What We Think

Biopharma has unbranded message development backwards. There I said it! How in the world can you define your unbranded message platform if you don’t know where you’re headed with your brand message platform? Market education or development activities aren’t altruistic. These activities are supposed to educate the market in a way that helps the target audience understand how to appropriately use and differentiate your product quickly after launch.

It has been our experience in applying Evidence-Based Marketing to communication development over the past 5 years that the identification of key educational messaging prescripts is essential for accelerating launch uptake. Educational prescripts are basically the unbranded messages that serve to quicken internalization of a promotional story and can be linked to intensified product adoption at launch. Quantitative evidence supports this.

Recent work that we did related to a Client launch of a forecasted billion-dollar brand demonstrated (with a P value) that internalization of key educational prescripts prior to launch, not only increased onset of prescribing, but depth of prescribing as well. A subsequent study with early adopters provided additional evidence and validation of the criticality of educational prescripts in launch platform development. Uncovering these prescripts and incorporating them into the launch communication platform is essential for success in today’s market.

With educational prescripts in hand, only then are you able to define and invest in appropriate unbranded pre-marketing activities!

I recently received my second report of a ‘failed’ messaging research project from a client that was looking to ROF for some evidence-based diagnostics (or as I call it . . . sanity check).  Both Clients used the term ‘failed’, not I.  In looking at the stimuli and methodologies for both projects, I came back to a simple tenet that I learned long ago from personal selling.  The tenet is that physicians are moved by stories—not statements—and these stories must be written for them, not by them.

Doctors are not marketers, yet traditional messaging validation techniques often ask them to act as if they were, by laying out dozens of discrete messages before them and then asking them to rank which are most compelling.  This democratic approach to message development is comforting yet suboptimal, because it gives the client a false sense of security that the brand messages are being presented in the right order.

There are two fundamental flaws in this approach at the end of the day.  First, physicians are human beings and as such, they base their decisions on reality, not potential reality. It is really just simple human nature.  Opinions are grounded in what is and not what can be, which allows them to quickly discard messages that don’t align with today’s reality.  There is much evidence within communication theory that demonstrates, quite simply, that we don’t know what we want until it’s been shown to us.

Second, is the difference between presenting robust factual evidence and the power of a compelling story based on these facts.  The vogue term now is “storytelling” because it accurately describes how most people process and internalize information – as part of a story with a beginning, middle, and end.  What physicians ultimately remember is a theme or vision, not a series of disconnected bullet point messages.

It’s time to step out of your comfort zone and start telling your Brand story. Not sure how?  Give us a call.

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!