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Health Meets Healthcare: Our Case for a 4 Day Work Week

As the Summer of 2023 enters full swing, the world has officially shaken off the remaining vestiges of the pandemic years.  While we are all enjoying this return to normalcy, it’s critical that those of us who have the privilege and responsibility to craft policies for the workforce don’t forget some of the lessons we learned when life slowed down more than 3 years ago.

·       Mental health matters.

·       Personal and family time is important.

·       Less in-office time and fewer meetings does not mean lower productivity.

Even though the world seems increasingly focused on improving mental health, research uncovers that full-time employees’ mental health has declined in recent years. U.S. employees regularly log longer hours and cite feeling that they are always on call.

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Are You Crowdsourcing Your Brand Strategy?

Crowdsourcing

According to Wikipedia, crowdsourcing is a process that involves outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people. The most common type of crowdsourcing assignment that you might be familiar with is running a logo design contest. This is where you share a common creative brief with a diverse, distributed set of graphic designers that provide potential solutions for payment.

At ROF, we are starting to see pharmaceutical and biotechnology marketers embrace crowdsourcing with their most sensitive element – strategy. The approach boils down to gaining input on the brand strategy from all corners of the organization and deriving the final strategy based on this ‘disciplined’ approach.

However, the disadvantages of this approach are many, including*:

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The Potential Perils of Over-Relying on Expert Advice — A Visionary Tale

Today’s brand director launching the next big advance in science too often circulates exclusively among rarified air. What I mean is that their views about the market, prescribers, and patients are almost exclusively shaped by the 4-6 key opinion leaders (KOL) who specialize in their target market. Over reliance on KOL input to shape your clinical and promotional plans is fraught with danger. Let me give you a case study to illustrate.

A company provided unfettered access to leading KOLs in the field for a new product in advance of full-scale roll out. Each KOL was provided a concierge from the home office to ensure the expert was detailed on the product through and through . . . plus each expert had 24-hours access for help in using the product.

Here was the product feedback from experts verbatim:

“An utter disappointment and abysmal failure”
“I’m genuinely baffled by why we might need it”
” . . . great it is not”
“My god, am I underwhelmed”

As it turns out, the problem here was not really the product. It was actually that the “experts” who took part in this controlled test were constrained by their own realities. They were not able to think of what could be possible with this new product, only what currently was possible. Thankfully, the company had the courage and foresight to recognize this limitation and they launched anyway.

The product you ask? Apple iPad2.

*Adpated from David Pogue article appearing in NYTimes on March 9, 2011.

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