Does the fact that hospitals often lose money on mental health patients mean that they should not market to the affected population? behavioral health coverage were enacted. Employers who wanted to offer behavioral health coverage to their employees were faced with a major cost-containment challenge.

ABC Health Services was a major player in the behavioral health arena, reporting an enrollment of more than 3 million members in its managed care plans. ABC was faced with the same issues other behavioral health plans had to address: customers who could not distinguish between plans and were shopping for the lowest price. As a result, ABC was losing clients to other, sometimes less capable, plans that quoted lower prices.

In response to this situation, ABC developed an innovative approach to the market using lifestyle segmentation analysis. On the basis of records maintained on enrollees who participated in its behavioral health plans, ABC believed the likelihood of using behavioral health services could be linked to different lifestyle categories among employees.

ABC also thought that the type and intensity of services used could be correlated with lifestyle cluster.

ABC subsequently profiled existing clients in terms of its MOSAIC lifestyle clusters (see Exhibit 8.3). They found that approximately a dozen lifestyle clusters (of the 60 MOSAIC clusters) were associated with a high propensity to use behavioral health services. Another ten lifestyle clusters were almost never associated with the use of these services. The remaining clusters did not appear to correlate with use or nonuse