Gaining Promotional Claims from Market Research— Yes, It is Possible

January 30, 2011

Perils of Unfocused Positioning #1 – Diluted Messaging

Filed under: Marketing Effectiveness,Patient Marketing,Professional Marketing,What We Think — Tags: brand positioning, messaging — kyork @ 6:22 pm

This is going to be the first in a series of posts we’ll be peppering in throughout the next few months. As part of our messaging work, we get to see a lot of positioning statements and the vast majority of these suffer from the same fundamental flaw—being unfocused and not singular in nature.

As an industry, there seems to be an intrinsic belief that all of the communication elements for a brand (efficacy, safety, dosing, and MOA) need to be jammed into the positioning statement. There are a multitude of problems with this, but in this post, I’m going to focus on the issue of supporting messaging.

If you have a completely diluted brand positioning, how can you possibly know which messages are necessary to best support it in order to compel use of your brand? In fact, isn’t it really possible that any combination of messages could map back to an overly-broad positioning statement, thereby making research insights on messaging development unfruitful until you attempt to find focus within the positioning? What I’m getting at here is that if you don’t apply discipline to your brand positioning development then you can’t expect your supporting message platform to work all that hard for your brand.

If you want to strengthen your product’s core message presentation, start by trying to gain some focus in your positioning statement. Don’t be intimidated. This isn’t really about re-positioning, it’s about refined-positioning and gaining some much needed focus so you can develop more impactful supportive messaging to drive brand penetration.

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January 23, 2011

Stop Asking for Directions and Set Your Brand GPS

Filed under: Marketing Effectiveness,Professional Marketing,What We Think — Tags: communication platform, message development, physician messaging, product development, professional marketing — dreinhardt @ 9:30 pm

Marketing, while certainly a form of science, is not medicine. So why do so many Brand teams allow physicians to decide what they should be saying about their brands? Let’s be real here. We all know doctors are not marketers. Yet, as an industry we often ask them to be—laying out dozens of discrete messages before them, for example, and feverishly tallying up their votes, so we can be sure we’re communicating the right things in the right order.

The fundamental flaw in this approach is that at the end of day, physicians are just human beings and as such, they base their decisions on reality and not potential reality. It is really just simple human nature. Opinions are grounded in what is and not what can be. This approach to message development is especially scary for products in development that may have something new to say. Physicians can quickly discard messages that don’t align with today’s reality. Simply, we don’t know what we want until its been shown to us.

The next time you’re looking to develop or tighten up your messaging, adopt a more strategic approach. Generate a few distinct communication platforms for your brand and let your target physicians react to them. This way, you can be sure that the marketing course for your brand is being set by genuine marketers and not just docs who play one for the day. Don’t fool yourself into thinking this just applies to physician messaging testing!

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January 16, 2011

Are You Knowingly Practicing Drive-By Adherence?

Filed under: Patient Marketing,What We Think — Tags: acquisition, adherence, co-pay cards, CRM, non-adherence — dreinhardt @ 9:02 pm

The acquisition versus adherence patient pendulum has swung back to adherence. But, is the equation for adherence marketing as simple as many believe? Adherence = CRM + co-pay card. We call this ‘drive-by adherence marketing.’

The concept is that you speed by your most promising customers – the newly initiated – and you spray them with the set formula believing that you’ve then got patient adherence covered. It can’t be that easy. Can it? It may be for some categories, but most teams lack the level of evidence required to address the most gentle of inquires by senior management.

Start by understanding whether your patient non-adherence is intentional or unintentional. Why you ask? The entire approach and framework for your program changes dramatically.

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January 9, 2011

Gaining Promotional Claims from Market Research— Yes, It is Possible

Filed under: Patient Marketing,Professional Marketing,What We Think — Tags: ATU, clinical data, market research, promotional claims, quantitative research — kyork @ 9:05 pm

If you’re like many of our Clients working on a marketed product, your brand probably isn’t going to be generating any new clinical data this year. So what are you supposed to do to keep your story fresh? Try thinking strategically about all of the market research you have planned for 2011. We’re seeing more and more pharma marketers skillfully using market research studies as the basis for claims in their promotional marketing materials.

As a recent example, we have a Client that took a few questions from a patient quantitative study we conducted for them and replicated them in a physician ATU. This effort revealed a shocking discrepancy in how patients and physicians perceived issues of control related to a specific disease state. Now, before you start yelling at me through the screen that this could never happen in your company, give me a chance to explain. As part of our business at ROF, we conduct a lot of quantitative market research. What we’ve found is that if you consult your Legal and Regulatory folks early in the survey development process, you can be sure that you design the study correctly, ask the right questions, and sample sufficiently so that you can increase the probability of claims generation on the back end.

We’ve had clients use data from patient segmentation studies to educate MDs on different patient types and their distinct needs. We’ve even had some successfully use data from re-contact studies to reinforce the value of a program to physicians and other patients. Objective market research is a great way to gather satisfaction data among your current brand users as well.

So where is new data to support the core messaging for your brand going to come from in 2011? We’re just a click away.

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