loss and what we would call super losers are men.

Interesting.

So making that assumption and, you know, you can see why.

Right.

The weight loss industry has historically been geared towards women culturally. And things. Things are changing.

Right.

And weight loss is not specific to women. It's not specific to aesthetics, although it can be for some people. Men are just as interested in their physical health and including their. Their healthy weight as women. And so being able to speak to them in a way that is meaningful, that is relevant, is really important.

Those are both great examples and both fall into the category of, hey, let's not assume we know our customer base both in terms of who the target audience is and then how they want to be communicated with.

Right, Right. That's why I love consumer marketing, specifically because you are always surprised. You are always learning. Your assumptions are always being turned on its head, and being able to flex with that and learn as you go is endlessly fascinating.

Okay, one more OG marketing advice wisdom here. What's your advice to marketers who want to make a real impact on people's health, not just their metrics?

Let's see. My advice who want to. Their health. My advice to marketers that want to make an impact on people's health would be to. I gotta think for a second.

That's okay. Take your time.

Okay. I'm gonna frame it.

And if you want me to re. Ask it a different way, I can do that too.

No, there's just. There's a lie I gotta mentally sit through. My. My advice to them would be to remember to keep the human at the center.

So.

Think of your target audiences as a mom or as your aunt or your child. Right. Always remember that you're speaking to humans, and remember that. That you have the privilege and the responsibility of relating to these folks as your child, as your grandmother, as your aunt, your sister. That connection is what will help you to be more relevant, to be more meaningful, and to create that connection before you're able to help them with behavior change or whatever the action is, as a marketer that you're asking them to take. It goes back again to that trust.

Yeah.

You have to earn their trust as a person, as a human. And to do that, you have to be relevant and you have to establish that connection.

I love that. Such great advice. And I can tell that you live that like that. That is very authentic and a personal mission of yours to really live knowing and communicating with these people as people that are, you know, potentially in your inner circle. Right. As if they were in your inner circle. That's such great advice.

It's. It's so easy to think of healthcare consumers as numbers.

Yes.

Yep.

We're all guilty of it.

We're 100% right. We're. We're in business, and we have, we have OKRs to hit. We have KPIs to hit, all of the things that we're responsible for as marketing leaders. And it's just really easy to forget about the, the humans, the people who are behind those numbers.

Absolutely. Misty, this has been fantastic conversation. So fun, and I learned a lot. Thank you so much for being here today.

My pleasure. It was fun. Thanks, Sarah.

You're welcome. Thanks so much. And if today's episode challenged you to think differently, do us a favor and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for being part of the Health Marketing Club collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence, because the future of healthcare depends on it. We'll see you next time.