Using Immersion to Invoke Viscerality (Viscerality Part 4)

Every second counts.

I wanted to open up this article a little differently. If you haven’t already, take a few minutes and watch these scenes from The Bear. Don’t half-ass it, either. Sit down and intentionally watch them; let yourself get wrapped up in the storytelling and the moments they create. 

Because they are doing something very powerful and intentional. They are telling you exactly what you need to feel and exactly what you should be experiencing. Of course, they are using a variety of tools available to their chosen medium, but the audience direction is there.

And it works. In the scene between Carmen and Ritchie (two of the main characters for the uninitiated), we are given a glimpse into a unique moment: Ritchie, who is usually painted to be the f*ck up, is calling out Carmen, considered to be the golden boy, for sabotaging his own life.

It’s an intense moment where the audience is told specifically: hey, at this point, you need to respect Ritchie. Every creative decision — the dialogue, the framing of the composition, the lighting, the contemplative music — tells us that Carmen is in a dark place, literally and figuratively, and even though he is screaming for someone to get him out of the freezer he is trapped in, it is ultimately up to him to pull himself out of the real dark place… himself. 

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My bad. I didn’t mean to get all movie critic on you there; let’s bring it back. Everything done in this shot was intentional. The director told us what to feel in no minced words. Even if we can’t find the phrases to express those feelings, we can still feel what it's like to be in that freezer or at that dinner table. We are immersed.

And because of that, this scene was branded into the memory of The Bear's audience. Years from now, after the show has ended and Jeremy Allen White is no longer breaking the internet with his Calvin Klein collaborations, this scene will live on in the audience’s memory because it was immersive.

That achievement, particularly when it comes to your medical practice, is something that every single marketing effort you create needs to strive for. You need to be in the director’s chair, deciding what you want your audience to feel. What feeling do you want your audience to get lost in when they think about your practice? 

3 Examples of Immersive Moments

Example 1: The Breakfast Club

Even if you aren’t part of the generation that was in high school during the ‘80s, The Breakfast Club does a great job of illustrating what it would feel like if you were. This film is one of the most popular and recognizable movies of all time and still has a huge following around 40 years later.

There is a vibe throughout the entire movie that is hard to quantify, but everything from the clothing and the school setups to the casual cigarette-smoking scenes is quintessentially ‘80s. But, even then, the movie is about capturing how frustrating and hard it is to be understood as a teenager and having to navigate the world during these formative years. 

And that’s a universal feeling that is easy to immerse yourself in, which is why, even now, so many scenes in this movie are layered into our cultures.

Example 2: All New 5 Gum

In the 2000s, 5 Gum was brand new to the masses. It focused its marketing on one thing: powerfully visceral and moving imagery. Its slogan, “Stimulate Your Senses,” accurately represented how these commercials made the audience feel. 

In the example above, hundreds of small metal balls and extreme bass are used to evoke a reaction. What would you feel if you were there? Your brain starts to make the connections, and before you know it, you can feel the cold of the metal beads and the bass reverberating throughout your whole body. 

Thanks to a little magic known as mirror neurons, that association becomes biological. To some degree, these neurons allow anyone watching the commercial to experience the same neuro reaction as actually being there would. 

Because of the effort they put into creating marketing content that immersed their audience, 5 Gum was able to break into the hyper-competitive world of chewing gum with a unique identity that people clung to.

Example 3: Image of the Twin Towers, 9/11

Not to bring the mood down here, but I wanted to show you that not every immersive moment lives in a fictional space. Every American who is old enough to have memories remembers where they were when they found out about the plane flying into the Twin Towers. This is definitely not a fun pop-culture memory or intriguing commercial — this was a moment that everyone in the United States, and even many abroad, collectively shared in horror. 

That day, many of us stood glued to the screen as though we were there ourselves. We felt the pain of the families, the fear of the victims and first responders, and the anger from what was transpiring. We looked on as scene after surreal scene piled up from the attack.

We weren’t physically there, but something this horrifying, grounded in reality and not deriving from a piece of fiction or art, was enough to immerse the entire country. This is an extreme example, but it shows that visceral immersion is possible in a real setting. 

What Does Immersion Look Like for a Medical Practice?

At this point, you might be getting the idea of what powerful immersion looks like, but that is only half the journey. How do we achieve this kind of phenomenon in your practice? 

First, let’s think of some vibes. 

Luxury, comfort, professional. These are three very popular feelings that medical practices try to evoke in their marketing and operations. It’s important to know what you are aiming for before you get started, and these decisions should be made as early as possible. The best time is when you started; the next best time is yesterday.

You’ll have to go through a fair bit of research beforehand. What kind of treatments are you offering? What kind of patients are drawn to you? What kind of patients are you drawn to? What kind of personality do you have? What is the personality of your practice and staff? What experience are you going to provide, and who are the patients that will seek out that experience?

In order to understand how to reach your ideal audience, you need to understand who that ideal audience is. This is typically explored during the patient persona development phase—if you don’t know what patient personas are, just think of them as profiles on the different types of patients you serve. If you still need to build your personas (and we highly recommend that you do), check out this article series or this guide to learn how to get started. 

Let’s Create Immersive Luxury

Let’s say you are a plastic surgeon who does business in a wealthy part of a metropolitan area. You think you can serve a specific niche very well: people with large disposable incomes who are looking for big-ticket surgeries like Mommy Makeovers or breast augmentations. 

Your goal is to provide a luxurious experience. Once they get in the door, you have a lot to do to maintain that, but to even get them to notice your practice, you have to start providing that experience long before you ever see them in person. 

Your branding alone should feel luxurious, expensive, and high-end. The marketing you do needs to be tasteful and demonstrate who your typical clientele is. It needs to use language and imagery that evokes these feelings and makes your audience feel as though they are falling into a scene where they are surrounded by this kind of luxury. 

That can play out in a lot of ways. An advertisement they find on your office's social media that is edited to include scenes of a high-end office and clientele, a blog they read with a unique voice speaking directly to these desires in elegant language and images, the design of your website as they are scrolling through your homepage that includes fonts, imagery, colors, and overall branding that feels like old money… anywhere that digital marketing lives, immersion can (and should) as well.  

Example: Park Cities Cosmetic Surgery

Park Cities Cosmetic Surgery is a good example of a practice and brand that provides a luxurious experience to its patients. As you browse their website, you’ll see a lot of very high-end, classy imagery and a completely black-and-white theme. 

The homepage focuses on providing key information about their services and about Dr. Lee, but ultimately, it subconsciously sets a tone, creates an experience, and draws the potential patient into the world of Park Cities Cosmetic Surgery, even including images of the office decor and furniture.

As the potential patient navigates to a procedure page, that immersion isn’t broken. The same branding and feeling are used to craft an educational page about their procedures. It still uses imagery and luxurious-feeling styling and design, but it is fundamentally still a different page. 

If the patient wants to know more about Dr. Lee, they are in luck: they can find a similarly branded page with even more imagery, narrative, and other content that tells the story of what a patient can and will experience in their office: luxury and artistry. 

In the grand scheme of websites, Park Cities Cosmetic Surgery is a simpler one, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t luxurious, elegant, and classy. And it’s an experience that follows through on all platforms:

Don’t Break Immersion

There’s an old joke in the video game industry that pokes fun at sudden and abrupt immersion breaks: “Oh no, my immersion!” It points out how certain games have hugely immersive storytelling and narratives, but there will, on occasion, be a character with a piece of dialogue that doesn’t quite fit the setting or a plot point that brings the player out of the world they are in and reminds them they are in a game.

Don’t. Let. This. Happen. Keep all of your communications consistent and on-brand so that your audience is never pulled away from the immersive story they have found themselves in. 

Immersion Never Ends

If there’s anything I want you to take away from this idea of using immersion to build viscerality, it is this: immersion begins the moment a potential patient learns that you exist. It doesn’t matter whether that first point of contact is through a social media post, a blog online, your sign outside your office, a billboard advertisement, or even a referral from a friend or family member — you have to be ready to capitalize on the immersion immediately. 

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At this point in the series, we’ve covered a lot: emotional resonance, authenticity, sensory engagement, and now immersion. But there is a final tenet we need to cover if we want to achieve viscerality, something that every single patient and powerful story has: compelling stakes.

If nothing is at stake, there is nothing to gain. So, naturally, when it comes to visceral marketing, understanding the stakes of your patient and using those in your marketing is paramount. Luckily, we are covering some key components of leveraging these stakes in the final part of this series.