Getting inside the customer’s head
pharmafile | July 11, 2005 | Feature | Sales and Marketing |Â Â Â
Doctors are a diverse group of people. From GPs to specialists, with the more than 60 areas of medicine that this comprises, there is a lot of ground to cover for pharma marketing departments wishing to get their attention.
Silver Fern's managing director Errol Crosbie, believes that the pharma industry's understanding of its audience has its good and bad points. "Despite the dearth of medics with companies, marketing departments exhibit particularly good technical understanding of both their customers and their subject."
But he adds: "Pharma retains a disturbing tendency to underestimate healthcare professionals and 'cherry-pick' data or massage visual presentations, which only increases scepticism of pharma data."
After the body blows it has recently taken from the Health Select Committee and on issues such as the safety of Cox-IIs and antidepressants, pharma can ill afford to further diminish its reputation in doctors' eyes.
Matters are hardly helped with the recent publication of books aimed at doctors, such as The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It and On the Take: How Medicine Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health.
At the heart of this there should perhaps be a clearer acknowledgement of the sort of customers that the industry has. As Dr Rino Coladangelo, chief executive of Medix UK, notes: "All doctors will have achieved high academic standards to get into medical school and then, there and beyond they will have spent months or years developing the skills to evaluate facts scientifically, analyse them and make diagnostic decisions based on those facts."
Adopting different approaches
Can the challenge of marketing to such healthcare professionals be remedied through a new approach to marketing? The shift in pharma thinking towards adopting techniques more commonly used in the consumer world, perhaps best exemplified by Novartis' appointment of former Pepsi executive Thomas Ebeling to head up the company, may have little road left to travel.
Silver Fern's Crosbie thinks so, saying: "Relatively little can now be learnt from consumer advertising research techniques.
"Excellent consumer advertising research agencies have brought their techniques to ethical pharma for several years but the stifling of research creativity by regulation, budgets and limited population has taken its toll and those techniques that work seem to have been applied."
However, Medix UK's Dr Coladangelo questions whether the consumer approach will ever be made sophisticated enough for the industry's customers.
"Pharma still approaches the promotion of pharma products to physicians in much the same way as one might promote washing powder to housewives," he says, adding that small numbers of physicians may have been complicit in encouraging this attitude by their behaviour.
Research has even suggested that doctors are dissatisfied with the quality of information they receive from pharma companies. A Medix survey of doctors' responses to pharma adverts and marketing material noted a range of comments on the subject from indifference to overt disdain. One fairly typical remark was: "It wouldn't have any effect, I wouldn't prescribe on the basis of a slogan."
"Campaigns tend to gravitate to being addressed at the lowest common denominator and until now have necessarily ended up as one-size-fits-all," Dr Coladangelo adds.
"This is in the face of knowing full well that in any group of professionals there is a wide range of knowledge, attitude and receptivity to information and marketing messages."
Targeting customers
Depending on the stage of development at which it is deployed, there is much that market research can do to aid and improve the targeting of messages to customers.
Louise Shearer, director of market research at Doctors.net.uk, says: "Market research can tell you which concept communicates most effectively and engages the interest of the doctor, which execution is most effective and it can also tell you that none of the creative work is achieving your communication objectives and that it time to go back to the drawing board."
Although advertising research is an integral part of the marketing research process and supports the development of marketing strategy and its tactical execution, its design is just as important as its execution.
"The key to ad research is defining the criteria by which the ads will be judged. This should be straightforward, based on the brief given to the creatives, which in turn reflects the brand strategy and the role the ad will play in delivering that strategy. Ensuring that all three are aligned will give you a better ad strategy but not necessarily a better marketing strategy," Shearer says.
Ad research can deliver new insights into the customer, product or disease area, which can then be used beyond the design and selection of advertisements to review and develop the fundamental marketing strategy itself.
Online research
The newest area of research for pharma is that of the online medium, which offers some exciting benefits in terms of its speed of reporting, which can allow market researchers and marketers to take decisions in virtually real-time.
Dr Coladangelo says: "We are still in time to set a new and high standard for this new medium before it gets too well-established and possibly picks up some of the bad habits of the other channels."
According to Shearer, online surveys tend to be quicker and more convenient to complete than their telephone counterparts and lack the perceived intrusion of having an interviewer present, making the route suitable to explore sensitive issues.
But she cautions that a large database of potential respondents is necessary to ensure that the sample for each project is representative and avoids respondent fatigue or the 'professional' respondent.
Making research work
For pharma to ensure its marketing research is successful, and that budgets are spent wisely, Dr Coladangelo suggests companies:
- Treat doctors as the intelligent, analytical professionals that they are
- Present information to doctors in a way that is familiar to them andeasy to access and assimilate
- Make programmes engaging and interactive
- Research working doctors widely and thoroughly prior to launching and during marketing campaigns
On the last point he concludes: "Research should be undertaken with doctors who see real patients at the coalface, not so-called representatives of these doctors, either in agencies or at pharma companies.
"Properly undertaken and detailed research is probably the single most useful tool in getting the material and messages right before, during and after its use."
