Strategies for successful marketing

Four experts give NGP the inside scoop on the latest techniques for establishing and promoting brand awareness. With Corbett Accel Healthcare Group’s Scott Cotherman, Grey Healthcare Group’s Michel Dubery, IDEA Pharma’s Mike Rea and Zaicom International’s Graeme Chrystal.

“Brands that outperform their market have always actively built their whole ‘idea’, and those who haven’t have underperformed”
-Mike Rea, IDEA Pharma

What is the importance of branding for a successful marketing strategy?
Scott Cotherman. In this globally driven, regulatory-focused marketplace, more reliance than ever is being placed on the scientific integrity of a brand, leading the industry to communicate more credibility at every front. From developing unique a nomenclature and lexicon to position the brand in clinical communications, to establishing visionary campaignability with long-term application, some agencies are taking advantage of this shift in grounding professional value propositions by developing innovative ways of approaching branding.

A focus on core values is a primary requisite for the opportunity to create uniquely ownable and motivating language and visuals. These branding hallmarks are the most permanent public expressions of the brand’s character or personality – how it looks and feels, as well as its tone of voice. They are important contributors to overall brand equity that are inextricably linked to the brand for its lifetime. While they are certainly a significant component of advertising and promotion, they also live in venues where advertising and promotion do not – such as scientific conferences, packaging and so on.

Michel Dubery. Branding still remains core to any marketing strategy. As channels of communications become ever more complex, the existence of a strong brand acts as an anchor for customers, a short cut that simplified choice in a world where choice multiplies faster than ever before. In pharma 20 years ago, the first brand in a new class could have three to five years of exclusivity before being followed by a competitor. Today that can be as little as three to five months, with another five competitors following in that previously exclusive three to five year period. In the absence of strong brands that stand for something, payer pressure can rapidly turn innovation into a price-led commodity market, particularly if the final users are indifferent to the choices they are offered.

Mike Rea. Branding isn’t optional – there are only two alternatives. Branding will happen, either passively when the audience makes up their own minds about the brand (or are led to do so by your competitor), or actively when you get to shape what they believe. So, a qualified ‘it’s essential’.

The qualification is that we need to be clear about what we mean – too often in pharma, people hear the word branding and think logos and colours, maybe even a tagline, but in this industry, those have been proven to be among the least important parts of a brand. Brand communication is actually non-visual – it happens peer to peer, or in the literature, and our buyers are all informed buyers. That is where ‘bad’ brands get built passively – often by companies that believe the product’s benefit is self-evident from the data collected, or that ads and logos are more important. Brands that outperform their market have always actively built their whole idea, and those that haven’t have underperformed. There have been occasional exceptions, but they were truly that – unexpected. You’d hope that unexpected success wouldn’t be part of companies’ ambitions for their pipelines.
 
Graeme Chrystal. If the goal of a marketing strategy is to optimise profitability by identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements, then the importance of branding in successful marketing is much the same as the importance of having wings if you are a bird and want to fly.

At the absolute core of marketing success lies the ability to understand and communicate consistently and succinctly what a brand stands for, and what rationally and emotionally makes it unique, versus its competitors, when meeting or resonating with an important need in a defined target customer’s mind. That distilled comprehension of the brand should permeate all internal and external communications and provide the basis for the marketing strategy.

It is imperative that the brand is marketed in such a way that at all its touch points the words and actions of the brand are cogent and consistent. The only way to achieve this is to have a single-minded view and application of the brand throughout the marketing process.

As communications evolve, what new technologies can companies use to enhance marketing?
MR. It depends whether the marketing is tactical or strategic. For tactical marketing, the goal of connecting a message to its audience would suggest that new technologies that make a message more tailored to people’s wants and needs, and where they’re receptive to hearing it, will succeed.

For strategic marketing, anything that can help understand the unmet need and benefit headroom in the market – from better data mining and gaining insight from broader groups of customers, to ways to prototype and test new ideas with those customers – will be immensely valuable. Think for example of the lost internal time and cost to get advisory meetings together now, and even more of just how inconclusive they usually are.

GC. New technologies open up exciting opportunities for reaching the target audience, and in particular the emergence of online communities is facilitating a more rapid spread of communications messages. We must remember though that however exciting a new technology may be, it is only a marketing channel and the technology is just that – a technology – a tool, system, technique. New marketing channels facilitate the delivery of messages but don’t guarantee the effectiveness of our communications.

As marketing professionals we need to really understand how individuals interact with these new technologies, and how this cyberpsychology impacts on how messages are received. When we interact with technology, our minds will work differently and it is not enough to simply communicate through technology, we need to ensure that the message is received in the way it was intended. Cognition of the technology linked with the emotional experience and the culture it is being used in are all elements that need to be researched and understood to best utilise new marketing channels.

MD. The use of the web has, or should have, been established for years as core in any companies marketing strategy. The way this technology is applied, though, has changed and will continue to change. The old model in which people sat at their computers and consumed content provided for them is as out of date as watching black and white soap powder ads on one of two TV channels. The growth of mobile browsing, user-generated content and social networking has encouraged an environment in which customers talk to each other about anything that pleases them, including the brands of which we are so proud.

Research shows that customers are far more trusting of information provided to them by their peers about products than that from any commercial organisation. This is far more pervasive than the growth in review sites that was seen a few years ago. If people have a disappointing experience with a brand, it’s on Twitter two seconds later and at the same time their Facebook and other social network pages have been simultaneously updated with the same content. If you think that this doesn’t apply to pharma try going to Facebook and searching for a medical condition. As for how user-generated content may affect marketing, take a look on YouTube and see what individuals with a little time on their hands have done to well-known brands’ ad campaigns. Many of these new versions are more interesting and engaging than the originals.

SC. Successful customer relationship marketing (CRM) depends on multi-channel communications that let companies reach customers any time, anywhere, and in whatever way they prefer. Our definition of closed loop marketing (CLM) is the ability to optimise communication by capturing brand message interactions, measuring them for marketing effectiveness, and refining the experience for future interactions. CLM is the process of information exchange; CRM is the process of developing relationships using technology to facilitate deeper and more meaningful interactions with our target audiences to help in both personal and non-personal selling.

Content management solutions output information by specific need, including audience and timing of distribution. Campaign management solutions construct and distribute customised content through a variety of media channels and measure the output of the content to segmenting audiences. Sales force automation systems provide two-way dialogue that addresses physician expectations of what they consider valuable, and help build a foundation for future interactions. There is also a rich opportunity to integrate CLM technology with handheld, wireless technology. Mobile healthcare applications and text support are growing exponentially through mobile phones, gaining permission-based status with customers while managing one-way and two-way messaging with both patients and healthcare professionals.

What research techniques are used to understand the marketing needs of clients?
GC. Many healthcare companies have moved towards a much more customer-centric attitude and thinking in terms of understanding and reacting to needs. In some pharma companies precedence is now given to understanding patients’ and payers’ needs over those of healthcare professionals. So voice of customer research is a key technique.

The other key change is a move towards deeper understanding of the emotional and psychological needs of customer groups. Approaches used to access this information go beyond the more standard left-brain and traditional question and answer what has been the mainstay of healthcare research. They involve advanced projective and elicitation techniques – such as role play, drawing and gestalts to name a few; skilled, executive level interviewing; as well as advanced methodologies such as psychographics, ethnography and semiotics to provide deeper contextual information and advanced analysis based on grounded theory, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), transactional analysis and linguistics.

SC. Established research techniques, such as industry analysis of trends and prescribing patterns, as well as one-on-one and group responses to product activities, remain important components to understanding and supporting the marketing needs of clients. Many of these response activities can be conducted online, to broaden the number of responses and reach a larger geographical area. However, in crowded markets, where there is little clinical differentiation in products, more sophisticated techniques can tease out a different kind of information.

There is an increasing awareness of the value in understanding the nonclinical needs and perceptions of customers. Cultural anthropologists and psychologists are using a variety of tools, such as semiotics and psychographic analysis, and interactive activities such as a visual collage stimulus, to gain customised insights that enhance established research techniques. Segmentation is a research tool designed to identify a communication bullseye within specific audiences and leads to the prospect, who may be a subset of the total market.

MR. Again, I’d clarify what we’re covering: strategic marketing or tactical marketing strategy. If we can understand what people really want, and then give it to them, we need to spend a whole lot less effort afterwards to persuade them they want it. In the former case, we tend to use techniques like prototyping to help prescribers and payers understand what might be possible – after all, unmet need isn’t always apparent to people who, day in and day out, are doing their best with what they have. Many companies end up relying on ‘research’ that tends to state the obvious – we’d all like what we have, but a little bit better: more efficacy, more safety, better tolerability, less cost. Henry Ford made that point a century ago when he said that, had he asked, people would have said they wanted a faster horse. The work of uncovering what might be wanted, via ideation, has to happen really early – discovery people are great at it – before it gets channelled into a more ‘paint by numbers’ development and marketing programme.

MD. There are formal research tools available to research the marketing needs of clients, but as an agency, the most effective methods often do not use formal tools. Staying close to the clients’ business, spotting trends in their, and other, sectors that may be applicable can allow smart agencies to anticipate or even create new marketing requirements.

More formal approaches, such as the use of the discussion tools on business networking sites such as LinkedIn can also generate useful insights into the evolving requirements of marketing clients. Half yearly review meetings with senior clients that involve general discussions around major trends in their markets as well changes in their own commercial objectives are also invaluable in ensuring that your client offer stays current.

How do you see the future of marketing developing in the next few years?
MD. Marketing will continue to evolve away from the one-way, one-to-many communication of the past. Smart marketers will realise that, at any one time, there may be thousands of conversations going on that involve their brand, and the only way to have any influence is to get involved in the more important conversations out there. This may involve setting aside the disdain that some feel for the humble blogger, but that should be measured against the influence that some of them wield. It may be far more than that treasured inside front cover spot on your favoured medical publication or even, heaven forbid, your own carefully constructed website.

More and more companies need to invite customers to talk to them. The easiest way to do this is of course to use their own websites, although this often causes terror from a legal and regulatory perspective. What if someone posts an adverse event? There are of course ways to handle this and many companies are doing so already. Free text entry on a site may look terrifying from a medical perspective but in terms of insight generation it is an invaluable resource. It’s better to have someone say something nasty about your brand on your site where you know about it, than somewhere you may never see it.

SC. The industry’s progression toward more effective and efficient approaches to the creation and execution of global communications is influencing the convergence of new technologies, globalisation and enhanced marketing disciplines.

Personalised healthcare and genomic-based therapies are slowly disintegrating broad-based marketing approaches that seek to reach large groups with a general message. The move towards CRM will meet the individual needs – clinical, product, psychological and emotional – of customer targets with tailored messaging. Social media will help deliver the message any time, anywhere, and in whatever platform customers prefer.

Global marketing will become increasingly efficient, leveraging technology for the application of brand messages throughout all markets through the flexibility of customisation for individual markets. Given the need for increasing accountability, marketing will become even more cost-effective for pharma clients, because there will be the need for fewer local agencies.

MR. First of all there needs to be a recognition across the industry that marketing isn’t a single discipline. It has been treated as one for too long, and fails to reflect that there is strategic marketing – trying to decide what a market wants or might want and will pay for – and there is tactical marketing, the business of persuasion, which overlaps with sales. Companies that don’t recognise the skills and expertise difference presented by that very simple separation will always come second. That isn’t a simple solution – most marketers (and fewer management consultancies, it seems) don’t recognise that split either.

Secondly, the deeper the strategic marketing mindset goes into an organisation, the closer it fits with R&D – the two have to be iterative and highly aligned. In fact, the best performers in the past 20 years have been those brands whose strategic marketing influenced the course of their R&D, regulatory approach and indication roadmap. Differentiation and the value proposition needs to begin early, during phases I or II, so that companies that continue to try to stick on some positioning and health economic arguments in phase III will really struggle.

Hopefully the future of tactical marketing will be a more targeted, higher ROI one, which is better because the strategic gearing will be higher, and also because it is one area where the industry’s image continues to falter.

GC. The biggest shift will be that pharmaceutical companies will move from illness management solutions to provide wellness management with their drugs/devices specific or bundled into wellness programmes. The impact on marketing will be significant, requiring a more consensual and integrated approach based on co-creation or co-development with key stakeholders, such as less telling people why they should want a brand and more understanding of how a brand fits into an holistic wellness system, and working within a flow of communication rather than trying to control the communication.

The drivers for this shift will be that pharma companies and patients will play a greater role in responsibility and payment for welfare management regardless of payer system. Payers are likely to start to incentivise consumers/patients for healthy habits and to disincentivise for unhealthy habits. Also, it has been suggested that regulatory bodies will come to expect such programmes as part of the cost of getting product and price approval and to help optimise drug use or need and develop better adherence.

Scott Cotherman is CEO of Corbett Accel Healthcare Group. Scott Cotherman shapes the strategic direction of the company, leads its growth and diversification initiatives, manages its reputation and corporate image, and develops leadership talent. Integrity and high performance standards earned him recognition as a top 100 inspirational industry leader. Cotherman is chairperson-elect of the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame.

Michel Dubery is Managing Director of GHG London. He is a leader in strategic healthcare communications with extensive experience in healthcare professional marketing, together with deep understanding of patient communication. Dubery has 28 years’ experience in healthcare, including seven years as a nurse and 15 years in sales and marketing for AstraZeneca and Novartis in UK and global positions, before joining the agency side seven years ago. 

Mike Rea is CEO of IDEA Pharma, a leading global consultancy in pharmaceutical  strategic marketing. Rea has worked in international healthcare communications for over 20 years, and has developed global marketing solutions for most of the world’s top 10 pharmaceutical companies. His principal point of interest is the incorporation of best practice into pharmaceutical marketing strategy, and he has helped lead the strategic direction of over 50 pharmaceutical brands.

Graeme Chrystal, Founder of the Zaicom International group of companies, has 30 years’ experience in pharmaceuticals and marcomms developing and implementing prelaunch communications programmes. Passionate about behavioural change, he is a qualified practitioner in NLP and hypnotherapy, a member of the International Association of Business Communicators and a student of the psychology of communication.