Pharma Brands – join the live discussion on Twitter

pharmafile | October 17, 2011 | Feature | Sales and Marketing |  branding, brands 

Do pharma marketers need to kill off the ‘smiley happy people’ and update their approach to branding?  InPharm will host an hour long ‘Tweet Chat’ on Thursday 20 October at 1pm (BST). The hashtag for the event will be #inpharm.

More information: Pharma brands tweet chat

Read the following article by MSI’s Chris Marks and take part in the discussion on Thursday.

Over the years, many people have extolled the virtues of building brands in pharma, and have put forward different ways to build emotional benefits on top of functional benefits to create brand essences, brand wheels, onions and footprints.

These have been powerful tools in bringing pharma marketing to embrace the ‘brand’ idea, and are still essential in the overall thinking, but it’s time to consider moving away from this traditional brand development process.

The traditional model used by most companies has sought to derive an emotional benefit from the functional attributes in context with goals of treatment. Whichever model is used – and in truth they are all variations on a theme – they are founded in consumer marketing folklore where the end benefit is ‘how the end user feels’: the emotional benefit. 

This appears outdated in our pharma future, which is focused on delivering value for each stakeholder, whether prescriber, patient, policymaker or payer.

Looking at a brand as an augmented product no longer suffices in any health system where the drivers of choice are value-based health outcomes in an environment of sustainable healthcare.

We have to accept that our world is directed by some key overarching principles: how does my drug help to meet unmet medical needs, how a drug better meets existing needs, expands access and enhances patient outcomes.

At the same time, our traditional audience has also shifted away from the prescriber (especially the physician) towards the patient (normally in the form of the patient associations) and the payer. The demands here are not about ‘how I feel emotionally’, but instead about a value and economic justification of drug use for each of our stakeholders with a far greater emphasis on patient (health outcomes) and payer (sustainable healthcare).

That’s not to say that ‘brand’ is to be regarded as a dirty word in pharma – on the contrary, it has never been more important.

Ben Osborn, Commercial Portfolio lead Europe, Oncology at Pfizer puts it aptly: “Unless we reach a point in time where decisions are purely made on clinical data in a robotic manner and such decisions rigorously enforced, then the psychological and emotional parts of the mind will continue to influence decisions. The smart marketers will realise that the brand needs to evolve and communicate clearly the value that the brand delivers to all stakeholders from payers and patients to prescribers.

“Brand development often starts too late in the drug development process, and as such important insights and views from scientists and clinicians are often missed. Brand development should be planned from an early stage in the drug’s lifecycle and can appropriately be used to develop the clinical trial programme alongside very scientific and clinical data.”

The role of the brand is critical – but the way we view it, how we create it, and how we use and communicate it will be very different. 

We must adapt our thinking to fit our industry, and not slavishly follow our marketing colleagues in fast moving consumer goods.  

The way we view the brand

A brand is a set of perceptions and images that represent a company, product or service.

Whilst many people refer to a brand as a logo, tagline or audio jingle, it is actually much larger. A brand is the essence or promise of what will be delivered or experienced.

Janis Clayton, VP and general manager for UK and Ireland for Shire’s Human Genetic Therapies business unit, says that this point is often missed in pharma.

“Brand development often seems to focus too much on pantones, visual imagery and straplines rather than the long-term, sustainable vision of how the brand needs to develop with the needs/demands of a changing market. There also appears to be little if any understanding of ‘brand equity’, with every new brand/product manager wanting to change the image as part of making their own personal mark. A brand needs to reflect the quality, reliability and value of the product and a long-term, patent-life view needs to be taken.”

This promise of what will be delivered or experienced remains as true today as it did in the past – just, in pharma today, it is a completely different promise.

“Any marketer who has ever thought ‘the drug will sell itself’ is deluded and missing a major component of the human mind,” says Ben Osborn. “Appealing to both the rational and emotional elements when marketing continues to be important in the pharma industry, but the degree to which each of these is considered and how they are communicated to the wide range of stakeholders has undoubtedly evolved in recent years, and will continue to.”

Thinking about our brand conveying some sort of purely high level emotional – some may even say ‘fluffy’ – benefit is no longer relevant. Instead we must view it as the value it brings to the healthcare system. It should convey the end benefits with a human, and hence more emotive, context relevant to the needs of our individual stakeholders.

Of course this human element can only be motivating, meaningful and differentiating if we truly understand the goals and needs of our stakeholders.

Trying to create a brand proposition that works everywhere and for everyone is as dead as the proverbial dodo. There is no way that any new brand launched today can satisfy the needs of everyone, so we must consider how our brand can add value, and not attempt to be “jack of all trades and master of none” – so often the apparent goal of pharma marketers.

Paul Navarre, vice president Ophthalmology EAME at Allergan does see some merit in applying FMCG brand development processes in pharma, especially in being clear about the target.

He says there are some similarities but adds:  ‘‘The environment is different, the constraints are different. There is still a lot of conservatism, it is old-fashioned. Compliance is the new excuse companies and marketers will take. The confusion comes also from a lack of clarity on defining the target: patients versus physicians.”

Janis Clayton agrees: “The pharma industry is often too insular and does not look outside to the approaches of other industries as often as it could. I appreciate that in ‘ethical pharma’ we don’t advertise direct to patients and that we operate in a heavily regulated and restricted environment, but this seems even more reason to learn from all successful marketing campaigns, whatever the product or industry and learn how to apply what has worked well – and not to apply what hasn’t! 

“Much of this also requires a strong understanding of market segmentation, which is also not a strength I have seen within the pharma industry, as you have to understand which target group you are aiming to appeal to with your particular brand. Perhaps this is the bigger challenge.”

In the same way as Pot Noodle doesn’t appeal to everyone but ‘owns’ the student demographic (as my children at university will testify), our drug will not be valued in every management situation but can be orientated to meet the needs in certain particular situations. And in the future that will be the defining moment for our brand.

A future view of creating a brand

So if branding is now more about framing our drug in the context of health outcomes and sustainable healthcare, then how we create that brand must change commensurately.

No longer can it be about emotion, but it must be emotive. No more fluffy promises and pictures of ‘happy patients’, but more about what it allows the healthcare system to do or achieve differently and the consequential value that this delivers, with a human context. Of course, if stakeholders (our customers) do not see or experience value then they reserve the right to revert to lowest cost!

Payers are demanding more and more information on a drug’s safety and efficacy, and  frequently require information on data comparing it with alternative treatments.

Meanwhile patients who are more health-literate need persuasive arguments to use effective medication (and in some situations, to pay for it as well).

All too often we hear the reaction to a basic target product profile setting out the efficacy, tolerability and safety, as David Digby, director Global Marketing at Eisai states: “This profile is not exactly what we need for building a successful brand. The evidence that has been developed doesn’t seem to address the needs of the segments that we should be trying to win based on the product’s potential and the commercially attractive unmet need in the market.

“This seems to be a result of the clinical trials having focused on standard clinical end-points, rather than those most pertinent to these target segments. But I guess we will just have to work with what we have.”

A product designed to meet the needs of everybody ends up meeting nobody’s needs specifically, and the ‘efficacy-safety-tolerability’ approach to product development frequently results in a product with little scope for differentiation. In addition, it leads to less than ideal, generalist forecasts which may become obsolete shortly after launch.

I am not advocating focusing our brand on adding value to specific segments to the detriment of our labelling. Of course we must strive for the most appropriate label to meet our long- term vision and commercial objective, but, as we all know, the label does not equate to use.

The label should be as wide as our trials and data allow. The brand should be focused on the segments where it adds most value.

Brand building must start during the product development phase – ideally in phase IIb or III latest – and not when the product makes it to market. We must examine the multiple layers of our brand and ensure that the clinical development and registration trial data drive out the real value for each and all of our stakeholders.

It starts with our molecule but aims to build a pharmaceutical brand as soon as the likely TPP is created, by designing phase III clinical trials to deliver the endpoints to support messages that are differentiating and compelling in the patient segments you have identified – as both attractive and suitable for your brand – replacing product-led clinical development with market-facing brand development.

Another fundamental shift in our thinking and a marked difference from consumer marketing is that the brand in pharma should not be created by marketing, no matter how good their skills or the process advocated by agencies and consultancies. Brand creation for pharma must be the preserve of the cross-functional and multi-disciplinary team: only by embracing this approach can we genuinely address how our brand builds on the evidence base to how it helps stakeholders achieve something differently. And this and only this will define how successful our brand will be.

Our onions and wheels should be replaced by a brand process designed for pharma by pharma, and not one plagiarised from consumer marketing.

How we use the brand and communicate it

Having spent many valuable resources in developing brands, historically it all comes down to the campaign – do we like the pictures?

No! As media has proliferated in the consumer world with the advent of multiple channels and delivery systems, so our world in pharma is changing. No more huge sales forces, detail aids with graphs, tables and diagrams, and creative executions centred on smiling patients – but a multimedia, multi-platform approach.

As Ernst & Young set out in Pharma 3.0, the future is about how we embrace change and all that comes with it. From vastly increased use of technology to disseminate information to multiple stakeholders; innovation in terms of how we engage with stakeholders; adapting to the challenges of working with payers and patients; and orientating all our communication around the critical drivers of managing patient outcomes, expanding access and meeting unmet medical needs.

Those who hide behind regulations or absence of guidance from the regulatory bodies are in danger of ‘missing the boat’.

We must be prepared for the day when we will be communicating our brands to our customers via totally new devices and media that we must ensure are consistent with our brand.

Fit for the future?

My view is that the traditional brand development process is well and truly dead – but brands remain critical for pharma into the foreseeable future.

My manifesto for future pharma brand development is as follows:

• Our desire to communicate at an emotional level has been replaced by the need to communicate at an emotive one

• Expressing emotional benefits has been superseded by the need to express benefits in a more human way

• Brand is no longer about an augmented product, but about demonstrating value to each and every stakeholder in context with what our drug brands allow them to achieve differently

• Brands are to be created by cross-functional teams not by marketing alone; they cannot focus on nebulous benefits at an individual clinician level. They must embrace demonstrating (with an appropriate evidence base build-up during the development phases) how they deliver enhanced and measureable patient outcomes, access and meet unmet or unsatisfied medical needs to deliver against the agendas of our stakeholders, namely, healthy outcomes and sustainable healthcare.

To discuss this and other aspects of pharma branding, join InPharm’s ‘Tweet Chat’ on Thursday 20 October at 1pm (BST). The hashtag for the event will be #inpharm. More information: Pharma brands tweet chat

Chris Marks is partner and brand services principal at the MSI Consultancy. For further information visit www.msi.co.uk or email cmarks@msi.co.uk