What We Think

How interesting would a superhero movie be if it immediately jumped right to the part where the hero fights the epic battle, defeats the villain, and saves the day? Although the action might captivate your attention for a few minutes, you’re ultimately not likely to remember much about it once it’s over if you haven’t been provided with the backstory. The backstory gives you context, and more importantly, it explains why you should even care.

Yet with the heroes of our industry, ahem our pharmaceutical brands, we consistently feel the need to just jump right to the part where our brand saves the day. This archaic approach leaves our customers, whether prescribers or patients, in the same quandary as my fictitious moviegoer – trying to figure out on her own why she should care. Read On

Congratulations! You’ve just completed your brand positioning, and it’s wonderful. After many weeks (or likely months) and hundreds of man hours, the wording has been expertly selected and refined to effectively communicate your brand’s unique benefit(s), it’s been validated with your targeted customers, and the result is a thing of beauty.

But now someone at your agency, or worse within your own organization, tells you that it’s kind of hard to remember. They want you to develop a short moniker to help the troops understand the essence of what you hope to communicate, but without having them have to work too hard to decipher. You know what I mean, s/he wants a catchphrase like, “confident control” or “best balanced” to throw around at the launch readiness review or sales meetings, because let’s face it, the catchphrase is just easier than reciting that whole mess of words that your team created.

So, what’s the harm really? It would make it easier for everyone to remember and rally around. It can’t hurt, right? WRONG . . . Read On

I’ve recently worked on two projects in separate therapeutic areas where the challenger brand had unique clinical data that was met with apathy despite high unmet need in both categories. Why would this be the case?

The physicians in each category had assumed that their current brand already had the data in question when it, in fact, did not. This belief by the prescribers basically eliminated the rightful clinical differentiation for these new products. The physicians had given the benefit of the doubt (or filled in the missing data) to their trusted brand.

So, how does something like this happen? Read On