What We Think

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!

OK, what I’m about to write here is going to sound like marketing blasphemy, but here goes…

Message Development Should be a strategically driven exercise, not a creatively driven one.

Where is this coming from, you might ask. Well, we’re involved in quite a bit of message development work here at ROF. In some projects, we handle it all internally—developing and testing Communication Platforms for physicians, patients, even pre-launch brands. While in other projects, we’re involved in more of a strategic consulting role on behalf of our clients where we shadow an agency process and assist in navigating the strategic hurdles of a given brand or category.

Now, having spent the first half of my career on the agency side and the second half as a strategic supplier, I think I’m qualified to lay this out there. What often goes fundamentally wrong with message development is that your brand’s core communication platform is generated and refined over time by creatives, not strategists. This is a huge issue because messages should not be viewed as stand alone units of eloquently written copy. They need to be crafted together, with a precise articulation and hierarchy to tell the most compelling story for your brand.

In most cases, copywriters are not going to be intimate with the broader strategic issues impacting your brand and that can result in a default approach of treating messages as individual elements of copy rather than a strategic, cohesive platform.

So how did you arrive at the current message platform for your brand? Did your agency develop a list of messages that physicians assembled into their “preferred” order? Or did you work with someone who carefully crafted a few distinct, but compelling stories about your brand and then vet those with a sufficient sample of your customers? If you did not select the latter option, then it may be time to reevaluate your brand story to ensure that it translates to a strategic idea that is larger than the sum of it’s well-articulated parts.