Eva Heath is Vice President, Commercial Group Growth & Retention Marketing at Kaiser Permanente, where she and her team work across business and consumer audiences. Their work spans helping employers and brokers understand the organization’s value, guiding shoppers through benefits decisions, and welcoming and supporting members throughout their care and coverage experiences.
Nearly 19 years into her Kaiser Permanente career, Heath brings a perspective shaped by studies in comparative literature and cultural studies, arts marketing in London, and time at the San Francisco Opera. Her move into nonprofit health care deepened the sense of purpose she first found in the arts. Across both fields, she has been drawn to the power of language and storytelling to communicate complex, meaningful ideas.
Named to our Marketers to Watch list, Heath shared her perspectives on bringing brand and demand together, keeping people at the center of marketing, and the career advice that changed her approach to leadership.
What book or podcast do you recommend to marketing leaders?
I really enjoy the HearSay podcast from Maslansky + Partners. It explores how language shapes perception, particularly where culture, current events, politics and economics intersect. I’ve always been fascinated by how people interpret words and how those interpretations can shift perception and behavior depending on the world around them.
As marketers, we spend so much time thinking about what we want to communicate, but what really matters is how our audiences receive and interpret those messages. HearSay is a great reminder that the words we choose, and the context in which people hear them, can make all the difference.
How are you and your team currently using AI in a regulated industry like health care, where trust and privacy matter so much?
In health care, trust and privacy are paramount. I think of AI as a helper, in service to the humans who are the creators, innovators and experts responsible for driving all of our work. The goal isn’t to replace human thinking, but to free up more time for creativity, strategy and the work that really matters.
Ultimately, I believe the greatest opportunity for AI is to help us become more human, not less. We’re testing how AI can help our people work smarter so they can spend more time thinking about our customers, members and communities. If we can leverage AI to streamline routine marketing tasks, synthesize complex information and explore different perspectives more efficiently, that will be a win.
What’s a prediction you have for marketing over the next few years, particularly around how B2B buyers make decisions?
We’re going to see a dramatic shift in how B2B buyers find, consume and evaluate information, particularly as AI becomes more embedded in the decision-making process. But here’s what I don’t think will change: our end users remain human.
Take HR leaders, for example. Many chose their profession because they genuinely care about making things better for their colleagues. Technology may change how they research health care options or compare solutions, but it won’t change the underlying hopes, concerns and needs driving those decisions.
As marketers, we’ll need to rethink how we reach people while staying grounded in what motivates them. The tools will evolve, but our ability to understand and connect with people will remain just as important.
What’s the most innovative or exciting project you’ve worked on recently?
One of the most exciting projects I’ve worked on recently is Keeping Promises, Kaiser Permanente’s first enterprise-level B2B brand-to-demand campaign. Kaiser Permanente was founded on a differentiated model that brings care and coverage together, but communicating the full value of that integration hasn’t always been easy in a for-profit, fee-for-service world.
With cost and access continuing to challenge our country, people are more open than ever to considering new ideas. The time was right to bring our commercial value proposition to life in a new, powerful way.
What made this effort particularly meaningful was how it united our health plan, care delivery, sales and marketing teams around a shared narrative, connecting the strength of our care model with the health outcomes that matter to our members and their employers.
Our early learnings reinforce something I strongly believe: brand and demand work better together, and so do the head and the heart. Data without a compelling story can fall flat, but storytelling without evidence is equally ineffective.
Supporting video: Keeping Promises Longform Video
What’s the most pressing growth or retention challenge you’ve faced in the last year, and how did you tackle it?
Access and affordability remain two of the biggest challenges facing health care today, and Kaiser Permanente isn’t immune to them. But our integrated care and coverage model puts us in a unique position to do something about both.
As a marketing leader, my challenge is helping audiences understand how that difference benefits them. It’s not enough to say we’re different. We have to prove how our model helps address the challenges employers and members are facing every day. That’s where we’ve focused our efforts: translating the strengths of our organization into clear, relevant stories that help people see the value of choosing Kaiser Permanente.
You market to employers, brokers, consultants and members at the same time. How do you keep the message consistent while speaking to such different audiences?
We start with the brand and work outward. Kaiser Permanente’s core brand positioning is the foundation for everything we communicate, regardless of who we’re speaking to. What changes is the lens through which we tell that story.
An employer evaluating health benefits has different priorities than a broker advising clients or a member navigating their care. We need to understand what matters most to each audience and bring forward the aspects of our story that are most relevant to them, without losing sight of the bigger picture.
For us, that’s both a philosophy and a methodology. When you’re grounded in a clear, consistent brand promise, you can tailor how you communicate without changing what you stand for.
What leadership muscle is most important for marketers to exercise?
Curiosity. I know it’s a well-worn answer, but I genuinely believe it’s one of the most important qualities a leader can demonstrate, especially when the world around us is so fraught and changing so quickly. We have to be willing to challenge our assumptions, consider different perspectives and look at familiar problems in entirely new ways.
I also think curiosity goes hand in hand with intellectual humility. The more experience I gain, the more I realize how much I still have to learn from the people around me. When we stop asking questions or become too quick to dismiss ideas, we limit our ability to grow and innovate. Staying curious keeps us open to possibilities, and I think it makes us better leaders.
What’s the most game-changing piece of career advice you’ve ever received?
Some of the best career advice I’ve ever received came from my older sister. Early in my career, as I started working at an enterprise level, I remember feeling frustrated by how many conversations, approvals and steps it took to get anything done. I was so focused on the outcome that I saw the process as something standing in my way.
My sister looked at me and said, “Eva, the journey is the job.”
It completely shifted my perspective. Leadership isn’t just about getting to the finish line. It’s about bringing people together, building alignment, clearing obstacles and creating the conditions for others to succeed. Once I stopped seeing the process as something slowing me down and started recognizing it as the work itself, I found so much more energy and fulfillment in my role. It’s advice I’ve carried with me and passed on to early careerists ever since.
What gives you energy and inspiration outside of work?
I find a lot of energy in being part of something bigger than myself. I love being involved in my community, whether that’s volunteering, supporting the nonprofits that support my kids, or simply finding ways to contribute to the people and places around me. There’s something incredibly rewarding about helping others thrive.
And the arts will always be a big part of my life. I love visual and performing arts, and I try to make time to experience them whenever I can. There’s so much beauty and inspiration in the world around us if we are open to it, and sometimes all it takes is a great performance or an afternoon surrounded by art to remind me of that.
Marketers to Watch is a recognition series to spotlight highly innovative and forward-thinking marketing leaders in the community. If you have someone you’d like to nominate for the series, apply here.
