How can customer insight work for you?
pharmafile | September 10, 2007 | Feature | Sales and Marketing |Â Â customers, insight, salesÂ
It should be a very simple equation: if you can understand what motivates clinicians – and all the other prescribing influencers – to prescribe a particular treatment, you can adapt your marketing to ensure that you are pressing those hot buttons.
A vital part of this is understanding how shifting NHS priorities affect these prescribing triggers. In a healthcare system where an ever-increasing number of stakeholders (both in the NHS and outside it) influence prescribing behaviour, ensuring that your marketing message hits the spot is the key to success in a complicated marketplace.
Using market research to try to find out exactly where and what that spot is, is nothing new. But how often does it give pharma companies the real insight they need to adapt their marketing to be fully effective? Too often, market research is used to try to prove what brand guardians (and often senior management) think is the case rather than genuinely seeking out new knowledge to improve their understanding of the customer.
Truly insightful research should find something you didn't already know previously, which will help you guide your marketing. To achieve this requires far more than a well-executed market research programme (although thats vital, too). What it really needs is a level of focus, which is sadly all too often lacking – but achieve it and you have a very powerful tool to pull those prescribing triggers and drive increased sales.
We often assume the first product to market in any particular therapy area will always be the one which sticks in the mind of the prescriber, but this is not necessarily so. The product which will stick best will be the first one which is positioned to best meet the customers' needs and this quite often means we need to communicate at an emotional as well as a functional level. As Rees and Trout say in their 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: "Marketing is not a battle of products, it's a battle of perceptions; and sometimes it's better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace."
Get under the skin of your customers and develop a true insight into their needs. In this way, you can become positively positioned in their mindsets, even if your product is not first to market or even, on paper, the best. It's a very powerful place to be.
A pyramid of needs
The starting point for this process has to be the customer (and not your product). You need to identify what change in behaviour you require from your customer in order to achieve your objectives. If you can understand that, and also who and what might influence your customer, then you can tailor your marketing accordingly, both directly to the customer and also to all of those influencers, both clinical and non-clinical.
In the end, what will persuade a customer to change their behaviour will be if they are convinced that in doing so, their needs will be better met – whether this be functional clinical needs, role-based needs or personal/emotional needs. Pharma has grasped this concept for some time, but traditionally we have concentrated on the basic, obvious needs of efficacy, safety and tolerability.
Many marketers will be familiar with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which identifies a pyramid of requirements ranging from the basic at the bottom, through to what he calls "self-actualisation" at the top. In pharma marketing terms, efficacy, safety and tolerability are basic needs, and ones which most prescribers will now take as read.
So, the differentiation can only come further up the need pyramid, and that means gaining a real understanding of the more complex and more sophisticated needs which will impact on their prescribing decision. Often pharma marketers only think in terms of what the solutions might look like, rather than trying to visualise the little details which will actually change behaviour.
Using research only to look at the basic needs of doctors may give you some data, but it certainly won't give you customer insight – not in any meaningful way which will help you shape your marketing effectively.
Knowing doctors' priorities
In practice, the other needs we have to consider can be split into two categories: role-based needs, and personal needs. The first of these are defined by the factors which impact on what the clinician has to have happen to fulfil their role, and accounts for the influences and influencers impacting them. These might be achieving financial targets or achieving agreed objectives with their employers. If a trust's priority is to keep a group of patients out of hospital and in primary care, then if the pharmaceutical company can persuade the prescriber that its product will achieve this, its message will have a very effective impact on prescribing. But you need to know what the priorities for the doctor are first.
In a system where the patient is increasingly viewed as a healthcare consumer, the need to keep the patient onside is an important role-based need for doctors. The NHS is increasingly building community-based services where patients must be motivated and empowered, and this impacts greatly on the prescriber's decision-making.
The other, less rational, needs that we often need to account for are the personal ones of doctors. The more emotional personal opinion that impacts on his or her beliefs, goals, attitudes and beliefs. Healthcare professionals will never directly say as much, but just like you and me, all prescribers are human and, therefore, there will be emotional factors which will affect the way they make prescribing decisions.
Traditionally, market researchers have shied away from digging too deeply into this important aspect of prescribing triggers, and not just because it is difficult to unearth the truth. It is sometimes said that because such emotions are intensely personal, that it is simply too complicated to build them into the equation.
However, a well thought-through and well-executed piece of research will be able to identify trends or segments with similar needs, beliefs, attitudes or goals.
What we are talking about here are emotions, and the doctors who wear their hearts on their sleeves are few and far between. But just because they don't immediately open up about it, clinicians – like all of us – have an emotional side which drives their decision-making; they are not just prescribing machines. Quantitative market research cannot capture those human and emotional triggers that requires true insight.
A four-step process
So given all of this, how do you go about gaining the insight? How do we ensure we dig down deep enough into functional, role-based and emotional needs to be certain we build a differentiating product proposition that ensures we are optimally placed in the customer's mind?
Perhaps the first step is to identify what we really mean by insight. Chambers Dictionary describes it as "imaginative penetration", which although incomplete as a definition, starts to express the difference between insight and data. It's only insight if it tells you something you didn't already know, which is useful to you.
In the pharma marketing sense, insight is about looking at the situation, understanding the challenge and, crucially, understanding the depth of information you need for your brand. If you don't know this, then you cannot structure your research to find it, and then no matter how well-executed your research is, it won't give you the insight you need.
Achieving it should be viewed as a four-step process, with the implementation of the research not occurring until step three. This proper consideration and preparation is the key, because if you can't identify what insight you need, you won't know what to look for.
The first step is to define the problem, and agree the research objectives. What is our business issue? What level of insight do we require? How much do we need to explore role-based and emotional needs? This means knowing the business issue you are facing, what information you need and why. It's important to stay focused at this stage, and avoid the common temptation to test something else at the same time, while we're doing the research. You'd be surprised how often this happens.
It is important that everyone buys into the objectives of the research at this stage, because you're setting out to gather things you don't yet know. Inevitably, some of those things will not fit into your current way of thinking, and you need to be prepared to take those insights on the chin and develop your approach accordingly. Accepting this before you are faced with the situation is easier to deal with.
Step two is developing the research plan and methodology, and this will be informed by the needs identified in step one. Clearly, this is not as straightforward a process; i.e. when you are seeking personal needs, rather than when you are seeking more tangible treatment needs. Confidence in your market research agency is crucial.
At this stage, you also need to work out what flexibility you will have to build into the methodology, because as you start to gain insight, you may need to change the questions you are asking and revisit the whole process.
Acting on insight
The third step involves implementing the research. Again, its useful to have interim steps here, including a pilot so that you can test whether you are gathering the insight you need and then adjust the process as necessary. Many product managers are unwilling to challenge their market research agencies once the process is under way, but it's important that you do. Constantly ask yourself and the agency: "am I learning something new?" If the answer is no, you are missing out on the insight.
The final, and fourth, step is making sure that the results are reported. There is little point gaining insight if it is not acted upon. Because you will be hearing things that are new to you, and not just confirmation that what you thought is correct, you need to be prepared to hear things in the presentation which may be difficult to accept internally.
You may need to pre-empt political problems by priming senior management. But, if your organisation is genuinely committed to gaining and using customer insight to drive its marketing, then that does imply an open corporate mind.
Customer insight is a hugely powerful thing. To make the most of it means getting away from the too-often-seen situation where market research is driven by questions asked by senior management, rather than by a genuine desire to understand what drives the customer and a willingness to change what you do accordingly, in line with the customers needs. The question in any organisation is whether everyone is prepared to buy into a process of, in Chambers' delightful phrase, imaginative penetration.
Jon Bircher is a senior consultant at The MSI Consultancy.. He can be contacted at jbircher@msi.co.uk; alternatively, visit www.msi.co.uk
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