Digital Pharma: Mobile marketing
pharmafile | September 1, 2011 | Feature | Medical Communications | Digital Pharma blog, iphone, mobile, smart devices
“This, is not a phone,” said Mark Blayney Stuart holding up his BlackBerry. “It’s a very powerful computer that happens to make phone calls.”
The head of research at the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Mark has been pondering the future of smart phones and marketing for a new CIM report on the subject.
He was speaking at the PM Society’s Digital Showcase meeting in London in June and presented some of the latest ideas and trends from the consumer world of mobile marketing.
Rather than trying to square consumer applications with what the Code of Practice allows, Mark looked instead at the transformation of the phone, from humble mobile to interactive data centre, and how it has “crept up on us over the last couple of years and changed our relationship with information”.
Last year more smart phones than PCs were sold for the first time, and internet browsing via phones is forecast to overtake PC internet access in the near future.
The speed of this change means that even consumer marketers have yet to fully exploit the potential of this shift in behaviour, Mark said.
Mobile marketing trends
Location: One of a smartphone’s key features is in combining GPS and other technologies to pinpoint your location. This location-sensitive element to opens up many potential benefits for marketers.
This technology has enabled Burger King to use a location-based app to direct users to the nearest branch. Moreover, the app allows users to order their food via their phone, and works out how long it takes to reach the branch, ensuring their meal is ready and waiting when they arrive.
But, Mark warned that mobiles apps like this could soon become commonplace, but may run the risk of being perceived as junk before too long. But for now, he said, it is worth exploring this side of mobile technology.
Some pharma companies have already exploited the technology – Abbott has launched a Diabetes Mapp iPhone app in Germany. This searches out a patient’s nearest diabetic services based on their current location, pinpointing convenient diabetologists, podiatrists, psychotherapists and so on.
In the US Novartis has incorporated location elements into two of its flu-focused apps. VaxTrak include a facility for locating the nearest pharmacy that offers a flu jab, while Where’s Flu allows users to search for sickness incidence levels by locality.
Daily deals: Another mobile marketing trend Mark outlined was that of ‘daily deals’, the slew of websites currently competing for consumer cash. Typified by services like Groupon, which last year turned down a $6 billion takeover offer from Google. The company provides a 21st century twist to the old fashioned coupon. Combined with location-based technology, daily deal apps provide a dynamic way to target consumers with locally-relevant offers.
Mark used the example of switching an ice-cream campaign to one for hot soup if the weather changes, though he acknowledged this was not an example the assembled ranks of pharma marketers could use directly. Instead he suggested the dynamism inherent in mobile marketing could offer the industry a way to swiftly react to issues such as new clinical news. This could see companies responding to something that either strengthens their brand messages or requires a swift re-evaluation of strategy.
Recommendations: What used to be simply word-of-mouth marketing was another trend tackled at the PM Society meeting. The internet has turned the power of recommendations on its head, with people increasingly turning anonymous online users rather than to friends and family.
Reviews on the likes of Amazon and TripAdvisor are sought out because, Mark noted, people now have too many options.
“What we’ve got now is a situation where we’re deluged with choices. But instead of choices, what we actually want is recommendations,” he said, adding that the power and reach of these recommendations has increased with the rise of social media.
“[Society is] placing social media more and more at the heart of what we do and, within this, we’re listening to recommendations and acting on them. If you can get your offering right, people are ‘sneezing’ it onto the internet.”
Recommendations in health have long been available online from patient blogs, communities and on social networks such as Facebook. Now the health service itself is looking to offer this kind of online participation. The Department of Health has stated its commitment to lead an ‘information revolution’ in the NHS and last year launched its own online comparison service that allows patients to rate and compare maternity services.
Mobile pharma marketing
When most people think about mobile marketing, they think of apps. But when looking at apps Mark was clear that marketers must offer users a clear value proposition.
The danger of not having such a proposition were clear from research released by Localytics. The analytics company found that last year 26% of mobile apps were used just once after they were downloaded.
And at the PM Society meeting Mark noted “the only apps that are successful are the ones that answer a specific need or offer something the customer wants”.
He cited an app from IKEA that allows users to superimpose the Swedish company’s furniture over a photo from their own home to see how that sofa would really look in a customer’s living room.
As his presentation drew to a close, Mark was asked whether marketers should favour apps for particular types of smartphones or focus on mobile versions of websites that would be accessible on any smartphone. There was, he said, no absolute answer to that question, depending as it does on who marketers are trying to reach and the needs of those groups.
To date pharma’s mobile marketing strategy has focused almost exclusively on apps for the iPhone and, to a lesser extent, the iPad. But recent UK smartphone market figures show the number of iPhones is running almost neck and neck with those that use Google’s Android operating system. Meanwhile, it’s only this year that the first mobile websites have been launched, with Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim and Shire the only companies to so far dip their toes in those waters.
Some of the ideas Mark outlined may not be directly applicable for pharma marketers to use, though now our phones are no longer just phones it’s clear that they present myriad opportunities.
The key to success will be meeting customer needs – without being seduced by the technology.
Dominic Tyer is web editor for Pharmafocus and InPharm.com and the author of the Digital Pharma blog He can be contacted via email, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+.
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