Advertising: be brief, be bold
pharmafile | July 22, 2009 | Feature | Sales and Marketing | Pfizer, advertising, branding
In the pharma industry, do we believe that the gap between what our businesses promise and what results our businesses deliver is the ability to execute?
Execution, according to Bossidy and Charan, is all about what you actually end up doing and not what you say you're going to do in the future. I like this as a concept – we all have friends or colleagues who 'talk a good game' but in reality, are frequently not even on the pitch. How do we therefore, close the gap between our (often extremely impressive) strategies and our implementation of them?
We must improve, or indeed learn, the ability to execute. But people, on the whole, do not think themselves into a new way of acting; they act themselves into a new way of thinking. We in pharma need to act our way into thinking that execution is the key to keeping our promises to customers and other stakeholders such as shareholders, employees and the communities in which we live and work.
In the field of pharma marketing, we spend many hours wrangling over the next great step into deeper customer insight, yet I would argue that the customer insight – as long as it truly is an insight – will not change or diffuse markedly from one year to the next. The coffee chain Starbucks built an empire on an insight that is as true today as it was 20 or more years ago: 'In this busy world, people need a home from home; a place to relax and feel part of a small community'.
Observations, therefore, which one may glean from formal research for example, are not, by definition, insights. Insight generation is the ability take those observations and then create compelling, fresh, relevant, enduring and actionable insight from them – in itself the discipline of execution.
Is there a counter argument here? I believe it was Henry Ford, the founder of the motor company and the Don Corleone of mass production techniques, who said: "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said larger wagons with bigger wheels and more horses!" Clearly, the vision of motorised transportation was not held by many in the early 20th Century, so was the customer insight incorrect? We can all now see with benefit of a century of hindsight that it is the question that is incorrect. Asking "What do you want for your transport needs?" is not going to elicit answers with sufficient granularity to gain the insight of "Freedom to move where I want, when I want".
On this insight one could start to execute a business proposition that revolutionised personal travel.
So true insight is the bedrock; the cornerstone of what we build our brands or services upon. Once that precious, illusive and value adding insight is corralled, we need to spend our time acting on the execution. I contend that our visual or above the line promotional campaigns are the keystone: the peak of the arch, the apex of the bridge. Our most clear, concise and thought provoking expression of our brand promise. We all have favourite advertisements from within our industry, be they customer communication, business to business or direct to public/patient.
We all cringe when we see the loo roll made of barbed wire; nod sagely when we see the brilliant "Lethal Obsession" campaign while glancing down to our own waistlines to check; and we feel a little shocked and uncomfortable when our flicking-through is abruptly halted by the "Toilet Head" images.
These strong campaigns, however, are too few and too infrequent. Is this because the insight on which they are based is, in the first instance, an observation and therefore the communication does not approach the emotional response required in the target customer? Or is it that the insight, that true, lasting, obvious-when-you- think-about-it gem has lost its shine in unsatisfactory – dare I say lazy – visual execution?
As marketers, we cannot hold our creative agencies responsible for this, for they are as good as the brief we supply and their creativity is not infrequently the element that doesn't quite make a silk purse but certainly makes the sow's ear a lot less porcine.
It is the role of the pharmaceutical marketer, to distil the insight from all we observe, read and research about our customers and their world. Once we have our insight, we must guard it jealously. We must make it the cornerstone on which all our communications are grounded. We must be brave and creative with our visual communication of the insight to our audiences as the keystone of our brand promise. In short, we must execute better to take the promise of what we were going to achieve to be what we actually delivered to our customers and our companies.
The next time you are putting a campaign into testing which you feel less than100% happy with, be brave! Do not accept "it tested well!" during the feedback session as reason to progress to full implementation. You know your brand, you need to do all you can to execute on its promise and a new visual expression of this promise, I believe, is vital to get absolutely right. Work hard, have fun, and execute on your brand insight as passionately as you can.
Jason Perfitt is head of customer and channel marketing at Pfizer UK
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