Are you connecting with your customers?
pharmafile | July 30, 2007 | Feature | Sales and Marketing |Â Â customers, marketingÂ
Insights (or customer insights) seems to be the current buzzword in the pharmaceutical industry. But is it something we should be taking notice of, or just the latest management fad that puts a fancy name on market research? The Oxford English Dictionary defines insight as: "the capacity to gain an accurate and intuitive understanding of something". In the context of the customer, this means a deep understanding or perception of their behaviour and their motivations for buying or not buying a product.
However, it is clear that understanding on its own is not enough. An insight is only worth its salt if it can be used to generate great ideas with real business applications. In marketing, insights are enduring truths about customers that open up opportunities to grow businesses and brands.
Using them requires not only a deep understanding of relevant customer groups, but also a comprehensive knowledge of the wider market context, and the intuition and imagination to bring the two together.
To clarify this, ConsultComplete uses the 'so what' test. If you can't see the 'so what' of your insight (i.e. the possible business application), it's probably not a true marketing insight, merely a 'nice to know' about your customer that will get filed on the shelf and gather dust.
Why are insights so important?
In an increasingly difficult and competitive market environment for pharmaceutical companies, greater insight into the motivations and behaviours of customers are set to take on even greater importance. Thin product pipelines, fewer blockbuster brands, generic erosion of branded drug revenues and downward pressure on drug budgets from payers are all providing challenges, while increasingly complex sales and marketing channels are reducing return on investment for sales and marketing efforts.
As the cacophony of voices trying to gain market share grows ever louder, truly understanding what drives and motivates customers to change behaviour or connect emotionally to a brand will be crucial to making products stand out.
For us, this means not simply putting more focus on the customer, but firmly embedding this focus into businesses as the starting point for all marketing and brand activity.
This approach has long been considered best practice among consumer marketers, and evidence from our research suggests it is now firmly on the agenda of the more progressive pharmaceutical companies. In the words of one senior marketer: "Insights underpin everything we do, whether we are looking at an initial market entry and need to do segmentation studies or a marketed product and want to do some targeting."
This new attitude means moving beyond the rational, scientific context to embrace a more emotional dimension. The pharmaceutical industry has long understood that patients often take medications for more than purely clinical reasons. Patients can be motivated by emotional, psychological and lifestyle ideas such as being able to do more or becoming more independent. Physicians, like patients, are only human, and while they usually consider clinical data first, they also develop emotional connections to individual brands, companies or classes of drugs.
As a result, insights are becoming a major priority for progressive pharmaceutical marketers who realise that purchasing decisions often hinge on more than efficacy, tolerability and price. These marketers know that effective marketing strategies have to address both the emotional needs of the customer and their evidence-based clinical needs.
Insights, therefore, have enormous potential as a basis for compelling differentiation, particularly in an environment where genuine clinical breakthroughs and advances are becoming increasingly rare.
How do you get insights?
While insights tend to be synonymous with formal, usually qualitative, market research, this is not the only place to look for a magic 'aha!' moment.
Insights can come from a wide range of sources, from traditional numbers-based quantitative market research to new, emerging methods of qualitative research. Undoubtedly, traditional qualitative methods such as the focus group and depth interview will remain at the forefront of the search for insights. However, we are already seeing techniques such as ethnography, semiotics and neuroscience (rather than traditional psychology-based approaches) infiltrate mainstream market research.
We are also seeing companies employing hybrid methodologies that fuse focus group and creativity techniques to generate more future-focused thinking.
Our firm view is that no single approach will provide all the answers. Different methodologies and approaches represent different perspectives, all of which contribute to building a fuller picture of an increasingly complex world. The goal should always be to open up the maximum number of windows on customers to provide as rich a perspective as possible. While traditional market research will probably remain the primary device to deliver this, it shouldn't be the only tool in an insightful pharma marketers armoury.
As Archimedes' eureka moment in his bath illustrates, an insight can come from anywhere at any time. The real challenge is recognising when you have one and then harnessing it.
What difference can insights make in practice?
The cases below show how a simple but genuine insight can have a major impact on brand and communications strategies.
Perhaps one of the best known examples of customer insight in action is the Dove campaign.
In 2004, Dove's market – cosmetic cleansing products – was saturated. But Unilever, a past master in finding consumer insights, developed a campaign that would have a major impact. Research into women's attitudes to body shape found that they were intimidated and depressed by the prevalence of stick-thin models in competitor advertising. A big budget advertising and PR campaign was launched that attracted huge attention by using real women as models.
The campaign generated a nationwide debate on the nature of beauty that raised awareness of Dove products and forged powerful connections between the brand and many real women. Sales of the brand's firming cream products rose by 700% in the first six months of the campaign - a powerful result achieved by having just that bit extra insight.
Similarly, when erectile dysfunction product Cialis entered the market in 2003, its manufacturer, Lilly, found itself up against some tough competition in the form of GSK/Bayer's Levitra and Pfizer's Viagra, with the latter, at that time, being so well-known by consumers, it had literally become a household name.
But Lilly developed a strategy that successfully combined a powerful insight with a genuine differentiator. They discovered that many couples wanted to revive the element of spontaneity by choosing the right moment to have sex rather than feeling as though the clock was ticking from the moment the pill was taken.
Cialis' longer duration of action (up to 36 hours compared with the four or five hours of its competitors) met this customer need and led to a compelling positioning that was clearly different from either Viagra or Levitra. The impressive result was that Cialis' sales quickly surpassed Levitra's, and within a year of its launch, Cialis was generating more new scripts than Viagra.
According to one senior pharma marketing executive: "Physicians, hospital administrators, payers, will always say that they have made their decision on efficacy of the product, patient response, satisfaction; but when you look at how the product is really used, those factors are rarely what drives the end decision, what drives it is a concept assembly of the various constituents of what makes people happy."
A view of the future
So what of the future? We believe the trend towards greater use of insights is set both to continue and to expand across the lifecycle. The main use is currently pre-launch in late phase II and early phase III, and insights will continue to play a critical role here. But proactive research – starting years before a drug hits the market – will help build long-term strategies for products entering ultra-competitive markets.
According to one pharma market research manager, the importance of – and long-term commitment to – insights should not be underestimated: "Over time, organisations will find that they spend more money on insights research. If done properly it should give a more defined, more reliable segmentation. It is an ongoing investment and it is important to follow through the investment."
Companies that use insights early will better understand unmet needs and better understand how target physician and patient segments perceive existing competitor products, which means that their product will be better positioned when launched and, ultimately, more successful. Earlier use of insights research can also provide direction to claims development and even clinical development, as companies have a clearer picture of what patients want and need.
Greater acceptance of new techniques, such as observational research and creativity workshops, will also drive the growth of insights research, as will the ability of new audio-visual technology to bring to life interactions with doctors or the experiences of patients. These will connect marketing teams with the real lives of their customers much more intimately.
Ultimately, we expect that insights will become increasingly integrated into the marketing function of brand teams throughout the lifecycle to keep brands customer-focused as their competition and markets change. For the most successful pharma companies, insights will provide the foundation for both a focused, differentiated brand strategy and effective, targeted, tactics. And if these companies get their insights right, the rewards can be immense.
Customer insights was written by David Coleiro, Steve Padgett and Stephen Small of ConsultComplete.
For more information, or to receive a copy of ConsultComplete's white paper on insights research, email: info@consultcomplete.com
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