Connecting with customers
pharmafile | September 13, 2005 | Feature | Sales and Marketing |Â Â Â
Great creative executions, those that have the 'wow' factor and stand out from the crowd, require long-term brand strategy and real clarity of thought. The first step towards great execution has to be really thinking through all aspects of the brand strategy and how that translates into a meaningful connection and long-term relationship with your target customers – an area that could often be improved in the pharma industry.
The emotional benefits and core values that will transform the product into a brand, and how to communicate those values with the right tonal quality and appropriate imagery as well as words. Key drivers for developing a successful creative brand execution are:
- Real customer insight – understanding why prescribers do what they do and really identifying what does/could motivate them?
- A clear understanding of brand building and brand management, be it global or local, and the development of motivating brand propositions
- Clarity about what you are doing, why you are doing it and what you need to achieve
Customer insight
Marketing excellence involves really understanding why our customers do what they do and the influences that can drive their behaviour, both our own and other parties. So we do not just mean understanding the prescriber but also the non-prescribing influencers. Having real customer insight, rather than just customer knowledge, provides both the inspiration and the foundation for successful brand positioning. It reveals the true customer 'question' to which your brand can provide the unique 'answer'. It helps crystallise how a brand can achieve customer relevance, customer motivation and competitive differentiation.
We tend to look at our customers too traditionally and have no clear understanding of their motivations and attitudes. Without understanding what makes the doctor tick we cannot give the quality of brief the agency needs to develop effective pharma advertising. Analysis of the customer should therefore go beyond the obvious scripted questions, in order to get to the information that will make a real difference to how we communicate with doctors particularly on an emotional level so that it engages and resonates with them.
Brand building
FMCG marketers understand the power of a brand and know that every strong brand is based on a good product. That is because the attributes of the product and its use lead to consequences, which in turn lead to emotional benefits.
Emotional benefits are what drive the increased value of the brand over the product. Too often in pharma we define customer benefits purely in terms of product value (ie, the functional benefit of the product).
The challenge for pharma marketers is to drive beyond the product and what it does and tap into the more human side of our customers. This will enable us to understand what emotional benefits they are looking for that our brands can satisfy.
This is not as easy in the apparently clinical world of pharmaceuticals but, doctors have always made value judgments and this is where the emotional values can take over. We can then ensure our whole communication approach, including advertising, is more motivating by building, reinforcing and defending those identified values.
It is also of utmost importance to build the right relationship with our brand users to maximise the return on the marketing investment. In life, building human relationships takes time and effort. While many relationships start on the purely functional features, for it to be lasting it has to move on to the emotional. It is the same for brand relationships.
We have to keep building on the emotional level to gain customer loyalty to our brand. This takes time and effort and a long-term view, not one that is focused solely on immediate returns.
Building this relationship requires delivering the consistent brand messages in a simple but coherent manner. How we communicate visually and in words determines how our brand is perceived and whether it resonates successfully with the target customer.
As we are all aware, pharma is focused more and more on global branding and positioning, insisting that 'one-size-fits-all' is a 'good thing'. This global view often fails to recognise that the only real beneficiary is the company (and perhaps the global agency!).
An imposed global campaign does not necessarily address the specific prescribing triggers which are effective at local level. What is needed is acceptance of local tailoring within limits, defined by a structured analytical process.
One of the key issues, however, is that the global team often provide insufficient detail for the local marketing teams to really understand what the branding and positioning means at an operational level. All too often, there is a lack of competitive brand and marketing strategy thinking based on real customer understanding.
Global marketers don't really know enough about their customers, their motivations, triggers and attitudes to allow them to develop a clear idea of the brand and its marketing strategy.
This makes it impossible to give the agency the real customer insight and the clear brief needed to develop a truly effective campaign.
So how do we break out of the marketing rut and ensure our agencies are given the direction to create more memorable and effective communications?
Creating brand personality and character
Most importantly, overall brand core values need to be defined. Brand core values are the active words that reflect your vision; the values that you wish to associate with your brand over time; the attributes and characteristics that you wish to assign to your brand, linking the brand with the customer.
These core brand values will be demonstrated not only in your Brand Vision but also in the tone of voice and style of your communications to your customers.
Think about the personality of your brand – Brand personality is more emotion-driven than logic-driven; it reflects the feelings people have about the brand and the way the brand transmits feelings back to them.
Think about the personality of your customers- To establish a meaningful relationship between your customers and your brand, you need to understand who your customers are and the type of people they are. What are their motivations and characteristics? The overall aim of thinking about a brand personality is resonance with the target customer to achieve characteristics such as loyalty, attachment, community and engagement.
Think about common values- To accentuate that resonance, identify what values are common both to your target customers and your brand? Use the words from market research that describe your competitors and think about the traits for each. In particular, active benefits/values drive Brand Strength.
The visual imagery
As well as developing the core brand values, the visual imagery then needs to be developed. As marketers you need to ask: 'What are the qualities you want to express in the visual imagery that support the brand values?' and 'What will be the persona and tone of the brand?'. This provides the feel of the brand and drives imagery and tone.
In summary, there are a number of things that need to be done to ensure that effective communication and advertising programmes are developed.
Marketing teams really must understand the motivators and drivers of their customers to identify their emotional as well as their tangible needs.
Overall brand values need to be defined and managed long-term. As part of this, what are the qualities you want to express in the visual imagery that support the brand values and what will be the tone of the brand communication?
Specific prescribing triggers and levers need to be identified, resulting in a tangible and emotional message construct that is consistent with driving prescribing.
Marketers must understand their communication challenges relative to the needs of their customers and be clear about what the particular campaign needs to achieve.
All of this should be understood before the agency is asked to translate it to a communications strategy.
Brand advertising and communication should spend more time highlighting differentiation and positive brand benefits, and less on esteem and what nice people they are.
CASE STUDIES
Award-winning Seretide
Using the example of the award-winning Seretide campaign illustrates what having true customer insight can achieve.
At a functional level, Seretide provides highly effective asthma control with significantly greater improvements in lung function and reduction in symptoms than steroids alone, something patients can feel.
Customer insight came through market research with end users that identified that patients felt Seretide actually changed their lives.
"It's quite miraculous for some patients. It's more than control – they just feel they don't have asthma," said a practice nurse.
"It had a brilliant affect on me. I was struggling in January. My peak flow meter readings were down and I just couldn't seem to get them back up even when I was behaving myself…and then two months on Seretide I was back up to normal", said a patient.
The creative team were then able to develop a campaign that engaged doctors on a more emotional level than a previous functional approach that failed to motivate a change in prescribing behaviour.
By prescribing Seretide the doctor felt they were helping a patient with asthma feel themselves again, not feel like an asthmatic.
They were giving them their lives back – a powerful, emotional message.
Repositioning Solpadol
Solpadol was an existing product within a low interest category to healthcare professionals (HCPs) so the ad campaign, therefore, had to stand out.
In the award-winning campaign that was developed, the creative idea came from talking to customers and deciding to position the brand for short-term distressing pain in otherwise fit and healthy patients.
Doctors painted pictures of patients to demonstrate the type of patient they meant. With that level of input, the agency was able to come up with a smart execution which effectively differentiated the brand and stood out from the crowd, based on understanding the doctors thinking and language.
This repositioning of the brand to existing users and the provision of clear patient pictures more than achieved its aim of getting doctors to prescribe more Solpadol. The rest, as they say, is history.
