What I’ve learned in 4 years of practicing evidence-based marketing

October 31, 2010

Message Development: The Perils of a Creatively-Driven vs Strategically-Driven Approach

Filed under: Marketing Effectiveness,Patient Marketing,Professional Marketing,What We Think — Tags: agency, communication platforms, creative, creatives, message development, patients, physicians, pre-launch, strategic, strategists — kyork @ 9:17 pm

I hope you’re sitting down for this one, because what I’m about to write here is going to send some of our readers into a bit of a tailspin.

MESSAGE DEVELOPMENT SHOULD BE A STRATEGICALLY-DRIVEN EXERCISE, NOT A CREATIVELY-DRIVEN ONE.

I know you probably have some thoughts on this, but please just hear me out first. We’re involved in quite a bit of message development work here at ROF. In some projects, we handle it all internally—developing and testing Communication Platforms for physicians, patients, even pre-launch brands. While in other projects, we’re involved in more of a consultant role on behalf of our clients where we’re shadowing an agency process and assisting in navigating the strategic hurdles of a given brand or category.

Now, having spent the first half of my career on the agency copy side and the second half as a strategic supplier, I think I’m qualified to lay this out there. What often goes fundamentally wrong with message development is that your brand’s core communication platform is generated and refined over time by creatives, not strategists.

This is a huge issue because messages should not be viewed as stand alones of eloquently written copy. They need to be hung together, with a precise articulation and hierarchy to tell the most compelling story for your brand possible. In most cases, your copywriter(s) are not going to be intimate with the broader strategic issues impacting your brand and that can cause a default to approaching messages as individual elements of copy rather than a strategic, cohesive platform.

So how did you arrive at the current message platform for your brand? Did your agency develop a list of messages that physicians assembled into their “preferred” order? Or did you work with someone who pre-assembled messages into a few distinct, but compelling stories about your brand and then vet those with a sufficient sample of MDs?

Your answer could reveal a potential deep-seated flaw with your brand’s communication approach.

OK, now let me have it…

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October 17, 2010

Wait . . . Pharma hasn’t figured out the web and now it’s dead?

Filed under: Marketing Effectiveness,Patient Marketing,Professional Marketing,Social Media,What We Think — Tags: app, Blackberry, Chris Anderson, evidence, internet, iPad, objective, pharma marketer, web, Wired — dreinhardt @ 10:21 pm

Just when we ‘thought,’ as an industry, we were getting a handle on the Web and formally working a line item for web investment into our collective budgetary process, the web is now dead. A must read for any pharma marketer who is planning to stay in this vocation is Chris Anderson’s article in the August edition of Wired entitled “The Web is Dead! Long Live the Internet.” The article provides objective evidence showing that we’re no longer surfing the web for information and increasingly visiting web sites less.

We are using the Internet to access more information, but not the Web, and devices like the iPad are only going to accelerate the trend. My own habits in accessing sports information reflect this important paradigm shift. Only a year ago, my #1 bookmark was ESPN.com – the WEB site – and I often checked the site 2 to 3 times a day to stay abreast of sports scores and news. I haven’t been to the site in over six months. I still access sports scores and news daily, even using ESPN to do so, but now I use my Blackberry ESPN app and my ESPN iPad app to do so.

I’m using the Internet to access content, but no longer using the web. If you stop and think about the implications for your Brand.com, Unbranded.com, CRM.com, and web-based media plan, it could paralyze you . . . or energize you to leapfrog your current state to where online health behavior is going.

What implications do you see?

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October 4, 2010

What I’ve learned in 4 years of practicing evidence-based marketing

Filed under: Marketing Effectiveness,Patient Marketing,Professional Marketing,What We Think — dreinhardt @ 5:46 pm

October marks 4 years since the birth of Return on Focus. This being my second entrepreneurial endeavor made me more sensitive to the experience and more introspective about my learnings to date. Much like parents who have children both early then again later in life, the second time around you have a better handle on the mechanics and an appreciation of the experience.

Reflecting on my learnings across almost 100+ client projects, yielded 5 key takeaways:

Employing too many tactics, leaving most sub-optimally funded – one likely culprit could be the explosion in the size of brand team now . . . everyone has to have their own stuff.
Focus on the execution rather than the foundation – admit it, putting more stuff in the vessel is more fun than figuring out what type of vessel is needed.
Going after everyone, not just the optimal someones –somehow a full on assault from all sides makes more sense than establishing a beachhead and then broadening out. . . thankfully no biopharma marketers were involved in D-Day.
Losing sight that Rx success begins and ends with the physician – more bluntly, an over-reliance on patient marketing to save the day for poorly developed and executed professional strategies.
Tradition of doing things traditionally – the fact that we still crank out detail aids that we know field representatives aren’t using amazes me.

With the majority of our Clients facing 2011 marketing budget declines ranging from 15% to 30%, a good starting point would be to examine these five insights for application to your own current circumstances.

For ongoing pearls and perils, you can follow me on Twitter @danreinhardt

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