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Editor's note:
World Mental Health Day is celebrated every year on October 10, a day that aims to raise public awareness of mental health issues and mobilize support for the promotion of this cause. Mindfront Health online store was successfully opened on JD Health this year during the World Mental Health Day. It can provide multiple types of professional counseling services online, improving the efficiency of counseling and the accessibility of psychological-type services. We are delighted to have Luna Luo, Deputy Director of Marketing Department of Mindfront Health (China) and Sophie Deng, Psychological Counselor of Mindfront Shanghai Clinic to give us an in-depth introduction of this brand new online store.
Luna Luo, Deputy Director of Mindfront Health (China) Marketing Department
Sophie Deng, Psychological Counselor of Mindfront Health (China) Shanghai Clinic
Q:Thank you Luna and Sophie for taking this interview, please briefly introduce yourself.
L: My name is Luna Luo, I’m responsible for Marketing Department of Mindfront Health (China). In the past year my team and I were mainly responsible for building brand moat and doing content marketing and social media matrix related matters. With a number of clinics opening one after another, our team focuses on working with other departments to go through the ramp-up stage, which also includes acquire customers through e-commerce.
S:My name is Sophie, I’m a psychological counselor from Mindfront Shanghai Clinic. I joined Shanghai team at the end of this July. Before joining Mindfront, I used to be a licensed clinical social worker in New York with 5 years of experience, which mainly provide consultation services to adult individuals and partners.
Q:Nice to meet you both, and congratulations to the opening of Mindfront Online Store on World Mental Health Day. Can you give us a brief introduction of this platform?
L:JD Health is similar to AliHealth. Internet Giants started to develop strategic plans in healthcare sector in the recent years. They can use their capabilities in digitization and user lifecycle management, utilize existing internet traffic and integrate resources to launch healthcare service platform, essentially helping to connect providers, counselors, specialists with visitors and patients. We value JD Health’s resource and complete data chain. This can facilitate us to track user's ecological chain, realize the whole life cycle of user management, and facilitate us to track the source of visitors and their feedback.
Mindfront JD Store
Q:What is the significance of Mindfront online flagship store for the strategic planning of Mindfront Health in the Chinese market from your perspective?
L:In terms of our overall market layout, online consultation can better extend the service capability of the offline organizations. We hope to differentiate our offline service and experience from other domestic competitors. Considering the overall online traffic pool and the fact that some visitors from the surrounding cities are unable to visit the offline store on a regular basis, the online consultation can form an extension of the offline service. On the other hand, joining JD Health in the early stage has a good exposure for our online brand, and in the future, when users search for evidence-based psychology on JD Health, they will see Mindfront.
Evidence-based lightweight consultation product
S:We can use some lightweight products in our online store to attract people in need, who may just see some of Mindfront's products while browsing their phones, and attract them to our offline organization and experience our services through these online products. I believe this is a good opportunity to those who do not understand this industry, since they can visit our offline clinic to gain further understanding.
Q:As we know, Mindfront has both online and offline clinics in China, we have opened several clinics in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Xi’an and Shanghai. Mindfront is also planning to open more hospitals and clinics in other core cities of China. How we can facilitate a good synergy between online and offline models in the future?
Shenzhen Clinic-Caring Medical
L:We have indeed opened medical institutions in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Xi'an in a short period of time, some of which were achieved through M & A by the team led by TDK in the early days, while others were invested and built at a later stage. We have applied for the Internet medical services certificate, with the aim of promoting the integration of online and offline. Just like Sophie said, online users may trigger some demands in various Internet scenarios, the demand is directly linked to online or lightweight consulting product. If the consultant believes a certain visitor needs further treatment, he/she can recommend the visitor to heavyweight product in our offline clinics, like group therapy or diagnosis & treatment. We have also considered how to do public communication, for example by using social media and hot topics to communicate with the public on this service which is quite unfamiliar to most of them. Users can see our services and products through social media, and then go offline to attract traffic.
Q:Online consultation is still a new service in China, what are the features and strengths of online model compared with offline?
S:The feature and strength is convenience, we can use video call or phone call to connect with visitors, therefore saved time and transportation cost. Most people don’t feel safe when they start to talk to consultants in a new environment. However, I found visitors react better in a familiar or comfort environment at the start, which has a lot benefit at a later stage. Although online consulting is still a new thing, its convenience will attract many people.
Q:What is Mindfront’s differentiated advantage compared with other online consulting brand in China?
S:First, Mindfront has a APP used to connect with visitors developed by our internal team, which protects users’ information safety and privacy. However, other online consultations use WeChat or face time. The safety of users’ privacy is crucial in our industry, since this is a big concern for many people who are struggling to come for help. Second, our online consultants all come from our own offline clinics, all of them are well-trained and certified.
L:I want to add up on Sophie’s comments on the APP. We follow some of the mature models from abroad, which not only protects the privacy and security of our visitors, but also allows our team of specialists to operate in an integrated manner, with better treatment results under MDT model and facilitates access to commercial insurance. Some domestic online consultation brands only use online model as a diversion, or only provide relationship consultation, but unable to guarantee its credibility, or has no ability to make the treatment effect externalized. I think this is a significant feature and strength of Mindfront, which is something the team has spent a lot effort to build.
Q:The success of a project can’t live without group efforts, can you share with us the biggest challenge during the process, and how did you manage to solve it?
L:We have a very tight schedule when this project was assigned to us. Near the end of the day on September 27th, we were informed that there is a possible opportunity to launch the store on October 10th. The Xi’an, Shanghai and HQ teams were all very cooperative, which ensures a smooth internal coordination to promote the project.
I think one challenge is related to the current environment, we need to think about how to make Mindfront’s professional services captured by C-users, which requires us to fit the ecology of the platform and adjust our words, brand expressions, etc. In terms of public awareness of psychological consultation and healthcare, 70% of competitors are still focusing on relationship consultation and pan-psychology. The e-commerce tactics and promotions used by competitors are contrary to the principles of a professional and rigorous organization like Mindfront. For example, competitors promote relationship consultation with a price of 0.1 RMB just to attract visitors. But we need to consider ethical issues: privacy and visitors’ willingness to pay for a consultation service, so that they can get better effect. We cannot deliberately make our professional consultants provide devalued online services for the sake of customer acquisition. I think this is a challenge for our marketing team to overcome: how to highlight Mindfront within the existing ecology without compromising our professionalism.
S:I agree with Luna, the relationship between consultant and visitor is more like a collaboration. It requires visitors to spend certain amount of time and effort, sometime they even need to finish some homework. The paid service that Luna just talked about represents visitors’ commitment and participation. Consultant and clinics are not able to improve visitor’s condition just on their own, which is a tricky part in psychological consultation. As Luna said, we need to take this into account in the pricing and promotion process.
Q:It has been half a month since the launch of this online store, how is everything going so far?
L:Our online store is based on our offline hospital in Xi’an, with Shanghai team offering online diagnosis and treatment. We have doctors from public Grade A Class 3 hospitals in our Xi'an outpatient clinic. This particular product is our differentiated advantages on JD Health platform and we have successfully get the first order.
Psychological intervention provided by doctors from Grade A Class 3 hospitals
Q:Last but not least, please share with us your expectation on this online store.
L:In the future, we will continue to look for and promote more products that are different from other stores in JD Health, especially some evidence-based and rigorous consultation products. This is in line with JD Health's planning of comprehensive health on the one hand, and the image that Mindfront wants to present on the other. We hope to highlight and enrich this store with more products and hope more online users can better understand the strength of Mindfront.
S:I hope more people will get to know Mindfront and our offline clinics through this platform, so that they will think of us when they are in need and come to our offline clinics to experience our services and share their experiences with others. As a counselor, I hope that people can get help in time when they are in need.