The chart above is from a peer reviewed publication Babor E et al. Psychiatr Bull, 1996.
Look at how influential 'representatives' and 'advertising' are versus 'colleague recommendation', and contrast that with what's at the heart of traditional pharma marketing strategy.
Read more....
The chart above comes from this article on Pharma Marketing Blog. A first reaction would be to blame the downturn on the same thing everything else is being blamed on: the credit crunch / financial meltdown. However, the dip started in 2006, so while this may become a contributing factor, it isn't the main cause.
Anyone working in pharma will know that thinner pipelines and higher market access hurdles mean companies have been looking for efficiencies. My belief is that under this lens, traditional promotion - of which TV DTC has to be the most obvious example - is starting to look like the emperor with no clothes.
Read more....
So far in this blog when it comes to the future of pharma marketing, I’ve mainly talked about us working to a better understanding of how pharma marketing really works - by adopting elements of diffusion theory and word of mouth (WoM) marketing.
There is another big change that’s already happening in pharma, and as with WoM it also shows how the consumer model aped for so many years is woefully inadequate – it’s Market Access.
“Back when I were a lad” learning the pharma marketing ropes in the 90’s, reimbursement and pricing was simple. The answer was always “premium price” regardless of the question. The only tricky bit was figuring out how much you could charge for something first in class. You called the pricing guys in at the last minute to do some research and put a price on it, and hey presto.
Such a scenario is clearly laughable today. As professor Michael Rawlins, head honcho and chief ball-breaker at NICE put it:
“The industry has to accept that just because new drugs are licensed does not mean that the health service wants or needs to buy them.” Ouch. But as a tax (or insurance) payer though, you’ve got to admit he’s on the money.
I realise this isn’t news to many in pharma. These days we’ve all got departments focusing on ‘market access’ or ‘managed care’; some companies doing better jobs than others.
But here’s my challenge – how long should it stay like that; with a marketing department and a market access department? Sure, you might need a small army of people to go smoothing the numbers with to HMOs or Primary Care Trusts, but at a central strategic level there is no real division.
It’s still about marketing strategy, it’s just that we’ve finally added in price and access (volume) into the equation, along with the customers most interested in these points.
For us old-timers (hey, I’m still in my 30’s!), on first sight this can be a little scary: new customers with new jargon to deal with who seem hell-bent on not paying for our products. The way I like to think of it though is as one big negotiation and the fun bit is that it isn’t necessarily all about price.
Let me give you an analogy. I was talking to someone a few weeks ago who sold her car on ebay. By self-admission she is a neat-freak who had every skerrick of information on the history of that automobile, as well as a ton of photos detailing its condition. The car was in good order and so she put it on at a premium price.
In the auction it went at full asking price to a bidder who said that the reason they paid top-whack was because, sure it looked like a good car, but she was the only seller who had fully answered their gazillion questions and so they were comfortable to buy at that price.
The same thing can work with payers. Have the right data answering their troubling questions (like, just how much better than generics is it?) and you too can snap up a great price. Other levers to think about with your access strategy include the patient segment you’re going to target and proof of the buckets of money you can save them elsewhere in the system.
It takes a little practice to start getting this thought process in train, but rather than thinking of it as menacing hoodoo, we need to see it as a fun strategic challenge that’s part of the role. The “kids” growing up as product managers today no longer see the distinction. Get on board or get outdated – it’s the future I tells ya!
Read more....
News on the Merck/Schering ENHANCE study popped into my inbox today, and the explanation of where the acronym ENHANCE came from gave me a wry smile.
As you would have no doubt have guessed, ENHANCE stands for
Ezetimibe aNd simvastatin in Hypercholesterolemia enhANces atherosClerosis rEgression
Obvious really.
We need some rules on these acronyms. The FDA don't seem to be approving many molecules, so maybe they could get stuck in here.
Sticking the word 'enhance' in the title and picking out the middle two letters is bad enough, but the N in the middle of an 'and' while ignoring anything out of 'simvistatin'? Apart from that I'm aware of at least one other trial with the same acronym. Surely not a case of clumsy marketing?
Read more....
The buzz phrase 'word of mouth marketing' has been pretty hot over the past few years and understandably so, after all, 'colleague recommendation' is regularly cited as the greatest influence over a physician adopting a new therapy. Also WoM has the allure of being cost efficient and contagious - very sexy indeed.
However, while the flashy 'WoM' turns heads and gets all the attention, it's the greyer figure of 'Innovation Adoption' that I've come to realise is really the big player sitting quietly, but omnisciently, in the background.
Of course, it's not actually an either / or situation with these two. 'Innovation Adoption' describes the whole process that someone goes through in adopting an innovation (like a new medicine), and Word of Mouth can be a player in a number of the steps within the process.
Where I'm going to with all of this is that in the quest for a marketing model that describes how pharma marketing really works, Word of Mouth is a lot better than the poor rip off the outdated consumer model. However, it's really Innovation Adoption that's the daddy, and it might sound a little strange, but I've been getting pretty excited about it.
This has been going on for a while now (should I tell my wife?) but some recent work with a client in the telecomms industry rekindled the fire. On the face of things you might say telecoms and pharma don't have a lot in common. But by applying adoption of innovation principles to their product, we not only got some great insights to their challenges and opportunities, but also saw a lot of direct parallels between the industries.
All driven by the fact that both sectors are in the business of driving the adoption of technical innovations, not selling a new brand of frozen peas or alco-pop.
Read more....
Not a hell of a lot to do with Pharma in particular, but a must see for everyone with anything to do with marketing
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.
Read more....
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....
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:
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
Read more....
