Branding pharma

Q&A

I’m pharma, brand me

With Mike Young, Senior Partner at Brand (x)

Q. Brand building is very important as it builds customer loyalty. How do you start that brand building process?

A. Irrespective of what any company does, we have to remember that customers build a brand themselves by the associations they make with it. It’s important to realise that they are going to do this even if we don’t do any conscious branding activity ourselves. It means that if we are to have a role in this we must first of all come up with a blue print of what we want our brand to be like, in other words what group of associations we’d like customers to have with the brand. However, we can’t pull that blueprint out of the air, so in terms of a process of getting branding started, the first step is that we must gain customer insight.

This means being sure who your customers are (and determining who the most important ones are) before examining their rational and emotional needs and thereafter looking at how your competitors and your brand, if it is already on the market, fit with those needs. These insights are really the underpinning because until you understand what your customers are about both rationally and emotionally you can’t actually start the branding process.

They allow you to go on to step two which is all about looking at the features that the brand has and translating them into appropriate benefits to meet those needs and then to move on to values and beyond. However, the starting point remains really deep insight into what it is that drives your customers.

Q. We hear a lot about brands having ‘core values’. What do you mean this?

A. A core value means something which is highly intrinsic to the brand – a value that will be with a brand all of its life. Normally a brand will only have three or four of these. To give you some examples from consumer brands, if you take something like Nike, one of the values that they are associated with is winning. If you take Harley Davidson it’s freedom or with Apple it’s creativity. In pharmaceuticals you get brands associated with values like liberation, peace of mind, progressiveness, leadership, confidence and so on. It’s these values that are going to stay with the brand throughout its life, and which belong to your brand and not to the competition. These are what core values are.

Q. Do you think the importance of branding has been recognised by pharmaceutical companies?

A. A number of companies have recognised the importance of branding, but in the industry as a whole it remains undeveloped. In the pharmaceutical industry we remain very rationally based and very product focused, which is all very well as long as we are producing blockbusters which are highly and rationally differentiated from competitors and we can keep that competitive advantage. But if we can’t we have to look at other things – and within the pharmaceutical arena some of the bigger companies have definitely explored branding. GSK is a keen proponent, AstraZeneca too.

In terms of whether they are successful in doing this with branding, it’s very difficult to scientifically prove the case one way or another. However, GSK would probably claim that branding has made a noticeable difference to Seretide, for example. I know too that AstraZeneca might also claim that branding has been important in the success of their prostate cancer drugs among others. So there are quite a few case histories where people believe that branding has made a major contribution and they therefore continue to enthusiastically embrace it thereby leading the way in the industry.

Q. How important is it that branding reaches across different audiences and lifecycle stages?

A. One very important thing about branding is that it needs to be consistent. A brand needs to be consistent across all audiences and across time. That means you can’t be one thing to one audience and another thing to another audience. You have to be the same to everyone. It’s said that a brand should be coherent at all touch points, which basically means that whichever way you look at it, it’s always the same thing. When people talk to each other, even if they are from different audiences, they should have similar basic feelings and thoughts around the brand. This should apply over time as well, throughout the lifecycle unless there are major changes in the environment.

Q. A patent can often run out just a few years into the commercial life of a product. How can you make sure that a product will continue to have a monopoly on its market through branding?

A. That is a very interesting question. Can branding save you from generics? The problem you have here is that they say branding is about the added value, which enables you to justify the price difference over a commodity or in this case a generic. The issue here is that when there is a vast price difference between the branded product and the generic then branding won’t close that gap. So there aren’t many good examples where you could say that simply doing branding is going to save you if you’ve lost your patent.

Q. Where do you see the future for branding and pharmaceuticals?

A. I referred earlier to the fact that nowadays we are all in the same boat, if you like, across all product sectors not just pharmaceuticals. Whatever product is put on the market, it’s copied within a relatively short time. In the old days you used to have sustainable competitive advantage. You’d have a product that you knew was distinct, and able to promote itself for a number of years because it was functionally different.

If you take Volvo cars, for example, and the way they used to go on about safety year in and year out, that’s the way things used to be. Now things are very, very quickly copied and that includes pharmaceuticals. No sooner is there a drug launch than other members of the class start to appear. The problem is, from the customer’s standpoint, that you look at drugs in a class and think they are very similar. Obviously we like to focus on the differences, but if you are really going to enhance those differences you have to look at what branding can do for you and say we’ve got to meet the needs of customers better than we have done in the past.

That is one thing that will make branding important to pharmaceutical companies in the future. Another point is the whole idea of corporate branding, which is rather underdeveloped in the pharmaceutical industry. In the consumer world, you buy a product not simply because of the brand but because of the company behind it. The company who makes it actually gives it added value. This is something that we don’t really see that much of in the pharmaceutical industry and I think that will definitely increase in the future.