Marketing isn’t about clever ideas, it’s about understanding real people: Narayana Health’s Dr Ashish Bajaj

Healthcare marketing today demands a delicate balance, one that requires marketers to navigate the complexities of building trust, ensuring informed decision-making, and driving business growth without exploiting vulnerability or fear. In an era where patients arrive at hospitals armed with their own research and heightened expectations, the industry needs marketing professionals who can transform from persuaders into empathetic service providers. It requires agility to respond to evolving consumer needs and an ethical compass to ensure every message serves the patient's best interest rather than just the bottom line.

Dr Ashish Bajaj's path to becoming Group Chief Marketing Officer at Narayana Health reflects this shift in healthcare marketing. His journey from media agencies to startups like Ola and MediBuddy, before landing in the healthcare ecosystem, has equipped him with an understanding of how to blend startup agility with healthcare marketing. Where his early career taught him the power of experimentation combined with data-led course correction, his current role demands what he calls "agility applied responsibly", maintaining speed and authenticity while ensuring every touchpoint is backed by insight and empathy.

This career trajectory has shaped how Bajaj approaches healthcare marketing at Narayana Health, where the brand proposition "Take Care" serves not merely as a tagline but as what he describes as "the purpose of brand" that guides every marketing decision. His experience across different industries has taught him that effective healthcare marketing isn't about clever campaigns but about understanding real people, a philosophy that has led him to redefine his hiring criteria. He prioritises marketers who possess empathy, cross-functional thinking, and ethical clarity over traditional media savvy and execution speed.

The ethical framework Bajaj has developed serves as a non-negotiable guideline against the temptations of growth-driven marketing in healthcare. He believes there shouldn’t be overpromising or fear-based triggers in this industry, wherein even tools like AI and personalisation are used to inform rather than manipulate. 

In our conversation, Bajaj elaborates on how this philosophy translates into practical strategies at Narayana Healthcare, leveraging AI for responsible personalisation, building national brand recall and fostering the kind of trust that transforms patients into partners in their own healthcare journey.

Edited Excerpts:

Your career path is quite unique, moving from media agencies and startups like Ola and MediBuddy to a large, established healthcare group like Narayana Health. What was the core marketing lesson you learned in the fast-paced startup world that you find surprisingly applicable to building long-term trust in healthcare?

The biggest lesson I learned from startups like Ola and MediBuddy is the power of rapid experimentation combined with data-led course correction. In fast-paced environments, you are constantly testing and iterating. In healthcare, while the context demands caution, that same agility, applied responsibly, helps build long-term trust. You communicate with speed, authenticity and sensitivity, ensuring every touchpoint is backed by insight and empathy.

How has your deep understanding of the media landscape influenced your approach to creative and content development at Narayana Health?

Having started my career in media agencies, I learned early that each channel requires its own storytelling language. This taught me to never approach content with a one-size-fits-all mindset. At Narayana Health, our campaigns are built around the user’s context, whether it’s designing attention-grabbing outdoor creatives or translating clinical narratives into simple, relatable social content. It’s about optimising not just for media efficiency, but for emotional resonance as well.

You made a significant shift from media agencies to the client side with Nokia, where you were involved in major launches. What was the catalyst for this move, and what was the biggest "unlearning" you had to do when you were suddenly responsible not just for media, but for the entire go-to-market strategy?

What pulled me to Nokia was the opportunity to influence the entire go-to-market lifecycle. The biggest shift was in mindset.

As an agency partner, your role often stops at delivery; on the brand side, you are accountable for business outcomes end-to-end, from creative to conversion to customer experience.

I had to unlearn siloed thinking and start connecting every campaign to operations, product, and real user feedback.

Can you share a specific moment or campaign from early in your career that felt truly pioneering, where you took a risk on a new platform or strategy that paid off and solidified your belief in a digitally-led approach?

If I have to recall one defining moment, I would say it was when I led a team to win India’s first national round of the Young Lions Media competition. We represented India at Cannes and later also received a Gold recognition at Young Spikes in Singapore for a WHO strategy. This was during my early agency days. Around the same time, we also executed the Nokia Antakshri campaign: a digital engagement initiative designed to build communities by leveraging the most loved community-building game, Antakshri, but done digitally. This campaign was pioneering in its approach to foster connections through a familiar cultural touchpoint, but on a new digital platform. These experiences taught me that if you blend bold thinking with relevance and purpose, even new voices from India can compete on global creative stages.

The healthcare consumer is becoming increasingly informed, often coming in with their own research from the internet. How does this shift from a passive patient to an active, informed consumer change the role of healthcare marketing?

Today’s healthcare audience is informed, curious, and digitally empowered. They often come with their own research and specific expectations. This shifts marketing from monologue to dialogue. Our job now is to equip them with credible, clear, and timely information, making marketing feel more like service than persuasion. It’s about enabling informed decisions, not just pushing messages.

Under your leadership, Narayana Health's brand proposition has evolved to "Take Care." This is a simple, yet profound promise. How does this central idea influence your team's day-to-day marketing decisions, from a large-scale campaign down to a single social media post?

“Take Care” isn’t just a brand line; it’s the purpose of the brand. It guides how we build campaigns, choose platforms, and even write social captions. A large-scale film should make you feel reassured, not overwhelmed. A WhatsApp reminder should sound like a concerned friend, not a system alert. This principle helps keep us grounded in empathy, no matter how complex the brief.

How do you, as a leader, draw the line between effective communication that empowers patient choice and marketing that could inadvertently exploit fear or over-promise on clinical outcomes? What is the one guiding principle you instil in your team to ensure that even when chasing growth targets, advertising and marketing messaging remains ethical?

In healthcare, trust is everything. Our golden rule is: no overpromising, no fear-based triggers. AI or personalisation should never be used to exploit emotion or urgency; it must inform, not manipulate. We ask ourselves with every campaign: Is this content empowering? If not, it doesn’t go out. That’s the one non-negotiable I hold the team to, even under growth pressure.

As a leader who has built and managed teams across different industries, how has your definition of a "great marketer" evolved? What core competencies did you look for in a team member at Narayana Health?

Earlier, I defined strong marketers by their media savvy and execution speed. Today, I value empathy, cross-functional thinking, and ethical clarity above all.

The best marketers I work with are the ones who can understand human behaviour, tell compelling stories, work fluidly with data, and still know when to stop and ask, “Is this the right thing to do for the patient?”

You've previously described Narayana Health's media strategy as hyperlocal. Could you elaborate on how you execute this on the ground? How do you balance hyperlocal BTL activations and digital targeting with the need to build a broader, national brand recall?

Our strategy is built on two layers. Hyperlocal media allows us to engage communities within 30 km of each hospital, through local-language ads, geo-targeted digital, and outdoor messaging that speaks their language. On the other hand, national campaigns ensure a unified brand identity. This balance helps us remain contextually relevant while building lasting recall at the national level.

With the rise of AI in marketing, there's a lot of talk about personalisation. In healthcare, personalisation is not just about convenience but can have clinical implications. From your perspective, what are some of the ways that brands should use AI for healthcare marketing?

In healthcare, personalisation isn’t about convenience, it’s about relevance and safety. We use AI to segment audiences based on health history, age, location, and outreach needs. Whether it’s preventive care nudges or wellness programs, every message is carefully filtered through clinical logic and ethical oversight. AI is a tool for better timing and targeting, but never at the cost of sensitivity.

If you could give one piece of advice to the Ashish Bajaj, who was just starting his career at an advertising agency, knowing everything you know now about brand building, startups, and healthcare, what would it be?

I would tell myself: Learn to listen before you create. Marketing isn’t about clever ideas, it’s about understanding real people. If you can stay rooted in empathy and build trust over time, everything else, awards, ROI, scale, will follow. Especially in healthcare, the most powerful stories are the honest ones.