Patient Marketing Isn’t the Cure for A Poorly Built & Executed Professional Plan

December 19, 2010

2011 – The Year of Accountability. Are You Ready?

Filed under: Marketing Effectiveness,Patient Marketing,Professional Marketing,Social Media,What We Think — Tags: 2011, accountability, FDA, FTC, level of evidence, marketing investments, MLR, patients, sales, scale, waste — dreinhardt @ 4:10 pm

In 2006, I started Return on Focus with an exclusive dedication to evidence-based marketing. It was a pretty lean year back then. The plain truth was our industry didn’t demand that level of accountability.

Our initial Clients had a certain intellectual curiosity and internal drive to demand a higher level of accountability in their marketing investments. But four years ago the drive for a higher level of evidence came from within rather than from their organizations. WOW, have times changed!

I have no doubt in my mind that 2011 is the tipping point for our industry with regard to marketing accountability. Many catalysts are driving this change.

Scale is the New Reward – focus on getting ‘stuff’ out the door is being increasingly replaced with a pilot-test-scale mentality
Tolerance for Waste is Decreasing – everyone is expected to do more with less and as a result, marketing waste, which never had a place to begin with, is a prime target from multiple constituents
Sales Forces are Demanding Intensified Focus – reps are getting less time, if any, with their docs and they don’t have the bandwidth to navigate a 20-page detail aid or a 5-message call
Patients are Asking for More – while multiple dynamics are at play here, the simple fact is that patient activism is only increasing
MLR (Medical/Legal/Regulatory) Review is Increasingly Conservative – if it’s not explicitly in the PI then it can’t be used in promotion induces a sobering clarity that marketers must absorb
FDA (and maybe FTC) More Active – While you may hear this every year, I think the totality of FDA actions speak louder than words

I’ve listed just a few and welcome your additions and/or deletions to the list.

If you believe we’re entering a new era of accountability, you need to ask yourself a few questions over the holiday break:

Are you comfortable with the level of evidence behind your 2011 plan and corresponding investments?
How confident are you that you’ll be able to hit increasing sales targets with smaller budgets?
When your boss knocks on your door and asks, “How’s it going?” do you have the marketing rationale and metrics to confidently address the question?

Accountability is the “new normal” for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Are you ready? We are!

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December 12, 2010

Evidence That Physicians & Patients Aren’t on the Same Treatment Page

Filed under: Marketing Effectiveness,Patient Marketing,Professional Marketing,What We Think — Tags: communication, disconnect, marketing effectiveness, patient marketing, perceptual gaps, professional marketing — dreinhardt @ 5:12 pm

One of the many downsides of a siloed strategy in pharmaceutical marketing (see our additional thinking on this topic) is that the two halves of the marketing equation – physician perceptions and patient perceptions – are never truly connected.

Too often there is the assumption that physicians and patients see a given disease state the same way and that they have open lines of communication with one another that are frequently accessed. These assumptions are not only altruistic, but can prevent a brand team from fully realizing potential opportunities for brand growth. As part of a recent project at ROF, physician perceptions of the impact of a specific condition on patients lives were assessed by mimicking a question set asked of patients in a robust quantitative study. The chart below illustrates only a sampling of the disconnect between physicians and patients.

Clearly, physicians clearly underestimate the impact of this condition on patients’ ability to thrive. From this, a campaign to sensitize doctors to this disconnect and get them to take a more thorough assessment of their patients was developed. Without a full view of this picture, it was impossible for both professional and consumer pharmaceutical marketers on this team to maximize the effectiveness of their initiatives.

Have you been able to quantify the perceptual gaps between physicians and patients when it comes to your disease state and brand? How closely does it resemble what was uncovered here? What were the implications?

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December 5, 2010

Patient Marketing Isn’t the Cure for A Poorly Built & Executed Professional Plan

Filed under: Marketing Effectiveness,Patient Marketing,Professional Marketing,What We Think — Tags: branded, branded request, HCP marketing, influence, messaging, normative data, patient marketing, professional marketing, unbranded — dreinhardt @ 8:17 pm

We all recognize that it’s getting tougher and tougher to reach high-value physician targets and be afforded the opportunity to deliver a persuasive message designed within the boundaries of the brand label. A disturbing trend that we’ve noticed at ROF is the almost blinded belief that patient marketing can somehow overcome the difficulties in HCP marketing.

More and more we see brand teams turning to unbranded and branded patient marketing efforts in the hopes of achieving or reinvigorating brand success. The fundamental flaw with this thinking, however, is that there are very few categories in which patients have more influence than physicians.

Over the last four years, ROF has built a normative database on patient marketing metrics and of particular interest is the degree of conviction in the request generated from patient marketing efforts. Our data reveals that of the subset of targeted patients that take action that results in an MD visit AND articulate a branded request, a whopping 78% would listen if the MD felt that the product wasn’t right for them. Clearly, professional marketing efforts form the foundation and the dependencies for successful patient marketing investments.

Ramping up patient marketing efforts to overcome a poor HCP plan winds up only further fragmenting your efforts and not addressing the root cause of your strategic issues.

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