Reduce Your Patient Marketing Carbon Footprint

February 27, 2011

Reduce Your Patient Marketing Carbon Footprint

Filed under: Marketing Effectiveness,Patient Marketing,What We Think — Tags: internet, patient marketing, research — dreinhardt @ 9:22 pm

Sitting recently in a central research facility (behind the glass of course) a patient looked directly at the glass at the exact spot I was sitting and said, “Who is reading 16-page patient brochures?” I asked myself the same thing. Nobody has the attention span for 16 pages anymore, even if you believe they did before the age of the Internet.

This was reinforced to me when one of our launch brands completed a national pharmacy intercept study. Of the 900 patients that received Brand X, not one patient recalled receiving or seeing a patient brochure. This was despite the fact that our client’s sales warehouse showed that more than 50,000 brochures had been distributed the 3 months prior to the study.

Ask yourself – what’s the level of evidence to support your current patient brochure? Chances are, there are alternative communication vehicles that could yield a greater benefit to you brand.

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February 20, 2011

The Evolving Definition of an Advocacy Group

Filed under: Marketing Effectiveness,Patient Marketing,Professional Marketing,Social Media,What We Think — Tags: advocacy, evidence-based marketing, Facebook, patient marketing — dreinhardt @ 6:17 pm

I recently heard a client say, “That’s not an advocacy group!” This was in response to ROF sharing with the Client a key Facebook community focused exclusively on the education and empowerment of people with a specific disease. How is this not an advocacy group? Their expressed goals are to educate others about the disease, push for more funding, and be a more active voice in the community. What then is the definition of advocacy?

Employing our evidence-based marketing philosophy, we actively uncover organic advocacy groups with passionate leaders focused on energizing a community of people affected by a common disease. Our Clients who have been touched by these individuals know the true definition of an advocacy group.

Don’t be confined by traditional definitions…you might miss out on a great opportunity.

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February 13, 2011

Revolution vs Evolution Marketing

Filed under: Marketing Effectiveness,Professional Marketing,What We Think — Tags: dosing, efficacy, evolution marketing, inertia, professional marketing — dreinhardt @ 7:59 pm

So I’ve got this Client. We’re helping them attempt to recover from a number of bad decisions, but I’m going to focus on the crux of their communication effort.

Flashback…it’s 2007 and this Client is preparing to launch a new brand into a small category with only a single competitor. They have a superior product, or at least they thought so. Essentially the same efficacy as their on-market nemesis, but with more convenient dosing and administration. Easier for the nurses and the patients. No brainer, right?

You would have thought so. But the problem was, this Client promoted this new product as a revolution in the treatment category and not the “evolution” that it was. It backfired. Target physicians downplayed the convenience benefits of the product because they felt the Client had overplayed the brand’s efficacy. Translation—“if you had told us we’ll get all the efficacy we have now plus the added benefits of your brand, we would have gobbled it up. But, since you since you tried to convince me your brand could do more than it actually can, I’m going to stick with what I know.” Our client’s brand was relegated to second-line and it’s a hole they’re still digging out from.

The truth is, in today’s pharma and biotech markets, advances in many categories have become incremental, not monumental, making it difficult to break the hold of inertia in the absence of an obvious, compelling value proposition.

Remember when computer manufacturers touted the speed of the processors inside them as a key point of differentiation? Not anymore. Why? Advances in speed declined and users could no longer perceive the difference in computing power. Computer manufacturers have had to move beyond processing power to convince consumers to upgrade.

This is exactly what is happening in many categories in pharmaceutical and even the biotechnology industry. Too often we’re trying to sell revolution when what we should be selling is ‘upgrade.’ If you’re marketing revolution on a product that is more evolution, inertia is going to win every time!

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February 6, 2011

No Benefits to Silo Marketing in a Franchise World

Filed under: Marketing Effectiveness,What We Think — Tags: franchise, multiple drugs, multiple indication — kyork @ 8:28 pm

Is anyone else noticing a strange trend emerging in our industry? Brands that have the opportunity to capitalize on the benefit of a franchise strategy are opting not to do so in favor of a more self-serving, siloed approach. Before I go into some examples here, let me clarify our definition of a franchise-brand as one that treats the same condition as another product in your company or one that is a franchise unto itself with multiple indications.

Ok, here’s a timely example. Just a couple of days ago I saw a press release announcing positive data in a new indication for a marketed oncology product. What I found really unsettling was that nowhere in this press release had the company bothered to point out that the unique mechanism of this drug was proving useful in a number of different cancers. The announcement was strictly concerned with this one indication and not the larger brand. Big miss if you think about it.

This product has 6 other indications in the pipeline—they would have been setting the stage for all the other teams and increasing the cumulative effectiveness of their marketing conditioning efforts at the same time. We have seen other pharma companies with two drugs in the same space that not only have different marketing teams, they have different sales forces and even agencies. Can anyone really believe that this is an optimal approach?

If you’re working on a franchise-brand, you really need to take a step back and look at the big picture. The decisions you make for your brand or indication can have far-reaching implications and if you don’t think about them, you could really be diluting the impact of your marketing efforts.

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