Phoenix Children’s Hospital Car Seat Helper and the Power of Removing Indecision

Excerpt from Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype

by Jay Baer

Chapter 3 

Friend-of-mine Awareness

Phoenix Children’s Hospital creates marketing people want. People would probably even pay for it if asked, but the hospital gives it away. They’ve tapped into a universal worry among vehicle-owning parents: finding the correct car seat for their child. Parents dread making a misinformed choice about anything related to the safety of their children, and the array of car seat models, sizes, and options is dizzying. Phoenix Children’s Hospital helps parents make sound car seat decisions with their free Car Seat Helper app, available for Apple- and Android-powered smartphones and tablets.

The award-winning application is simple, singularly purposeful, and highly effective. Parents enter the height and weight of their child, and it instantly recommends the appropriate type and size of car seat.

“So many people have their car seats installed wrong,” says Allison Otu, formerly the media relations specialist for the hospital. “At twenty-two pounds, all of a sudden you’re supposed to get a new car seat. Is it front facing, rear facing? Then you walk into Babies“R”Us and it’s so overwhelming . . . there are forty-five car seats in front of you. You’re not sure what to do. That’s one of the reasons this has been so successful, because it’s such a real-life application.”

Phoenix Children’s Hospital didn’t have to determine which car seats to recommend, as that information was already published by the American Academy of Pediatrics and being handed out to parents in printed form by the hospital’s Injury Prevention Center. Instead, the Car Seat Helper app makes needed information far more accessible. It’s an important distinction, because Youtility doesn’t always require creating helpfulness from scratch. Taking what already exists and putting it in an inherently more helpful format can be just as effective.

Brian Berg, founder of the mobile marketing consultancy MediaKube and creator of the Car Seat Helper app, says, “The American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations came in a three-page flowchart of medical speak. There’s no way anyone could make heads or tails of it. PCH thought it would be a really great opportunity for an application, to make it easy to use.”4 Berg’s design converted the flowchart and its logic into the application, making the entirety of the data available via a simple, four-question interface.>

In addition to recommending types of seats, the application includes information about car seat recalls and video instructions for safe installation. It’s been downloaded tens of thousands of times and carries a 4.5 (out of 5) rating in the iTunes store. If you’ve used this application, live in the Phoenix area, and something unfortunate happens to your child (she breaks an arm, gets the measles, or something else requiring a hospital visit), are you going to go to the nearest clinic? No, you’re going to go to Phoenix Children’s Hospital, which is utilizing Youtility to deepen bonds and break through the squall of marketing noise faced by consumers—especially parents.

The impact of the program spreads far beyond the natural geographical boundaries of the hospital, however. “We’ve had responses from police departments, fire departments, and public safety officers from New Jersey, from California, from all over the place that have found this app, are downloading it, and even using it in their own safety training,” Berg says.

It’s creating a ripple effect of recognition for Phoenix Children’s Hospital, which competes with other major children’s hospitals across the country for grants and donors. “It’s really extending the reach of the hospital beyond Phoenix,” says Berg. “When these other organizations have their own events, they’ll use this app as an educational tool, and encourage parents in other parts of the country to download it, because the information isn’t Phoenix-specific.”

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