Market research in action

pharmafile | July 19, 2004 | Feature | |   

Market research is to marketing as water is to life. This deeply held view is rooted in the personal belief that the customer is at the centre of what we do as marketers. Feeling the customer's pulse and understanding the ebb and flow of their needs and desires lies at the very heart of the marketing process.  

When identifying and satisfying customer needs we must look beyond product features and pseudo-unique selling points. A 'need' which is already met by our competitors is of no use to us in our pursuit of the marketer's Holy Grail: sources of competitive advantage which are differential, sustainable, inimitable and supported by the resources and capabilities of the organisation. We need to reflect deeply on the true character of our brands in order to discover this elusive ideal.

Finding the path to that ideal is dependent on sound answers to three core questions: Who is the customer? What do they want? How will the brand and the firm survive competition? Whilst intuition plays its part and all marketers believe that they 'know' their customers, brands and markets, it would be supremely arrogant to assume that we can answer these questions without even bothering to ask the customer.  

In a world where the only constant is change, our valued insight and internal knowledge may become a liability, falling out of step with an external environment which has moved on and left our world view behind. Market research provides a basis for informed decision-making by bridging the gap between the marketer 's perceptual paradigm and where the customer really is.

The power of market research

The practical power of market research was demonstrated many times during my work with Cipramil, Lundbeck's first SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) brand, launched in the UK during 1995. Cipramil challenged the conventional wisdom that first-mover advantage is a critical success factor.  

Entering the market as the UK's sixth SSRI, Cipramil's prescription share growth curve had the surreal look of an over-optimistic forecasting model. Cipramil's success was all the more extraordinary in the light of pre-launch research findings which revealed the customers' belief that they already had plenty of effective antidepressants to choose from and saw no need for yet another.

How then did an apparently me-too brand become so popular with customers, and leave supposedly omnipotent corporate giant competitors scratching their heads in bewilderment and asking 'how on earth did they do that?'.

Cipramil's unprecedented success was due to a wide range of factors, each worthy of a business case study in its own right. A common theme, however, was the intelligent application of qualitative and quantitative market research insights to inform critical business decisions taken at strategic, tactical and fundamental brand development levels.  

Developing brand advertising

The development of Cipramil's brand advertising provides one example of the power of well-applied market research. Cipramil's advertising from 1995 to 1999 had a somewhat bizarre and convoluted history. During 1999 we wanted to capture the essence of the brand more effectively and portray that essence more strongly through Cipramil's advertising.

Lundbeck had the benefit of extensive market research to draw upon, yet we lacked a process or system for distilling down the core components and identifying what Cipramil the brand really meant to our customers.

Having entrusted the Cipramil account to Torre Lazure McCann Healthcare London, and working to a tight deadline, we revisited our existing customer research in detail to define Cipramil's essence. The outcomes centred on the key insight that customers believed all antidepressants were effective, but they really needed something that patients could tolerate. The sentiment was that depressed people have enough to worry about without adding to their problems with side-effects.

Overcoming low customer expectations

Customer expectations for Cipramil were low, with no perceived unmet need and an inherent suspicion that the promises made for the brand would not be delivered in clinical reality. In stark contrast, customers' usage experiences with Cipramil were very positive. Prescribers described the brand in terms of reliability, delivery and trust; Cipramil prescribers described themselves as "pleasantly surprised" by the brand.  

One defining characteristic was that Cipramil was l'cean' as evidenced by projective techniques. For example, if Cipramil were a house, it was described as a 'clean, white house'.  

Building on market research

Building directly on the research insights gained from the customer, a series of functional adverts were created which built upon this process of defining the brand essence and the benefits were linked to a single central theme expressed as 'anti-depression not anti-patient'.

The core theme captured the essence of Cipramil, which customers told us did exactly what they wanted (tackle depression symptoms) without doing things they didn't want (cause side-effects).

Three adverts were run to support this theme, using clean white backgrounds and uncluttered designs to reflect the brand essence in their execution.

Although our work represented huge progress for Cipramil, it was carried out at speed to meet a key commercial deadline and we had the nagging feeling that we could do even better in communicating the essence of the brand.

Visualising patient benefits

Having established Cipramil's functional side we wanted to tap into and occupy mind space linked with the visualisation of patient benefits. One challenge here was to avoid the obvious traps of pursuing generic 'quality of life' patient images and the hackneyed before/after depictions of happy patient/sad patient that had previously blighted the therapy area. Another challenge was how to communicate 'clean' visually.

Taking as the hook the key selling idea 'You'd expect Cipramil to work. Would you have expected it to be so clean?' a wide range of concept ideas were generated. None of these felt right for the Cipramil brand.  Months of work generated dozens of concept themes, which were all consigned to the bin; attempts to visualise 'clean' using patients seemed doomed to failure.

Non-patient themes saw concepts involving plastic ducks in the bath, cotton wool balls, kittens and a plethora of shiny objects, none of which fitted the brand character. The images certainly portrayed 'clean' but they also suggested 'weak' and 'ineffectual' which created the false impression that Cipramil was not an effective treatment choice.

That 'eureka' moment from customer feedback

We knew that the solution must lie within our reams of feedback, about what Cipramil the brand meant to the customer. So we took another look at the market research results and we found a previously overlooked insight contained within a single comment made by just one of our Cipramil users. This customer saw depressed patients as a tricky and sensitive group to treat and she wanted to help them without adding to their complications.

The eureka moment came by extrapolating this single insight into a customer need for an uncomplicated therapy, then replacing the word 'clean' with 'uncomplicated' within the key selling idea. This unleashed a new line of creative thinking, leading to three strong concept lines, which were developed further and tested. All three creative routes did well and had the 'legs' to make it as successful advertising campaigns.

The strongest theme and overall winner was the 'Shakespeare' concept line, which went to press as a series of three advertisements very true to the concepts used during testing.

Market research is to marketing as water is to life

Quantitative data is equally powerful in its practical support of my adage that market research is to marketing as water is to life. Drawing further on Cipramil examples, there have been many occasions where using data, naturally with the supplier's prior permission, proved to be a critical success factor in dealing with live promotional issues in the field.

For example, to support Cipramil's 'antidepression not anti-patient' theme, we used adapted duration of treatment data from CompuFile's DIN-LINK patient database, to illustrate that Cipramil patients had above average compliance compared with patients taking other frequently prescribed SSRIs.

The WHO recommends that depression drug treatment continues for a full six months following remission of depressive symptoms. At the time we used this approach, based on November 1999 data, the average treatment duration for depression was between three and four months. This fact shocked our customers, who could all recite the WHO recommendation like a mantra yet had no idea that actual compliance levels were so poor compared with the ideal.

Differentiate yourself from the competition

By using data in this way, we cemented a differential competitive advantage for Cipramil in our customers' minds and opened the door to achieving greater sales through longer duration of treatment for our brand.

Another quantitative example was driven by the tactical need to address competitor activity in the field. Competitors were suggesting that Cipramil was relatively ineffective and therefore most often used in a 40mg once-daily dosage.

At a 40mg OD dosage, Cipramil would have been a relatively expensive drug treatment. Once again using Compufile patient data, we were able to show that in reality 88% of Cipramil prescriptions were written for daily dosages of up to 20mg daily, based on the 81% of prescriptions in the database where the dosage used was stated.

Coupled with a cost comparison based on the actual most frequently prescribed daily dosages for competitor products, we demonstrated that Cipramil 20mg OD was in fact the least expensive SSRI brand. We successfully dealt with the issue head-on by using quantitative data to present the facts, then disseminating the message via several different elements of the marketing mix.  

Market data has proved an effective tool in addressing many more examples of internal and external issues. One interesting internal example was to turn around the mindset of the Lundbeck sales team when they were performing way above their Cipramil sales targets. The belief was: "my customers are saturated, they can't possibly prescribe any more Cipramil".

Educating sales team for enhanced growth

The reality was that Cipramil had huge scope for further growth as evidenced by a wide range of market data, the most compelling of which was a comparison of average scripts per GP per quarter. In October 2000, Cipramil had 22 scripts per GP per quarter and was ranked third; the market leading SSRIs had figures of 32 and 34, respectively.

By sharing this data with the Lundbeck sales team, we managed to turn their mindset around by creating a shared vision of where Cipramil future growth would come from.

I was recently asked to comment on what I, as 'the customer' wanted from business information and market research for a BHBIA training course audience of rookie market researchers and agency-side delegates.

My reflections touched on survival tips for how the customer and agency should behave in order to achieve a productive working relationship.

Don't suffer paralysis by analysis

We end as we began, with my opinion that market research is to marketing as water is to life. However, in an information-rich world we run the risk of suffering analysis paralysis. The problems we face as marketers rarely have straightforward 'right' or 'wrong' answers, rather a range of potential solutions of which many will be suitable and feasible for the situations we face. Used without a well-focused process, market research opens up a potentially infinite iterative process.

We have to make decisions without perfect information. During one marketer's board meeting presentation a frustrated managing director is alleged to have banged the table whilst uttering the immortal words: "How can you assume when you don't know?"

In a competitive world the commercial imperative marches on and demands action, whether or not we feel adequately prepared for it. We need to strike a practical balance between analysis paralysis and informed decision-making and also be aware of my maxim's dangerous corollary: you can lead marketers to water, but you can't make them think.