A Behaviour Change Is Gonna Come

Image taken from The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce)

Designing services for behaviour change is a core part of our healthcare work at Blue Latitude.

It’s an exciting time. Mobile computing, networked devices and an ageing-but-digitally-literate population are creating huge demand for services to help you lead a healthier lifestyle.

Supply is exploding. The Eatery wants to change your diet by people rating photos of your food. The Jawbone Up uses a wristband to help you exercise more and sleep longer. The Fitbit pedometer graphs your physical activity, just like the Withings scale graphs your weight. My personal favourite is Crunch Fu, an iPhone app which teaches you stomach crunches, counts your reps and graphs your progress.

But it’s easy to be distracted by the technology and the gadgets. The real challenges are about understanding humans. So here’s my quick guide to thinking about the human side of behaviour change.

Ability, Motivation and Triggers Are Essential

BJ Fogg of Stanford University has been writing about using computers to change behaviour for over a decade. Two of his ideas are fundamental to understanding the design challenge.

The Behaviour Model stipulates the elements required for behaviour change. You need the Ability to do what is required in the first place, the Motivation to want to do it, and Triggers to remind you to keep doing it. The more motivated you are, the more ambitious you can be about the change.

His Behaviour Grid classifies different behaviours and tells you how to combine Ability, Motivation and Triggers for each. Stopping smoking is a Black Path behaviour and can be tackled by reducing triggers (avoiding coffee), dampening motivation (dwelling on health consequences) or removing the ability (by never buying cigarettes).

BJ Fogg’s work is a fantastic introduction to thinking about behaviour change. But there’s a problem.

Everything You Know About Motivation Is Wrong

Most people think about motivation in terms of carrots and sticks. Incentivise the behaviours you want, punish those you don’t. It’s why companies pay bonuses for good performance, schools offer iPods for exam results and parents withhold allowances from kids not doing chores.

But incentivising behaviour with rewards can fatally damage motivation. In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Dan Pink shows that although incentives can lead to short term gains, these are often outweighed by long term losses.

A personal example. My school friend didn’t read much so his dad paid him a cash bonus for each book he read. The result? My friend only read when he was on the clock and realised he could game the system. The incentive removed his enjoyment of reading  and encouraged him to cheat!

So how do you motivate people without incentives? Hand them control, help them master the task at hand and give them purpose. My friend’s dad would have been better to let him choose his own reading material (hand him control), read books with him (help master the task) and openly discuss the impact reading made on his own life (give purpose).

Understanding how motivation really works is the key to lasting behaviour change. If you do one thing as a result of this post, watch this incredible animation of Dan Pink talking about motivation.

Persuasion Tactics Work Too

No matter how well your service understands motivation and behaviour change, you’ll need tactics to get people to try it and stick with it over the first few weeks. My favourite place to start is Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini.

Four tactics have been invaluable when designing healthcare services at Blue Latitude:

• Social proof – people do things that they see other people doing
  Show stories from people who have changed their behaviour to get users to try your service.
• Authority – people do what they’re told by authority figures
  Provide instructions by doctors to persuade users to take the actions necessary.
• Commitment and consistency – people try to live up to their stated self-image
  Get users to record their commitments, even privately, to bolster their motivation.
• Reciprocity – people are disproportionately generous to givers of gifts
  Reward signup with a gift (not large enough to demotivate!) to encourage initial participation.

But be careful. This is dangerous ground. You only need to read about infamous Milgram experiments from the 1950s to understand the potential for harm in these tactics. Use them wisely.

It’s A Human Thing

Designing services to change behaviours is difficult. But one thing is certain. If you want success, you need to focus on what makes humans tick. Not the technology.

Blue Latitude specialises in a customer-centred approach to designing healthcare services. If you’d like to talk to us about our work, drop me a line on william.myddelton@bluelatitude.net.

- Blue Latitude is a digital business and marketing consultancy. We drive growth and innovation through best use of digital channels.

In a world of change, it’s back to basics

This post was originally featured on PMLive’s The Directory, 27th January 2012.

Fact: the internet has changed the communications landscape more than anyone could have ever imagined. 2011 was another year littered with examples of digital’s continued impact on society as political uprisings were facilitated, the traditional news model further rewritten and, somewhat less significantly, the dark art of marketing given another good hard shake.

Whilst a fair few of us failed to get on board the Cluetrain back in 1999, by and large advertisers and marketers have woken up to the implications and opportunities this paradigm shift represents and have begun to adjust their strategies accordingly.

Integrated campaigns are gradually being delivered where the move has been made beyond storytelling and into involvement, with the right channels chosen for the right audience, previously passive consumers actively engaging, and media space created rather than just being stared at. Even some of the outputs from the healthcare sector have begun to impress, and we all know how well beaten the ‘pharma lagging behind the times’ drum is.

The problem is that brilliant integrated or purely digital campaigns are still a rarity; too often unsound strategies caused by an insufficient understanding of digital channels and how they integrate result in poor creative or missed creative opportunities.

As with any major development or shift marketers need to avoid the bandwagon and consider the wider picture that surrounds it; to combine the understanding of a new landscape with a return to the basics of a solid, business-focussed strategy that can then be unlocked by brilliantly executed creative.

Two of the examples below are from Pfizer and illustrate the differing roles digital can play in a campaign; the first has digital at the heart, whereas the second is a great example of mixed media where digital could have been used to much greater effect.

Finally we’ll look at a mobile asthma app from GSK, an instance where the appeal of developing an app may have distracted its creators from ensuring an app was the right choice to deliver value for their target audience in the first place.

Back in Play – Pfizer

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

At first glance, Back in Play comes across as a cynical and nonsensical attempt to cash in on the buzz of a World Cup; what do back pain and football have to do with each other? In creating a football game that focuses on throw-ins, Ogilvy Health found the answer. They recruited the notorious long throw artist Rory Delap and featured him in a series of YouTube videos to promote not only the game but also the condition, Ankylosing Spondylitis.

Out of the (one guesses) limited budget available, sufficient investment was put into the game’s development for something simple but credible to be produced, with detailed collateral around the disease area highly visible. Targeted digital media buys, a well-chosen ambassador and clever PR also helped differentiate the campaign from the general melange of World Cup noise.

In choosing a specific aspect of football relevant to back pain (the throw in), Pfizer were also able to avoid the risk of appearing to ride on the coattails of a sport’s popularity, a relevant example of which being Bayer’s Keepy Uppies game for world Haemophilia day, where the only reason for the football tie-in was that keepy uppies represent ‘all [haemophiliacs] can do rather than the things they can’t’.

Rational Explanation – Pfizer

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Pfizer’s Alzherimer’s campaign sent a number of awards down under for McCann Healthcare Sydney last year, and rightly so. A mixed media campaign encouraging early screening for Alzheimer’s, it took a simple creative idea (the irrational made rational when seen from an Alzheimer’s patient’s perspective) and executed it brilliantly.

Teaser press ads saw slippers in toasters, with burnt slippers then mailed out to GPs and sales reps. Christmas cards were sent out at Easter and items put out of place in reps hotel rooms prior to a major international conference, again recalling a press ad. USB credit cards were also given to GPs, taking them straight to the disease awareness site (and potentially automatically logging them in).

All in all it’s a fantastic mixed media campaign, but one that could have been so much better had the strategy and creative been more successfully deployed digitally.

Extensive research tells us how HCPs practically live on Medscape and Drs.net; a homepage takeover buy could have misplaced content or altered language momentarily, leading to the Rational Explanation tagline and a link to the campaign site. Even a simple touch like adding the URL to the press ads would have significantly helped boost traffic to the campaign site, enabling interaction with the richer content that sits behind the emotive message.

MyAsthma – GSK

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

GSK have developed an asthma related app promoted via a YouTube video featuring Kirsty McCabe, apparently a weather correspondent for ITV’s daybreak, along with some Pay Per Click media.

As Pfizer chose to do with their Back in Play campaign, GSK have opted for the celebrity tie-in. As with Delap there is a relevant connection, but the contrastingly low awareness of McCabe amongst the general public and slightly cheap feel of the video itself means little benefit is likely to be reaped.

Available budget may again have been limited, but a higher profile tie-in and more attention to creative detail would have meant exponentially increased awareness, generating sufficient usage of the app to justify the expenditure in developing it. And would Michael Fish really be that expensive?

The app itself also seems a little behind the times, serving mainly to host the ‘Asthma Control Test’, with the idea that this is repeated and the severity of the patient’s asthma logged over time (something that arguably doesn’t necessitate the development of an app).

To make the app truly worthwhile, could GPS tracking and weather forecast data not have been combined to help develop an understanding of how changes in the weather or their location is affecting the user’s asthma, something that was done to an extent by Claritin?

Ultimately the campaign suffers from errors that hark back to a time when digital communications and technology were used simply because they were new, not because they were right. With a little more thought, time and attention to detail it could have been so much more.

- Blue Latitude is a digital business and marketing consultancy. We drive growth and innovation through best use of digital channels.

The EU Privacy Directive: what is ‘strictly necessary’?

Imagine this. For a few years now you have been working with IT to push web tracking changes higher up the priority list. No longer is a lack of impact on end users an adequate excuse as to why a tracking code error isn’t fixed as quickly as that blurry image on the homepage. The marketing teams no longer ask the “web analyst” to identify why campaign X didn’t perform as well as campaign Y. This is because you integrated the data analysts and the marketing teams some time ago and thus created a team that understand every online nuance of their consumer; from the sites they regularly visit, to the time of day they view their emails, to the format of creative they are most likely to click on.

At board level, although these operational changes were difficult to sell in, the impact has been tangible. Discussions have moved beyond visitors, TOS and Hits, to how the site, app, or Facebook pages are driving online and offline sales.  Senior directors may even have a Geckoboard screen around the office showcasing online performance metrics in a plethora of time ranges. This has led to more emails and conversations around performance metrics with directors and senior managers across the business. Your ‘watercooler’ time is no longer spent discussing Downton Abbey, but how your campaigns are performing.

The outcome of all of this is that you and your company are moving up the analytics maturity model. You’re happy and content that decisions being made by you and your teams are the right ones, based on data driven insight.

Then along comes something called the EU privacy directive, enough to pull most analytics managers out of their current contented state and make them want to hide in the nearest stationary cupboard.

Why is this? When implemented, this directive will seriously impact on everyone involved in digital activities. Whether it be the marketing individual responsible for evaluating last month’s performance, an account manager at an agency sending through that conversion report, a content manager discussing the A/B tests from the latest round of changes, or the director about to agree the next wave of online spend. In one moment you’ve just moved from multichannel aggregation to analysing a sample of visits and dropped down a few levels on the maturity model in the process.

And all because of the cookie.

The EU privacy directive insists that site owners require consent from users in order to place anything, including cookies, onto their devices.  Requesting permission from a user before placing a cookie onto their device is unlikely to yield a positive response. The implications will be wide reaching – no data means no data-driven decision-making.

However, those who have read and analysed the directive will find that permission is not required if the access is deemed to be ‘strictly necessary’.  This offers some of us hope in that by not requesting prior consent, we will have a rich set of statistics to analyse. For those of us who are still hiding in the cupboard, maybe this gives us a chance to re-define ‘strictly necessary’.

The industry’s current interpretation is limited to “adding to basket” functionality only; I’m guessing the more creative amongst us will be offering up a number of examples of what is ‘strictly necessary’ to enforcement bodies across the EU.

For information-only sites; is it averagely necessary to know how your PPC budget is being spent on and what you’re getting from it, or is that strictly necessary? Is it moderately necessary to know how to split that last click referral percentage between the four other affiliates who drove the sale, or is that strictly necessary? Is it unnecessary for me divulge my box-set addiction for period dramas set in Northern England to my girlfriend, close-family and friends who on hearing the news will no-doubt disown me, or is that strictly necessary? So perhaps that last one doesn’t count, but it’s time to speak up on just how ‘strictly necessary’ cookies are to our industry.

- Blue Latitude is a digital business and marketing consultancy. We drive growth and innovation through best use of digital channels.

>10 Print “learn to code”       >20 Goto 10

At the end of last year I became the stepfather to a 9 year old boy.

Obviously, this comes with far more responsibility than I’d like – particularly as the UK ploughs an ongoing path into economic gloom. It all makes me concerned about the world he’s growing up in, and whether he’ll have the right education to get a meaningful career and support a family of his own one day.

So, when it came to making New Year’s resolutions, I thought I’d try to get a bit more engaged in his education and schoolwork and help out where I could –  just to at least make sure that he’s on the right path to flourishing in future.

Obviously, with a personal and professional interest in digital and a growing boy who’d happily spend every hour of the day on Minecraft, Roblox or (the soon to be late lamented, at least in my house) Lego Universe, I thought I’d look into how he’s being taught computer studies – or ICT as they insist on calling it these days.

And I was horrified.

When I was my son’s age, I lived through what now seems like a golden age of home computing.

The government was subsidising BBC Micros in classrooms, after-school computer clubs were teaching basic programming (literally), and in our homes a generation of machines from now fallen giants like Commodore and Sinclair were encouraging us to go hands on and code our own programmes.

Now, however, it seems that ICT isn’t about computer programming or computer science – it’s simply about using common computer tools: in other words, learning how to use Microsoft Office.

Clearly, for an economic future where video games are the new Hollywood and the best use of a garage is launching a start-up rather than rehearsing a band, young people need to develop the skills to be active creators of technology – not simply passive players and consumers.

So, I set about trying to find the best way to teach a 9 year old about coding and the best I could find was the excellent Scratch from MIT. That was when Twitter came to my rescue, in the form of tweets from all my New York friends name-checking Codecademy.

If you haven’t come across it, Codecademy offers a series of fun and engaging interactive online tutorials in Javascript (with Python and Ruby looking set to follow).

User numbers had been growing across the US over last year, receiving a huge boost from New York mayor Michael Bloomberg (no slouch when it comes to getting digital) tweeting in support of the company’s #CodeYear initiative and stating that he’d made the resolution to learn programming from Codecademy in 2012.

“Brilliant,” I thought, “this is what my stepson needs”. After I signed up myself to check it out, it got me thinking and you know what? I’m not going to push it on a 9 year old just yet– I’m going to push it on you.

Odds are that if you’re reading this blog you almost certainly work some kind of digital marketing job, but increasingly (and this may not be you) there’s a generation of people in these roles who’ve never really known what lies beneath the hood of software, websites or apps.

Nevertheless, these people still feel they’re qualified to manage development projects and pontificate on digital issues just because they passively consume Facebook and own an iPhone.

To be honest, when it comes to understanding the nuts and bolts I’m not much better: my knowledge of Sinclair and BBC basic now counts for nothing, and the HTML and VB I learned when I started my first digital job in ’96 don’t add up to that much more in 2012, but at least I recognise this.

Obviously, I don’t believe that you can’t understand ‘digital’ if you don’t write code, but I do believe that a little experience of ‘making’, rather than simply ‘using’ can provide a valuable perspective on project work. And – if you’re a digital professional – the further you are away from these skills the closer you might be to irrelevance in the future.

So, if you have time to spare this year then make the resolution to join myself, the mayor of New York and more than half a million others on Codecademy.

It’s never going to make you a native, it might not even teach you how to write serious scripts let alone set you up for a lucrative second career as a coder, but at the very least it should give you an appreciation of what much of the real work in the digital industries really involves.

- Blue Latitude is a digital business and marketing consultancy. We drive growth and innovation through best use of digital channels.

Multi-channel tracking: enough talk, time for action!

As a concept multi-channel tracking has been a hot topic for many years now, and although marketing professionals still consider it one of the top current trends, they also remain confused by how to achieve it:

• A survey by the performance agency eprofessionals showed that multi-channel tracking was one of three top online marketing trends regarded as extremely relevant by experts, with 44% of experts considering the monetisation of multichannel traffic to be the joint biggest issue, alongside monetising social media
• The majority of marketers working in large UK companies admit that they find it challenging to properly track sales from multi-channel sources, according to a survey of 100 marketing professionals commissioned by Sky IQ, the customer intelligence division of BSkyB

Whilst most marketers have been taking time to consider the merits of both sales attribution and personalised marketing (which can be achieved from multi-channel tracking), the technology industry has been hard at work. Significant investment has resulted in a number of highly advanced technologies, from TagMan, Agillic, DoubleClick, DC-Storm, Adform and RevTrax to Google’s newly launched free tool Multi-Channel Funnels.   However this has resulted in a daunting pool of technologies with poorly understood capabilities and power that marketers are struggling to understand, and ultimately are rarely using.

Despite this confusion that surrounds multi-channel tracking, the reality is very different. To understand and benefit from the opportunities it presents, brands need to spend less time discussing multi-channel tracking, and more time practising it.

Instead of getting hung-up on the theory, there are ways to take the first step into multi-channel tracking using existing data and tracking tools. This week why not take an hour out of your day and challenge yourself to see what impact you can make on your bottom line over the rest of the month?

Start by reviewing your sales, marketing and customer data and see what information you are capturing, and how you can use it. Below are five suggested starting points:

1. Measure your TV activity – can you use campaign search terms to monitor the impact of your TV or other major offline activity?
• What if your latest wave produced a higher response rate than the previous wave?
• What if the response rate has been dropping over the last 4 months?
2. Measure the impact your online activity has offline – how has your recent branding display campaign impacted on your in-store footfall?
• What would it tell you about your campaign and site performance if you found display drives in-store but not online sales?
3. Look to increase engagement with your marketing emails – if your call centre captures customer’s email addresses, can you link the customer queries to your email marketing campaign?
• What if you significantly increased the response of your marketing emails though more personalised content?
4. Improve website and in-store cross selling – can you use your site analytics to identify items successfully upsold at checkout online and compare them with those that were purchased in-store?
• What if the products were very different?
• What if you used online data to inform in-store product positioning at checkout and vice versa?
5. Locate a sample group for user feedback – can you use your Facebook campaign to deliver product or service development research questions straight to your highly engaged audience?
• What would be the added benefit from acknowledging and working with your brand advocates?
• What would be the recruitment cost savings from utilising this channel?

Whilst not all of these approaches are that simple or relevant to every brand, they offer starting points that can lead to tangible business benefits, and by using existing data points to create a true business benefit you will be more confident identifying where additional technology is needed, and in justifying the resource to take multi-channel tracking further.

Whichever step you choose to take, do let us know what you find!

- Blue Latitude is a digital business and marketing consultancy. We drive growth and innovation through best use of digital channels.

Adherence: new solutions for an age-old problem

The father of Western medicine, Hippocrates, is reputed to have said “Keep a watch also on the faults of the patients, which often make them lie about the taking of things prescribed.” Not only is this the premise on which House, M.D. is entirely based, but it also highlights a problem that has plagued medicine since time immemorial, that of adherence.

A patient not taking their medication, refilling a prescription or fully completing a course has many implications. For the pharmaceutical industry there is an obvious financial impact but more worryingly patients simply may not get better. And we’re not just talking about antibiotics for an ear infection here, there are many long-term, chronic illnesses where patients aren’t completing the very therapies designed to save their lives.

Given the number of possible causes – often entirely personal to the patient – for low adherence, there’s no single magic bullet that can resolve this issue. However, the increasing availability of access to the Internet through mobile is providing a variety of ways in which new technology can solve an age-old problem.

Whilst simple access to the Internet through mobile devices can help immensely by giving patients better access to knowledge and support, beyond this there are a number of approaches to mobile-driven adherence and compliance currently being tried and adopted:

Below we look at five of these in detail and highlight the adherence barriers that each solution might be able to address:

1.  QR Codes – Quick Response for better health

You’ll be familiar with QR codes by now – they’re those strange pixelated barcodes squares seen in newspapers, magazines, adverts on the train and even on the telly.

A recent study showed that 14 million Americans scanned a QR code in June this year – usually to buy something, but the same functionality could be utilised for the more noble purpose of adherence.

Placing a QR code on the packaging of medicines could provide a direct mobile web link to patient information, automated calendar reminders and patient support. More importantly, this step would get this information off the pack where it often goes unread and into the pocket of the patient.

2. SMS – Simple but effective

Even the humble SMS, the most commonly used data application on mobile phones worldwide, can play a part in adherence. To reach patients in resource limited settings in sub-Saharan Africa, cheap mobile phones have been used to increase adherence amongst patients on antiretroviral therapies. Simply sending text message reminders has resulted in a 90% adherence over a 48 week period  (some clinical trials for chronic illnesses only report adherence between 43-78%).

3. Smart pill – Smarter than your average pill

At the other end of the spectrum of technical complexity, consider the “smart pill” (coming soon to a gut near you). This contains a chip activated by stomach fluids that can relay messages to a sensor (in or on the skin). This sensor may in turn communicate to a mobile device that can send information to a doctor. The doctor can then check that the patient is taking the medication and also monitor for adverse reactions with other drugs.

A bit too Big Brother? Perhaps, but this is up for FDA approval…

4. Gamification – All play and no work…

Technology itself can also be augmented with techniques and interactions to help change attitudes towards medication and health: the current buzzword of choice, for example, is gamification which seeks to make technology more engaging by leveraging various fundamental psychological and behavioural mechanics.

The diagnostics sector is using mobile technology to help patients monitor themselves; but there are now glucometers that can link to your child’s Nintendo to turn self-monitoring into playtime (or so the theory goes…)

5. Mobile apps – Cough please!

A crowded space these days, amongst which my personal favourite is an app that uses ‘cough recognition technology to diagnose influenza. Users simply cough into the phone and the app is able to differentiate an everyday cough from potential flu, pneumonia or another respiratory disease.

So what does this all mean?

The greatest influencers in tackling the challenge of adherence are healthcare professionals and, obviously, patients themselves, but the pharmaceutical industry also has much to lose and much to possibly gain if this challenge can be overcome.

Thinking creatively when looking to solve the problem of patient adherence will help drive healthy outcomes for all parties, and it’s clear that mobile technologies can deliver a number of interventions which can both encourage and empower patients. Just imagine how impressed Hippocrates would have been…

- Blue Latitude is a digital business and marketing consultancy. We drive growth and innovation through best use of digital channels.

Is Pharma’s mobile budget going down the drain?

Picture the scene: you’ve just been diagnosed with an overactive bladder and you’ve just discovered there’s an app for that.

Now, imagine that you’re a little confused by how this app works. Perhaps you’re unsure how to gauge the “voiding volume” the app urges you to record; or maybe you can’t work out how to enter the number of “leaks” that the tracking functionality would like you to log?

Obviously, as someone so comfortable with apps that you’d be using one to keep a diary of your bladder movements, you’d expect some online help. After all, this is what other apps offer; it’s why Apple asks publishers to provide a “support” link.

In this case however (and the app in question is “Get BladderFit”, produced for a pharma company), the link for support goes to the homepage of a digital agency. Nice site. But do they offer any support for the application on their site? Hell no.

Nor is there any link to online support within the app itself, (which refers to the agency as being “the sole proprietor of this application… taking no responsibility for the information given being up to date, correct or complete.” How reassuring).

Admittedly, taking shots at mobile apps developed by the pharma industry is something of a fish in a barrel game, and this is just one example of a drug manufacturer not hosting any online support for the apps they fund. There are many others where similarly there’s neither an appropriate support link nor any real transparency or accountability as to ownership.

Obviously, in the real world this is irrelevant. Who cares about a thin stream of the application market and whether or not it observes good practices?

Well, unfortunately I have to.

You see, I’m sitting on a panel at EyeforPharma’s Mobile Strategies for Pharma event on December 1^st and I suspect – rightly or wrongly – that despite ‘mobile’ (like ‘social’ before it) being more about customer behaviour than technology platforms, the focus of the event is going to be firmly on apps.

Certainly this is where all the activity seems to be. As the UK legal head of a top 10 pharma remarked to me the other week: “We’ve got 94 application concepts globally that people want me to approve, and I’m not sure why anyone would use any of them.”

It’s bizarre. Just as the industry starts to accept that its existing digital activities require greater control and something resembling rationalisation (I don’t know a single big pharma out there that isn’t looking to re-platform, reassess or re-apply consistent compliance processes to its current portfolio of owned web sites), there appears to be an increasingly incontinent stream of mobile applications splashing – albeit quietly and largely unnoticed – into app stores.

While I think it’s great that the industry is trying to adopt new technology and channels and to gain early experience in the mobile space, I can’t help but think that some proper planning would help to focus minds on the potential value (or indeed the lack of potential value) that these offerings present.

What do I mean by proper planning? Well, if you’re bursting to develop the world’s next great (or at least ‘just about OK’) pharma app then you might want to consider the following:

• Firstly, the obvious question: it’s possible that a significant percentage of your audience will engage with your app, but is it really that probable? Call me cynical, but the lack of proudly published case study data on industry apps speaks volumes about whether the majority of initiatives are delivering…

• Is your app integrated into a wider platform, campaign or initiative, or is it exactly the type of entrepreneurially developed point solution that your compliance, regulatory and IT teams are trying – for good reasons – to remove from your company’s current web portfolio? Because they will. (More than 10% of the pharma apps detailed on the excellent InPharma directory are flagged as “No longer available”. I look at the list and can name at least two more that have been recently pulled/discontinued…)

• Why an app rather than a mobile-optimised site? With access to the internet via devices set to outpace access via the desktop, this starts to look like a hygiene requirement. Obviously, in terms of customer experience even the best mobile sites are simply ‘handshakes’ compared to the ‘hug’ that can be delivered through a native app, but – given how infrequently the average pharma property is visited – a handshake is good enough.

So beyond considering mobile optimisation before native app development, what do I think qualifies as intelligent thinking around mobile for pharma?

Two thought starters for you:

1. For public/patient audiences: If you’re in retail, entertainment, publishing or any sector with highly trafficked, frequently visited web properties then mobile’s potential as ‘The Third Screen’ almost certainly merits you producing applications. But when it comes to patients you may be better advised to concentrate on computing power rather than devices’ screens. There’s a wealth of tracking, monitoring and outcomes behaviour that devices will be increasingly able to gather, transmit and aggregate. This won’t be ‘your’ data, but it will be a rich resource that can (and will) be anonymised then mined for outcomes and effectiveness data. Plan for how to access and extract value from this and payers will thank you.
2. For healthcare professional audiences: The same information and service providers who dominate HCP web use are already demonstrating their dominance in the mobile arena. Why produce your own dosage calculator, interactions checker or literature guide if someone else is already doing it better, more professionally or with more likelihood of regular usage?

Again, don’t think about silo’d point solutions, think about adding value by looking to better place your content and services within the healthier, stronger stream of existing day-to-day customer workflow rather than letting them leak out in an unstructured and unsupported fashion.

Duncan Arbour will be speaking at EyeforPharma’s Mobile Strategies for Pharma event in London on December 1^st-2^nd2011.  To take him to task for tasteless wordplay or to find out more about any of the above opinions quote ‘BlueLat’ when registering for a €300 discount on the standard ticket price. 

- Blue Latitude is a digital business and marketing consultancy. We drive growth and innovation through best use of digital channels.

How to be ‘social’ in Brazil

“If  Brazilians could put their joie de vivre in a bottle it would be bigger than coca cola”
Diane von Fürstenberg

With an average of 231 virtual contacts per person and 85% of Brazilian internet users going online to connect with friends on Orkut, Facebook, Twitter and other blogging platforms, it is no surprise that Brazil is considered one of the most sociable countries in the world.  So, if looking to integrate social media into your digital marketing mix, what should you consider?

The social landscape is changing

Orkut was launched in Brazil by Google in 2004 and was market leader for 7 years.  Comparatively late on the scene, Facebook has recently usurped their rival as younger, highly educated and internationally minded users migrate, and is now market leader with over 30 million users compared with Orkut’s 29 million (IBOPE Nielsen Online, August 2011). Twitter has also seen phenomenal growth, with a penetration into Brazil’s internet users of 23%, the 3^rd largest penetration rate for Twitter globally (ComScore 2011).

Platform choice differs by demographic

Preferred choice of the different social media platforms differs by gender, age and geographic region. Women show stronger engagement (+16%) towards social networking sites (Facebook, Orkut) and content consumption. The platform for content consumption also varies by age – younger users (15-24 years) are more likely to use Orkut and Twitter, whereas older people prefer to use Facebook (as do people in the South East Region including Sao Paulo and Rio) according to ComScore.

Brazilians are open to interacting with brands and businesses

Although social media is primarily used to connect with other people, TNS has found that Brazilians are open to interacting with brands and businesses via social media, with a number of brands successfully engaging their fans on various digital platforms.

With the country’s love of celebrity no secret, unsurprisingly the brands with the the highest number of fans on facebookare Brazil’s top celebrities including football stars Kaka and Ronaldinho as well as renown author Paolo Coelho. However, you will also find consumer brands (L’Oréal, Brazil’s soda ‘Guaraná’) and Brazil’s highly successful online shopping club Peixe Urbano (similar to Groupon) all appealing to the Brazilian mass market.

The internet is not a mass medium – yet!

Although social media has been a success story in Brazil, the actual figures need to be caveated slightly; while millions of Brazilians are online and of these a very high percentage are active on social networks, the Internet is not quite a mass medium yet. Internet penetration in Brazil is currently around 40% due to the income inequality and the infrastructural and educational challenges that come with its position as an emerging market. The government recognises the importance of bridging this gap and programmes are in place to provide community access to Internet, incentivise ICT education and research and lower taxes on mobile devices in order to speed this process up.

Integration and the right screen

Mobile devices will play a key role in Brazil’s continuing development according to BCG’s report ‘The Internet’s New Billion‘; internet users in the BRIC countries will represent 1 billion by 2015 driven by heavy use and adoption of mobile devices. Non-computer device traffic (tablets, smart phones) currently represents a low portion of overall traffic (only 1%) but this number is growing rapidly (a 60% increase from May to August 2011 according to Comscore).

Adriana Knackfuss from Coca-Cola Brazil recommends thinking about the multiple devices your audience might be using to access the web and to “use the right screens’’ when the World Cup comes to Brazil in 2014.  She expects media stacking and multiple device use to be particularly prevalent among teenagers, simultaneously in front of the TV and using their mobile. As with any new channel, it is important to remember that social media will work best when it is properly integrated into your wider marketing strategy.

How to be ‘social’ in Brazil

We know that the Internet in Brazil is not a mass medium yet. However, Internet use is growing rapidly and those who are online are very active in social media and open to interacting with brands and businesses. As a result, when considering testing the value of social media for your business in emerging markets, Brazil presents a notable opportunity.

Start by listening to any conversations relevant to your audience and identify their needs (both met and unmet).  Think about how you can enhance existing conversations and engage in a meaningful way that adds value. In summary, if you decide to invest in social media in Brazil, make efforts to understand the following:

• The local market  – including  the changing social landscape
• How you are going to integrate social into your wider marketing strategy
• Your target audiences’ online needs and behaviours  and where you can add value
• Your social media objectives and KPIs – evaluation is not easy but you need to assign value to audience actions
• How to get internal buy-in, the skills and processes necessary to succeed (this obviously is a whole separate chapter!)

To receive a copy of a presentation on ‘Using Digital Channels in Emerging markets’ or for more information about how Blue Latitude can help you use social media responsibly and successfully in emerging and developed markets, please contact Sophie Berger.

- Blue Latitude is a digital business and marketing consultancy. We drive growth and innovation through best use of digital channels.

Marketing in China – The Digital Discrepancy

The World Bank recently indicated that China has the potential to follow its current strong economic performance and achieve another 20 years of 8% annual growth. Combine this with a population of 1.3 billion and it’s understandable why many international western organisations, operating primarily in haltingly languid markets, are looking at China with great hopes of salvation.

While it might seem like a self-evident fact, the foundation of any successful marketing strategy is dependent on understanding and serving the distinctive needs and idiosyncrasies of the local people and markets. China (probably more accurately described as a collection of unique markets not a unique market in itself) is probably one of the most challenging for many of our clients. However, when it comes to understanding channel preference and the growing importance of digital, many companies’ marketing budgets aren’t keeping pace with consumer behaviour.

Back in 2010 Shaun Rein stated in a Forbes article that in China multinationals are currently spending 2-3% of their marketing budgets on digital initiatives, compared to 8-12% in the U.S. However, Chinese consumers spend more time online daily than their US counterparts (2.7 versus 2.3 hours according to the BCG), and spend proportionally more time using online rather than offline media.

Online sources also seem to have greater influence on the Chinese.  Recent research found that user-generated content, including consumer reviews, forum discussions and blog entries influences 58% of purchase decisions in China, compared to only 19% in the U.S. China is also the world leader in the most number of people who join social networks to find information about brands according to the 2010 TNS Digital Life report.

Source:  The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), China’s Digital Generations 2.0 Report

Obvious discrepancy? Companies are spending disproportionally less on a channel that matters more to their customers. Why? Maybe many are still operating under the preconception that since China is a developing nation, its consumers are not yet ‘eReady’ – that China is similar to many of the mature markets ten years ago. That the correct marketing strategy is to emulate what worked in the past, but businesses need to realise that the world, and Chinese consumers, have moved on.

I recently saw a great presentation on the pace of change in China and how it’s operating in marketing ‘dog years’. The notion that in one year in China the marketing landscape will actually have moved on and matured by seven. The key here is to treat China like China, in fact treat all local markets in a global organisation as different and unique. Take the time, care and attention to answer some basic questions.

So what should you do differently? How do you iron out the discrepancies in your marketing plan?

1. Understand where your customers go, and why (online and offline sources). Don’t hold any preconceptions.  Be open-minded and listen to what your customers are telling you.
2. Get an understanding of the importance of each channel.  Prioritise them based on their likely impact on your marketing objectives, at each stage of your customers’ journey. Remember no pre-conceptions.
3. Align your channel mix and marketing strategy based on the local market’s needs. Be aware that regional differences can be vast between cities in China.

To give you a flavour on what to look out for when thinking about your digital channel mix for China, here’s what’s caught our interest recently:

1. Microblogs are going from ‘new media’ to ‘hot media’ in China.  Sina’s weibo is the biggest, launched just three years after Twitter in 2009, and already has over 10 times as many users as Twitter (1,300 mil vs 106 mil).  It has 38% more users than the top mainstream media, Xinhuanet News (940 mil users).  A handful of Chinese and foreign companies such as Estee Lauder, Nike and Starbucks have already started to use social media to promote their offerings, such as tweeting alongside offline events, and providing GPS-specific offers.
2. The upsurge of internet access via mobile. About 46% of Chinese internet users access the internet via cell phones, according to a China Internet Network Information Centre report in 2010, and nearly half of Sina Weibo’s updates are sent via mobile phones, compared to less than 20% for Twitter.

If you’d like to find out more on how to localise and implement your global strategy for emerging markets, Blue Latitude will be speaking at EyeforPharma’s Emerging Markets Commercial Excellence conference in Berlin on the 15th – 16th November 2011.  Contact sophie.berger@bluelatitude.net for a discounted ticket to the conference or to find out more.

- Blue Latitude is a digital business and marketing consultancy. We drive growth and innovation through best use of digital channels.