Truth in Advertising

Not a hell of a lot to do with Pharma in particular, but a must see for everyone with anything to do with marketing

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A rockin' word of mouth story

WOAH, before you click away, this is not a post written by some crazed seventies rock fan. This is about a great little word of mouth story that I heard spun just the other day.

For those of you not in the UK, you probably haven't heard that the rock giants Led Zeppelin are performing a one off-concert in London on November 26th. I've got to confess that this leaves me pretty cold (aging rockers with big hair) but what grabbed my attention was when I heard a sound-bite from Harvey Goldsmith, the famous promoter of the revival.

Harvey showed the skills of the cunning marketer he is by crafting a nice little word of mouth story. He obviously instinctively realises that people think and talk in stories, not bullet pointed sales messages. Hey, I'm no LedZep fan, but even I can remember the story weeks later. Quoted on the radio (and below on the BBC website here) about the concert even before details were announced, he said (I loosely paraphrase):

"I originally asked the guys if they would get together and perform for 30 minutes, but they got together together and after a week's rehearsal, things sounded so great that they decided to do a full set. It was all really sparked off by Jason, the son of the original drummer (John) who'll complete the original line-up"

Why's this so clever? What Goldsmith could have done is just list the key selling points of the band; number of albums sold, bands influenced, etc. But instead, he created a story about how they reformed and the role that son of the original drummer has played in this. "Aging, out of practice rockers" becomes "they've aged like wine", and "stand in drummer" becomes "carrying on the rock dynasty".

If you're a marginal LZ fan, or even just a general follower of guitar based rock, you already knew about the band's status and achievements. But now there are extra points of interest; the chance to be a part of this magical reformation and see John Bonham's spirit live on. Just as important, you've got an interesting story to pass on to someone else like you, who might also decide to go, and even pass the story on again.

This one concert is so popular that there have been 25 million (yes, million) ballot applications and over 120 million hits on the website for only 20,000 tickets.

So what's the takeout in pharma?

Have an honest look at your marketing messages. Are they in the form of a genuinely interesting story that a customer would want to listen to and pass on, or are they a list of bullet pointed sales messages? If they're the bullet points then take a leaf out of Harvey's book.
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Drug-Blog interactions: do blogs have a place in pharma marketing?

To understand the role blogging could play in pharma marketing, you need to understand the implications of web 2.0; where customers are no longer talked at through promotion, but for the most part just talk between themselves.

To fully appreciate what this means you must participate first hand in the ‘blogosphere’ (how well could someone who’s never watched TV understand TV programming or advertising?). Scanning a few blogs (like this one) doesn’t count. You need to get your hands dirty, by at least engaging in conversation through leaving comments, or preferably even starting your own blog(s). It’s easy and free; choose a mix of subjects, from work to outside interests, and if you like remain, anonymous.

Having done this for a few weeks, you’ll start to grasp the fundamentals of the medium. In essence, blogging is about informal conversations rather than promotional lectures, and there are different categories of these conversations.

While a ‘blog conversation’ between a pharma company and consumer is extremely difficult to create (regulations, speed and style of medium), a closed ‘blogversation’ between a company and health care professionals is far more manageable, although not without steep challenges; e.g. does your subject area have the scope to generate a daily or weekly blog post, and who’s going to write it?

The blogversation that most marketers tend to want to get in on is the one between consumers or customers themselves. Trying to infiltrate this blogversation through fake blogging (flogging) is marketing suicide. See my own blog post on that here.

However, observing and learning from those conversations, and even reacting positively to them, is becoming a crucial piece of the marketing mix. Basically, if these people are successful at blogging, they have become opinion leaders, and need to be treated the same way you would treat other key opinion leaders.

In short, blogging, while still in its infancy, is a preview of where modern communication and media is headed. As such, even though there are many barriers (including our own mind-sets) in the way, it’s crucial to really understand this medium rather than either ignore, or crudely trample all over it.

This is part of a fuller review of pharma blogging which you can find here. Read more....

The Break Up

Here's a little video that summarises beautifully how traditional marketing is failing.

I experienced an example first hand last week when Vodafone, my mobile network, rang me. The scripted call-centre guy, who I could hardly hear, started off by grilling me with a questions to establish my identity; off putting considering they rang me, and it could be anyone calling me as I try and shop with the kids.

Then he told me that the call was to thank me for being a loyal Vodafone customer (I've been with them for a while) and as a reward offered me this deal: free phone insurance for three months, after which this would turn into a policy that will cost me £6 a month.

A great demostration of how to insult your customer. This was quite obviously no "reward", but rather a very clumsy way of trying to upsell me some insurance I don't need, using shmarm that wasn't even as good as that of the "advertiser" in The Break Up, above. Hard selling to me is bad enough, doing it under false pretenses even worse

It does remind me of a few opinion leader meetings I've seen though. Genuine scientific discussions or thinly veiled selling schemes?

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The Stealth Sell

Last weekend, The Sunday Times Style magazine ran this feature The Stealth Sell (let me know if the link has gone and I'll post the text). Overall, it's an interesting read that succinctly taps into some key live issues in Word of Mouth marketing. It's also fascinating to see that it was in a lifestyle section, not business or news.

What it does by the end of the piece however, is to lump together some forms of marketing that really aren't in the same ball-park.

The bit that I think it gets right, is to point out the deception that's going on by those people who want to exploit the power of word of mouth, rather than work with it. The author sites PayPerPost, who are paying bloggers up to £10 per post to endorse set products.

“This is a new way of looking at advertising,” says Tim Draper, a PayPerPost stakeholder. “You put an ad inside the text, and it’s more subtle.”

It's not more 'subtle' Tim, it's more 'deceitful'.

Whether you think paid posts are wrong or right (is deceiving someone the same as lying? Semantics - they're both wrong) it doesn't make good business sense for anyone involved, apart from Tim and PayPerPost:

• If the blogger is a serious writer who wants people to heed their opinion and come back to their blog (even for commercial reasons), then these paid posts will slowly but surely kill their legitimacy (their brand), and with that their audience. Who wants to read stealth ads masquerading as blogs in their spare time? Perhaps because blogging is online - you can't look these people in the eye to see if they're lying, and there's no editorial control - people who read blogs are ultra sensitive to sniffing out flogs (fake blogs).
• For the company ultimately paying for the post, this is also bad for their brand - unless you want to be known by your customers as the brand who has to pay people to lie about it, presumably because it's not that good, or because you're just the sort of big, evil corporation who likes doing this sort of thing

Where the article goes off track a little is the way it ends off, introducing the shady new art of "tryvertising", actually known for a hundred, if not thousands of, years as "sampling":

“Several years ago, a well-known trainer company went into working-class areas in America and doled out free shoes to a handful of ‘opinion-former’ kids aged between 14 and 18,” says Mark Ratcliff of the research consultancy Murmur. “Then they sat back and waited for demand to flare up. They told me where they appropriated that idea from,” he continues. “Crack dealers.”

A nice little anecdote, but what separates this "new tactic" from paid posts, and to my mind takes it out of the 'Stealth' category, is that no-one is being deceived. Some selected kids got some new free trainers; they could then make up their own minds whether they wanted to recommend them, or even wear them in the first place.

Lessons for pharma

1. If you're thinking about online strategies - don't pay for posts or flog. It'll not only demean your brand, but I'm sure the regulators would rightly take a pretty dim view of deceiving customers and consumers
2. Transpose this to what we do with customers and opinion leaders. Stop looking for ways to make them spout a promotional message, and start thinking of how you can create a situation where the right people in the right context can make up their own minds about your brand. Much more powerful and a win for everyone.
   

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Advocacy vs Thought Leadership

There's a subtle but important difference between these two terms that can change the way you work with opinion leaders. In a meeting recently I saw this "penny drop" for a room full of experienced industry folk.

Advocacy is when a customer believes in your brand so much they'll recommend it over and above the competition to others (hence 'brand advocate')

Thought Leadership is when a truly powerful opinion leader influences the way we think about a disease

While it's nice to have brand advocates at a local level interacting with prescribers, too many pharma marketers then try and convert thought leaders into brand advocates, to the point where they start to obsess about whether the thought leader is predominantly prescribing their brand.

There are two points to be made here:

1. A true thought leader will not let themselves become a brand advocate. By doing this they lose their perceived objectivity and with that their influence. It's thought leader suicide, so save your breath
   
2. You don't actually want them to. Thought leaders can do something far more powerful (commercially for your brand) than advocates: they can change the the world thinks about a whole disease. The way we think about a disease defines which treatments are most relevant for that disease. For example, if asthma was still a disease to be treated symptomatically - what use would there be for Advair / Seretide?
   

Understanding this elevates opinion leadership to where it should be; a strategic imperative rather than a tactical message channel. It also explains two of my pet hates:

• the phrase "thought leader management" (sounds patronising and/or logistical)

• clever dicks asking what the ROI (return on investment) of working with thought leaders is. I'm OK with ROI - for tactical programmes like Reps, advertising or even advocates. But for thought leaders it's like asking what the ROI of your position statement or insight research is.

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Blogs & Pharma part 1 - Intro

So blogs; if marketing commentators aren't talking about them, they're writing them. But does this make blogs and other social media a force that pharma can't ignore? Should we take the step out into the unknown, potentially risking all sorts of backlash to become involved in this modern communications phenomenon?

Talk to anyone involved in social media and they'll look at you like an idiot if you question the impact of blogging. There were moments like this at the International Word of Mouth Conference earlier this month in Amsterdam. During one pro-blogging presentation, Dr Peeter Verlegh of Erasmus University openly challenged the presenter on what percentage of the general population could actually be involved in blogging - there was stunned silence.

Over a few posts on this fledgling blog I want to explore these questions, challenge a few assumptions and by the end see if there is a way forward for pharma, blogs and social media. I say challenge assumptions because I feel that there's an accepted wisdom building about the power of blogging that reminds me of the blind faith behind the first dot-com bubble (but then I also thought the same about that new search engine Google, so just goes to show...). At the same time, the power of word of mouth in healthcare is undeniable and social media would seem to tap into it. Let's see where we get to.... Read more....

IWOMC '07- is this where WoM is at?

Last week I presented at the 3rd International Word of Mouth Conference in Amsterdam. It was a thought-provoking couple of days with a friendly bunch of people. Good on you Nils for organising it.

Having attended last year, my key thought going into this one was:

"is it just me, or is everyone else using WoM as another media tactic, rather than a fundamentally better way of approaching marketing strategy?"

An avalanche of presentations of the various buzzmarketing agencies resoundingly confirmed the the former. I note that George Silverman also experienced this at WOMMA in the States late last year - see his insightful blog post here.

I believe in 'live and let live' for the buzz guys, but my concern is that "WoM" as a concept is getting niched as a kooky direct marketing tactic, rather than fundamental strategic shift. My presentation (download from here) followed this line of thought and showed how you can build a WoM centred communications strategy.

The good news from IWOMC '07 was that there seemed to be an acceptance that we need to move things 'upstream'.

So the questions I'm left with are:

1. Why isn't WoM being talked about in this way?
2. Who else out there (apart from George) is trying to do this?
3. How can we get this discussion going at events like WOMMA and IWOMC?
   

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My (pharma) marketing philosophy - what this blog is about

For the rest of my posts to make sense, it's important to understand where I'm coming from. So, here's my philosophy on marketing and pharmaceutical marketing.

I 'grew up' as a pharma marketer wishing I was a consumer marketer. Those guys work on brand names people have heard of, they can actually use their own product, and plenty of them get to do the ultimate in marketing glamour - TV. Try telling someone at a party that you're in pharmaceutical marketing. The eyes glaze over (or maybe even squint a little if hostile to the industry).

Not only that (or maybe because of it) as a pharma marketer you're constantly being told just how clever the consumer guys are, and being shown the latest clever ad or piece of viral marketing.

When I first moved over to healthcare advertising, these prejudices were reinforced. The consumer advertising guys have interesting trade magazines and prestigious award ceremonies in places like Cannes. There also seemed to be a lot of money going around, and you actually read about successful admen in proper newspapers.

But then, after working with the consumer guys on a few projects, I got to realise that consumer marketing was definitely no more intellectually challenging or fulfilling than pharma. In fact, selling toilet paper doesn't exactly require mental gymnastics. We'd always been led to believe that Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) was where the buzz was at. For 'FMCG' read detergent or fish-fingers; not nearly so glamorous, or interesting.

So that made me think about what sort of stuff I would like to work on; something mentally stimulating, but important - something that might even help change the world we live in a meaningful way. First up, I thought of computer and information technology, and the way that it's revolutionising everything we do. And promptly admitted that I knew nothing about it, and a lot of it looked pretty dry.

But then another form of evolving technology that is shaping our world came to mind - healthcare. This made me realise that it's not the pharma subject matter that's the problem, it's the staid, myopic view of marketing that we've always applied to it. Why should we ape the tired old ways of classic consumer marketing (becoming rapidly outdated itself) when what we have is a far more complex and interesting marketplace that requires its own approach?

"And hence", to be dramatic, "my quest was born".

Together with my business partners I've set about ripping up all the pre-conceived notions of how we should approach pharma marketing. In their place, seeking out and developing the theories, tools and techniques that work in a marketplace where the customer is rarely the end-user, and colleague recommendation (word of mouth) is the most powerful influence; not advertising or sales reps.

The result is a marketing approach that is not only unique for pharma, but I that believe in places is cutting edge across all marketing sectors. In this blog you'll find all related viewpoints to this - some from pharma, some from other industries. I'd be fascinated to know what you think of them.

Matt

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