It’s really sad to see what happened to them. Today Kodak is merely a shell of the company it used to be.

Kodak’s Fork in the Road Moment

Ten years ago, I happened to have a ringside seat at Kodak as they were wrestling with what to do about their future. Initially, I had been hired to create an external positioning and marketing campaign targeting Wall Street. The stock price was languishing, and they wanted to announce how they were innovating around digital.

I went to Rochester and met with their senior marketing team and the innovation group. After looking at their digital pipeline – the “naked truth” of their digital capabilities – I recommended that they not approach Wall Street at that time. They weren’t ready to go digital in an authentic and sustained way and if they made that claim, they would lose all credibility once results came out in a quarter or two.

Instead I recommended that we focus on building a comprehensive internal communication plan that would change the mindset of the organization from print to digital. Bureaucracy to innovation.

We used the powerful language and imagery of a fork in the road. One direction continued down the path they were on in which they owned 80% share in a market that was essentially flat and predicted to shrink. (At least that’s what it was back in 2003; it fell off of a cliff a couple of years later.)

Or, they could choose the alternate path and move into the new digital world – the world of imaging converging with information technology – but where they would be a niche player with only 8% market share. But it was a market that was growing 10-12% a year.

Market Share vs. Market Growth

Do you want to own a market that’s becoming commoditized, or do you want to become a smaller but strategic player in a larger growth economy?

This was 2003. It was time to make a full commitment to digital.

Because of the success of our work framing and communicating the business opportunities and risks, I was asked to facilitate a series of business strategy workshops with much of the strategic product group leadership. The goal was to outline a path for the product leadership to transition from the seductive but ultimately toxic print revenue to the digital opportunity. Re-invent the company.

Ultimately they made their choice, and unfortunately they chose the wrong path. We all know what ended up happening.

I remember the thought process and the frustration that many people at the organization felt. At the end of the day, it came down to poor strategic choices. Yes, there were cash flow challenges in moving from one business to another, but there was also an internal, very personal aspect to the decision process: it was quietly noted that the people who ultimately had to make the decision were all within five years of retirement. No one wanted to rock the boat.

Kodak completely missed out on a digital imaging industry that they created.

What Does This Mean for Pharma?

Is healthcare and pharma facing a similar fork in the road? What are the changes in the market telling us about the future viability of expensive products with nominal outcomes metrics? Are we seeing a transition from products to more complete health solutions that could threaten the traditional product margins of pharma?

If this is true, there are decisions that have to be made. Some of them could have short-term adverse effects on financial performance, but there are important bets that need to be made around expanding pharma’s value proposition beyond the pill.

Outsiders seem to be able to see what needs to happen. As always, it’s up to internal leadership to make the hard choices.

But while the focus of pharma brand teams is on avoiding product commoditization, little attention has been paid to that same danger for the brand manager.

There’s a real danger that brand managers themselves could become commoditized.

“Commodity” is the point when a product or a service is “fungible.” In other words, it can be easily replaced by a substitute. Substitution is the biggest threat to any product or service, because when the buyer (or, in this case, the employer) doesn’t perceive any significant differences between alternatives, they buy strictly based on lowest price.

As pharma management feels the effects of margin pressure on their business, they will look for ways to consolidate or eliminate redundant positions. They will look for ways to substitute expensive talent with technology, lower cost employees, or consolidated roles. In each case, it’s the employee with little to show that’s unique and valuable whose job is suddenly at risk.

How Do You Avoid Becoming a Commodity?

There are four things that you can do to inoculate yourself from becoming fungible. While these strategies certainly apply to companies, they are just as valid for individuals looking for career advancement.

1) Specialization

When you’re a generalist, you’re easily replaced. On the other hand, as you become recognized for your focus in a particular niche, your competition and risk of substitution decreases. But this requires choosing to specialize. It requires the discipline of focus.

2) Expertise

Expertise is closely aligned to specialization, but is slightly different. Once you’ve decided on an area of specialization, your job is to become a world-class expert in that niche. While specialization enables you to reduce your competition by reducing the possibly for substitution, expertise justifies charging a price premium.

As an employee, specialization and expertise give you a great deal of negotiating power when it comes to retaining your job, getting a promotion, or finding a better job.

3) Pattern Recognition

Specialization and expertise enable you to develop the skill of pattern recognition. Pattern recognition is the ability to walk into a situation, recognize a problem and quickly form a strong hypothesis on the solution. It allows you to get to the heart of the matter quickly, often without the need to do a formal study or commit to a time-consuming diagnostic. It communicates confidence, a sine quo non of leadership.

Pattern recognition only comes after you’ve seen a similar situation multiple times, and is thus a product of specialization. It increases your productivity and the trust of your company in your role and value to the business. Your ability to spot patterns can protect you from becoming fungible.

4) Positioning

Companies position themselves. Products position themselves. Brand managers also need to position themselves. Positioning involves creating differentiation from anyone or anything else that might be seen as a competitor. Positioning is about figuring out how to place yourself in a role where the opportunities fit your personal capabilities and brand.

Moving Beyond Fungibility

As you think about the current state of your career, have you created a unique brand around an area of specialization that makes you hard to replace? Are you investing in ways to deepen your expertise? How aware are you of recurring patterns in your business that give you faster and better insight into more effective answers?

Even as you work on positioning your product for success in the marketplace, make 2013 the year you explore how to position yourself as a successful brand in the marketplace, one that can’t be replaced by substitution, whether that’s technology, lower cost employees, or business consolidation.

Be the brand!

To further reinforce this topic, I want to share a compelling story that a physician friend of mine shared over breakfast:

Laughing, she said, “I had an interesting experience yesterday with a rep. As you know, I’m hardball with sales reps. I rarely give them time. I walked in the back door to my office yesterday morning, and there were eight reps standing there, waiting. The office manager had told them there would be another doctor who would sign for their samples. I walked in, waving my hand, and said hi to everybody. I told them I would not be able to talk to anybody but that I would happily sign for their samples.”

This doctor is the highest-producing physician in her practice. Just having her sign for their samples is a big deal to these pharmaceutical sales reps.

She marched right through to her office – with a smile the whole time – and closed the door. A few minutes later, the office manager came in with eight different signature devices. The doctor dutifully signed for them and handed them back to the office manager. It was at that point that the office manager handed her a piece of literature from one of the reps. She had a hunch that the doctor would find it interesting. And it did catch her attention.

“Okay, I want to see this rep. She’s got 30 seconds but I’m willing to see her.”

The physician returned to the back hallway in the office where the reps were waiting and offered the rep from the pharmaceutical company Sanofi the opportunity to deliver her sales pitch. The rep delivered her message in the allotted time, thanked the doctor and went on her way, knowing that she had been successful.

I was curious why my friend had decided to see this particular rep and what it was that was so intriguing.

“Every other rep had only product messages. The Sanofi rep was the only one that offered me something of value.

“This rep came with a very simple, 5×7 glossy postcard. But it wasn’t a product pitch. It was a coupon for the new Sanofi iPhone blood glucose monitor. She said, ‘You plug this little electronic glucose monitor into the bottom of your iPhone, and you put the test strips in there. It measures your blood sugar and uploads it right to the iPhone. It keeps your records over time, and you can add notes if you want. It’s been FDA approved. It usually retails for $79, but with the coupon, your patients can get it for $5.’

“I’m definitely going to remember her name. I told her, ‘I’ll need more of those coupons so I can refer the program to my patients.’”

So was this an example of “give to get” marketing?

“She is a good example of the reps I respect and will take the time to see: reps who make my life easier and make me look savvy with my patients. By offering me patient tools and educational material. But if all they have to offer is a product pitch, I just don’t have time for them.”

Are you willing to invest in value?

Are brand marketers willing to take the long view in building value relationships with doctors? Are you willing to sacrifice the potential for a short-term product message in exchange for longer-term, trusted relationships?

At the end of the day it’s a very simple question: Are you customer-centric, or are you message-centric?

One of the interesting challenges facing marketing, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, is the message. Not that we have a hard time coming up with key marketing messages. No, it’s the fixation on delivering that message even if it’s to the detriment of the customer relationship that is the problem. Should marketing be message-focused or customer-focused?

Every marketer will say, “Of course we’re customer-focused. We know who our best customers are and what they want.”

But in reality, everyone gets focused around the big creative idea. The Message.

In many ways, the TV show Mad Men reinforces the concept that the marketer’s genius is in finding the words, images and metaphors that will stir customers’ hearts and emotions enough to motivate purchase behavior.

Typically, however, messages are developed in a sterile focus group environment with the marketer sitting behind the one-way mirror. A handful of specific messages are trotted out to find which one gets the best response from a group of carefully selected physicians.

This seems to be a straightforward, logical and cost-effective way to build a communication approach to which physicians will respond. But the physicians used in market research may not only under-represent the larger physician population (most active physicians don’t have time for market research), the research is done completely out of the context of a physician’s crazy, busy day. A typical primary care doctor will shuttle from exam room to exam room seeing 18-20 patients in a day with rarely even a couple of minutes to see a sales rep. This is context where messages and value are truly tested.

It’s Time to Take a Step Back and Focus on What the Customer Cares About

A revealing conversation with a busy primary care physician:

“Any smart rep is going to be able to look at my practice and know right away the kind of patients I’m seeing. I’m in Bucktown in Chicago and you can figure out right away the kind of demographic that I’m dealing with: I’m prescribing birth control, I’m dealing with high blood pressure, I’m dealing with some obesity, some type 2 diabetes…

“If you’re smart you know what my patient load looks like and you know the kinds of issues I’m struggling with. When you come see me, bring some initial ideas, and ask me about my patients and what kind of support I need.

“I’m scrambling to get the right kind of patient education in the hands of my patients. I’m running over to the Xerox machine and copying something that’s been Xeroxed seven times already, and isn’t even aligned properly. You want to give me something that’s really going to help me and to begin to build a relationship? Well, then talk to me about what I need. Or get my attention by making an educated guess at what my patient population needs.”

This perspective is a distinct and qualitative redirect of how we, as marketers, should be thinking.

A 5:1 Give-to-Get Ratio

One solution to this disconnect between what physicians want and marketers need is an approach in which we start by offering value and only ask for the business when we’ve earned the right. To make it real and not just a passing sales fad or manipulative sales technique, I suggest a ratio of 5:1. Five times out of six, offer your physician customers helpful information about particular disease areas that may relate to your product, but it’s information that they’ve asked for, not content that you’re trying force feed.

For the next five sales calls talk about things your doctors care about, topics that are relevant to each one on an individual basis, and then on the sixth call offer, “Oh, by the way, Doc, we’ve been talking about high blood pressure… here is some interesting data on our product that I thought you should know.”

At this point you’ve built a rapport and created value. It’s the Give-to-Get side of marketing. It’s born out of a focus on who the customers are and what they care about, versus always hammering the message.

Give-to Get in Digital Marketing: Creating Conversation

We’ve been talking about the relationship between a sales rep and physician, but it’s the same in digital marketing. As we think about moving customers through the adoption cycle, from awareness to consideration to trial – we’re going to use online interactions as ways to create dialogue, creating opportunities to sell from a position of value.

Once you’ve identified who your targets are, and you’ve done at least an initial differentiation on value, then the next series of communications shouldn’t necessarily be just message focused around your brand. At this point you should try to create a conversation. A conversation around what is fundamentally important to the customer, not to the message.

This marks the ultimate move to customer-focused messaging and customer-focused marketing…

The Old Waterfall Method

Traditional medical content development, just like in traditional software dev, has tended to follow the waterfall method.

Key medical claims will get approved by medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) staff before going to medical writers. After the writers are done and the promotional copy is finalized, it goes back to MLR where it gets reviewed. It’s not unusual for there to be more than a few rounds of revisions before it can be handed off to designers to develop the visual messaging. And then it goes back to MLR for review.

Only after the design sign-off milestone will it go to the interactive team to build the project… and then back to MLR. Traditionally, if even one page or section is rejected and sent back for revision, the entire marketing program will need to go through the review process again.

This can be a very long drawn-out process, often taking up to six months to develop and approve a simple website. Heaven forbid that new customer insight is uncovered mid-project that suggests a change in the words or images! This would force the process to start over back at the top of the waterfall!

Becoming Afraid to Innovate

This approval gauntlet often leads brand teams and their agency teams to avoid content or marketing innovation. They fear repeated revisions leading to missed deadlines and budget overruns.

Agencies learn to self-censor. They hesitate to bring innovative ideas to the brand team for fear of getting shot down. And brand teams begin to measure agencies based not on their creative but on their ability to get stuff through the regulatory review process quickly.  This is a frustrating and dysfunctional arrangement, to say the least.

Agile: Rapid Prototyping and Testing

The agile software development philosophy has begun to introduce changes to marketing that are well overdue. Agencies, their brand teams, and MLR staff are starting to think more iteratively. The goal now is to prototype an approach or creative concept very quickly and test its “approvability” earlier in the process. This can greatly accelerate the process of getting approved content to market.

For example, one agile strategy  - timeboxing and focusing on small increments – involves breaking a project like a new website into smaller components, each with a separate job number. Rather than a finished website going through the approval process to be judged thumbs up or thumbs down as a single entity, only the individual sections or pages that fail approval are sent back for revision. Meanwhile, the portions of the website – separate “jobs” – that have been approved don’t need to go back through review. This saves significant time and resources.

Another agile method is to use cross-functional teams during the development process rather than a traditional linear “conveyor belt” approach of development activities. In a digital marketing agency, this means engaging strategy, writing, creative and technology together from the start. The cross fertilization of ideas that is possible in a team environment enhances problem solving and can reduce errors and accelerate time to market.

Finally, agile’s “inspect-and-modify” approach encourages parallel pathing of development with shorter iterations or “sprints.” Building in shorter cycle times for key elements of the project avoids the “big reveal” at the end of weeks of work only to discover that the marketing program is not on message or strategy.

Implementing Agile in a Data-Rich World

I have discussed at length in previous blogs the power of data and insight to drive marketing strategy and build deeper customer relationships. We now face an interesting nexus in pharma where we’re beginning to capture data richness and now need a methodology for quickly turning this new intelligence into action. The next step is to adapt an agile philosophy that will allow for rapid prototyping and ever-improving iterations.

In every market, the brand that implements these development methods is going to get ahead. They’ll be able to learn about their customers faster, and quickly turn that knowledge into a better product or service.

Behind the headlines of healthcare reform we see seeds of change taking root that may have a similarly profound impact – changes that will create many new markets and that will potentially challenge the very foundation on which pharma is built.

It’s hard to overestimate the impact of the healthcare revolution that’s coming in the next decade. Let’s look at some of the emerging technologies that could lead to remarkable changes in how healthcare is bought, sold and delivered.

The Advent of Synthetic Genes

I recently met Craig Venter, the scientist who was the first person to map the human genome. His aptly named company, Synthetic Genomics is building on his successful attempt to synthesize a gene. I had the opportunity to visit his laboratory and see a few of his current projects. Craig is forging an intersection between biology and the digital world. He’s not only working on the genome, he’s turning it into digital content.

According to Craig, now that he can synthesize genes, he can turn the genetic instructions embedded in the DNA into a digital file and literally email a gene. “If there is someone at the other end who has a properly equipped wet lab, they can take the digital content that I’ve given them and then turn that back into a biological gene.” This could revolutionize the way we respond to outbreaks of disease, develop tailor-made diagnostics and create targeted therapies.

Globalization and Innovation

Globalization and innovation at the bottom of the pyramid are creating new courses of therapy that are cheaper and that can reach more people than what’s currently available in North America and Europe. The obvious example is the Aravind Eye Care System in India where process innovation means that cataract surgery can be completed at a fraction of the cost in the US. Avarind’s eye surgeons average 2,000 operations a year. In the US, the average is 125.

I have been in conversation with a researcher in Boston who is pioneering the field of nano biophysics. She is literally moving around molecules at the DNA level, with incredible implications for diagnostics, targeted therapies, and even preventive medicine. The costs involved in manufacturing new products using this technology are a fraction of the cost of traditional small molecule and biologic therapies, making it the kind of innovation that could revolutionize the business model of the pharma industry.

Patient Communities and Governments Becoming Empowered

Patient communities around the world are beginning to take charge of their own destinies. They are making demands of governments and pharma to gain access to more efficacious and cost-effective therapies. In some countries, patient and caregivers are forming activist communities, demanding the latest therapies from their governments.

At the same time, budget constraints are leading both patient communities and governments to demand much more attention by the healthcare industry to prevention rather than just expensive acute and chronic care. This is going to challenge pharma’s traditional model. If pharma doesn’t seriously embrace prevention as a part of its portfolio, it will be ill equipped when governments with constrained budgets limit payments for drugs.

The Power Shift Away from the Physician

The growing influence of health plans, both private and government-run, is beginning to displace the primary care physician as the most important decision-maker in choosing a pharmaceutical course of therapy. Internists will find their ability to prescribe certain medications circumscribed by price and even access to certain drugs may be curtailed.

This change in power means that the traditional focus of pharmaceutical marketing – the physician – may not be the most effective target. This has broad implications for how a brand goes to market and how it staffs its sales force.

New Sites of Care Evolving

We’re already beginning to even see small changes in where care is delivered. Clinics at Walgreens, CVS and small, dedicated surgical centers staffed by healthcare professionals are beginning to displace more traditional physician offices and hospitals. Young parents are realizing that they can get their child’s pink eye, sore throat, and ear infections diagnosed and treated in 20 minutes, including filling the prescription a few steps away at the in-house pharmacy, compared to trying to schedule an appointment with their family doctor.

These new clinical sites are providing more efficient care at a fraction of the cost, leading to what I call “new centers of influence.” As these clinics of convenience gain traction and popularity, the world-class doctors who might have directed therapy choices in the past may not have the same level of influence going forward.

More Transparent Outcomes

Technology and “connected health” are making the ability to measure and publish outcomes much more transparent. This will inevitably lead to new models of prevention, diagnostics and therapy.

There will be an ever-growing demand for more targeted therapies. At some point soon, outcomes measurement will allow the FDA to tell pharma, “Your drug is now efficacious for over 80% of the American public, but it’s actually the most effective for 20% of the population. You need to partner with a diagnostics company so that you can do a much better job of identifying which patients will thrive on your product.”

Off the record, senior pharma executives express skepticism that outcomes measurement will ever be definitive enough to influence prescribing decisions, but that it precisely what the private and public health plans are expecting.

Will Pharma make the Necessary Adjustments?

Given these changes that will likely impact this industry in profound ways, what kind of new role does pharma need to play to maintain its relevance and profitability? Should it rethink its very expensive, traditional manufacturing role and move into a health leadership or partnership role? What impact would this have on pharma’s fundamental business model?

An important example to explore is the partnership between United Healthcare, YMCA and Walgreens in which the health plan pays the Y and Walgreens for every type 2 diabetes patient they enroll in exercise, diet counseling, and compliance training programs. Who would have predicted these types of non-clinical payments five years ago? Yet it’s a very strategic partnership for United Healthcare grounded in a different definition of value and the long-term relationship they wish to have with their customers.

What is the right definition of value for pharma for the next twenty years? And what type of relationship do we want to build with our customers that will provide value to both parties?

There is an alternative however. It requires a great deal of patience and a willingness to take the long view, something not every sales organization is ready to do. There is the potential to create a competitive advantage in the market by stepping away from the hard sell long enough to determine, “What are the challenges facing this practice right now and how can we solve them?”

This attempt at true understanding is a great deal more effective than just trying to persuade the overworked doc to write more of your drugs. Although it may take a few months to persuade a physician of the sincerity of this question, it has the potential for changing the nature of the relationship.

Pharma needs to move beyond simple product promotion and much more towards long-term relationship building and thought leadership recognition. Brands need to position themselves as partners with physicians, not just as the manufacturer. Technology can be an enabler to help brand teams do just that.

Using Technology to Help Physicians Quickly and Effectively Diagnose a Patient

Most doctors are extremely busy. One of their biggest challenges is getting to a diagnosis as quickly as possible. Often they have only fifteen minutes with each patient…

In order to quickly and thoroughly diagnose a patient, physicians are trained to ask a set of really good questions. The goal is to document and analyze any important data points, experiences and symptoms since the last patient visit that might reveal important clinical patterns. Unfortunately, most patients are bad at self-reporting, and often the important details are not captured in the allotted time.

One solution that is beginning to emerge is the use of symptom tracking tools, particularly mobile-enabled tools (such as iPhone apps) that allow patients to capture their symptoms in real time. These tools provide both patients and physicians with a summary of symptoms, triggers, effects, attempted homebrew therapies – all of the kinds of things that a physician would want to capture if they were monitoring that patient from afar.

The challenge of diagnosing migraines

Diagnosing migraine headaches illustrates the disconnect between a patient’s ability to self-report salient symptom data and a physician’s ability to effectively diagnosis. Migraines can overwhelm the patient’s ability to concentrate and by the time they can get an appointment with their doctor, many of the important details about the onset of the migraine are lost. At that point there are few reliable observational clues on which the physician can base pattern recognition.

This is a clear case where technology can help. We created an iPhone app that an individual can launch when they feel a migraine coming on. You pick up your iPhone and launch the app, capturing the time of day and location. Then the app offers several simple data capture tools. It shows you the front and back of a head, and you tap on the location of the pain. Is it between the eyes? Is it at the top of the head? Is it around the jaw? Is it behind the back of your head?

Then you register a severity index. You indicate whether it’s preventing you from going to work or play. There’s a list of possible triggers: Lack of sleep? Alcohol? Emotions? Loud noise or bright lights? Then, what are your feelings? Do you have a sense of a blinding aura? Pinpoint pain? Nausea?

Did you take Advil for it? Did you take a prescription drug for it? How long did it last?

You’re capturing everything around the experience and you’re capturing it in the moment.

All of this information gets stored in a tiny database. If you experience multiple migraines before you can get in to see your doctor, that data is captured and stored, too. The application begins to reveal common patterns such as triggers or emotions. You can email the data to your physician just prior to your appointment and now your physician can begin to develop a theory of what may cause your migraines before you even walk in the door. It streamlines the time in the office and it gives the physician a lot more confidence in her diagnosis.

These tools also give the patient a new level of self-awareness. At its most fundamental level, diagnosis is simply pattern recognition. Technology can help provide enough data to begin to notice the relevant patterns.

Writing a Prescription for an App

This migraine app, sponsored by a pharmaceutical company willing to invest in providing physicians with a tool that will help them in their practice, is available free of charge in the iTunes store. Physicians can download it to their iPhone to demonstrate it to patients. They can even write a “prescription” for the app, which is a growing trend. The doctor can say, “I’m going to write a prescription for this medication, but what I really want you to do is go to iTunes and download this app and use it before you come back and see me again.”

Although these types of apps are often wholly funded by pharma, it’s important to note that they are non-branded, and that pharma doesn’t have access to any patient data. There is complete patient privacy and confidentiality.

The goal of this health app is to provide physicians with important information about their patients, thus enhancing the relationship that they have with their patients. And it begins to change the value proposition that the pharmaceutical rep brings into the office, offering an opportunity for savvy reps to reframe their role as partners in helping their local physicians improve their practices to serve their patients better.

By taking a simple but intentional walk in a physician’s shoes, one can find multiple ways to help. That’s more what sales and marketing ought to be doing.

Success comes when you have both data richness and the ability to take action on the data. One without the other is a non-starter, like having the keys to a hot sports car without the ability to drive anywhere.

In the pharma world, for example, spending on marketing databases is hot right now, and for many of the right reasons. There’s a lot of data involved in communicating with physicians and patients. But is there an adequate budget, a strategy, and the will to take action based on the insights gleaned from the data? Data mining without the ability to take action will be frustrating and ultimately embarrassing when the money is spent and there’s no change in sales.

Start with a strategy that clearly identifies what needs to change and what marketing actions are possible at your company, and that will tell you where to focus your efforts back in the data mine. Put physician data richness together with the ability to act on its insight and you have pharma CRM.

And a license to drive.

With the sheer volume of new communication platforms, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the huge number of variables that can be involved in an interactive marketing program. I recommend starting with baby steps. Two simple but very effective ways to personalize marketing are the choice of communication channel and the development of custom content. Channel and content. Often just getting these right will have a significant positive impact on building value-based customer relationships with healthcare professionals.

As a place to start, channel and content are both necessary. It’s one thing to come up with great, personalized content – but it’s a total waste if you’re not using the channel that a target physician is monitoring or uses. On the other hand, you might discover the unique channels a specific physician prefers, but if the content is irrelevant or inappropriate, you have lost an opportunity to build affinity.

Lessons Learned from Breakfast
I recently had breakfast with a physician friend of mine. We’ve had a number of great conversations about her practice. She is very busy internist with over 2400 patients, making her a “top decile” physician, the segment that pharma needs to reach. Not surprisingly, given her large patient load and full calendar, she has very strong opinions about pharmaceutical sales reps and the value she gets or doesn’t get from their daily interruptions.

There are certain media channels that she uses regularly. She knows she needs regular access to information on new FDA approvals and emerging therapies. The major peer-reviewed journals and online content portals are two of those channels; the sales rep channel is not. Try to communicate using any other method and she simply won’t get the message. And like most professionals, she’s very particular about what kind of content she’s interested in. It’s got to be related to internal medicine. Go ahead and try to offer content outside her areas of interest but it won’t matter – she’ll turn it off and walk away.

At the end of our conversation I had a pretty solid idea of how to market to this physician. Now obviously, we can’t go out and have breakfast with every customer in order to build enough trust to learn specific channel and content preferences, but we can carefully structure our existing marketing interactions with the goal of capturing this insight.

One of the most underappreciated advantages of interactive marketing is the fact that every time we publish content to our audience, they publish their preferences right back to us. Unfortunately, most campaigns aren’t designed to listen to the customer response, especially at the individual customer level. But in fact, based on careful analysis of detailed response data, we can capture glimpses of an individual doctor’s interests and preferences. A good marketing analytics team will begin to recognize familiar patterns, and over time individual profiles will emerge.

After several months of intelligent interactions, we start to deduce which channel that specific physicians trust and what kind of content they prefer. In the marketing world, this knowledge is gold.

Direct Mail isn’t Dead for Everyone
About a year and a half ago, an editor of one of the leading trade journals called me and said, “I’m writing a year-end review. I want you to comment on which marketing channels are in and which marketing channels are out.”

This is the wrong question to ask, because you can’t categorically say that, for example, sales reps don’t work anymore or direct mail doesn’t work anymore. I can tell you that sales reps don’t work with specific physicians, and direct mail may not work with other specific physicians – but you can’t say categorically that a channel doesn’t work. You can only say it doesn’t work for a specific physician.

One of our most important responsibilities as an agency is to prevent broad generalizations about customer segments and channel and content preferences. We can’t just dismiss a channel such as direct mail that might only have a 5% response rate. Our job is to find the 5% who trust that channel and service them well. And redeploy the budget for the other 95% towards the channels that are most relevant to them.

This physician-level insight marks an important shift in the way marketers think about their markets and their customers. Even if we start with the baby steps of simple channel and message preferences, the implications are profound and will have a ripple effect throughout brand planning, budgeting, messaging, and marketing operations.

One small baby step for a brand, one big step forward for the industry.

The Lack of Integrated Campaigns

While each of these tactics may be implemented by best-of-breed agencies, there is generally little coordination or sophisticated strategy that enables the whole effort to be greater than the sum of the parts. Unlike in other industries where marketers have learned how to build multi-channel programs, pharma has continued to use its traditional silo approach.

For example, in pharma you rarely see integrated campaigns in which one tactic, say direct mail, launches a chain of touch points by presenting a call to action to go to a website, where there is a prompt to opt-in to an email newsletter program or register for a conference.

Why is integrated marketing so important? There are two reasons why a more sophisticated approach to marketing is beneficial for both the brand and physicians.

Two Reasons Why Integration Is Important

Integrated marketing acknowledges the fact that there is an adoption path over which all of us travel during the process of becoming aware, considering, evaluating and eventually making a purchase decision. An integrated marketing program understands what types of information and presentation formats are most helpful at each stage in the decision making process.

Secondly, an integrated multi-channel approach respects that fact that individuals use and respond to different marketing media. Some physicians prefer sales reps, while others insist that they receive their information digitally. Some professionals need clinical documentation while others want to hear from a colleague…

For many pharma brands, the traditional approach to determining the effective marketing messages and media strategy is to use focus group market research. While this is helpful at a macro level, it overlooks the fact that we still need to understand the issues and interest at the individual customer level. And this is where big data comes in.

Capturing Data Should Be the First Step

There is lots of data on physician behavior, but it’s stuck in individual marketing silos and in the offices of the brand’s ad agencies, residing in Excel spreadsheets or on a website database. Even now, most agencies don’t report back at a physician level. They will typically report back at an aggregate level.

“We had a 5% click through.” “We had 2% response rate on the BRC card.”

No one is looking holistically at the detailed data at the physician level. No one is tying it all together to learn things about the customers at the individual level. Which channels do they actually respond to? Which channels do they ignore? What types of content do they respond to? Are there ways that we can actually increase a lift on different channels by coordinating them better?

Turning Lots of Data into Big Data

The first step in building an integrated marketing strategy is to work on turning lots of disparate data into structured data where it can be analyzed and used more efficiently. This starts by capturing data from every physician interaction. From each agency, the brand team needs individual physician data on:

• Who did they target?
• When did they target them?
• What was the content?
• What was the response?

Once this data is tied together and compiled into a single dashboard that actually tells the brand team who we are talking to, what we are saying, and how much we are spending on them, we have the foundation for smart marketing decision making.

Automation is the Next Step

Once the value of this data has been proved, then it’s time to help the various agencies develop APIs, or interface software that will automate the collection of this data from the various sources.

Once the data is flowing in from the various agency partners in a regular and sustained way, it’s possible to take a serious look at marketing effectiveness and make changes and choices that are now based on evidence and not hunch.

Integrated marketing can be a reality for pharma. It just requires capturing all the data that’s out there and turning it into “big data” that can be turned into marketing insight.