The changes that have occurred within Pharma in the recent past, such as:
- increasing challenges to demonstrate real, value added differentiation at a clinical level
- dramatic changes in what we need to provide to create value propositions for the payers
- the spread of information technology and social networking sites that have revolutionised patient involvement in therapeutic decisions
are likely to pale into insignificance in contrast to the current most important trend in marketing for the 21st Century – involving customers in what they want, i.e. ‘co-creating with your customers’.
Not because everything has to or will be co-created in the future, but because tapping into the collective experiences, skills and ingenuity of hundreds of millions of customers around the world is a complete departure from the inward looking, producer-versus-customer innovation model so common to corporations worldwide.
Have you ever sat in on or observed a focus group where you have thought to yourself that the respondents are bored or trying to give answers that they think you want to hear? Not a criticism of respondents per se, but it highlights a real need to look at how we have historically have gone about brand, concept and message, creation and testing and represents a real challenge to how relevant are our current methods.
Traditionally, the process for brand development has been for the marketing team (at a global, regional or local level), the medical and sales teams, the advertising agency and the brand consultancy to be closeted in a darkened room in a workshop environment, striving to create the complete strategic brand, with a view to undertaking extensive market research to collaborate their thoughts.
We develop what we think customers want to hear, the value we think they want, to put together an offering and then, and only then, expose it to our customers in the hope that they will like what we offer them!
Is this approach as relevant as it was in the past? The changing environment facing our market today would suggest that we must look further and act differently if we are going to create the compelling brand propositions we need to maximise the success of our products.
In the next decade brands must adapt or die. We need a more collaborative, adaptive and continuous approach to building and sustaining our brands – one that is based at a minimum on the core co-creation principle of doing things with people not at them.
What might be an appropriate definition of this co-creation phenomenon: “The principle of creating goods, services and experiences with the direct and active involvement of experienced and creative customers, tapping into their intellectual capital, giving them a direct say in the positioning, innovation and communication of brands, to produce more profitable products that customers want to buy”.
Although it is not appropriate within the Pharma industry that our customers (either patients or physicians) should be actively involved in R&D – they can play a vital role in the development of the brand, the messages and the creative execution.
Co-creation is founded on three key tenets:
1. Constant customer involvement throughout the entire marketing planning and brand communications process, i.e. maintaining a continuous dialogue with customers; harnessing their ideas and opinions to develop better communications and adapting to their changing needs and tastes in real-time.
2. A continuous process, with no end points as the communication is constantly building and evolving.
3. Creating communities and constantly communicating with them, online and offline.
The co-creation of value
The notion of marketing as a facilitator and ‘structurer’ of the mutual creation of value is gaining credence. The customer should always be a co-creator of value.
Together, the company and customer create value through customised, co-produced offerings. The co-creation of value is a desirable goal as it can assist firms in highlighting the customer’s point of view and in improving the front-end process of identifying customers’ needs and wants.
Looking at the world of consumer marketing, which is often the fore-runner of what will be adopted by the pharmaceuticals industry in time, there is significant agreement that the Top 5 Brand Development and Communication Trends can be summarised as follows:
Substituting the word “physician” when you read “consumer” helps to paint what the picture might look like for Pharma.
1. The Power of Word of Mouth
The majority of purchase decisions are influenced in some way by word of mouth recommendation making word of mouth marketing amongst the most powerful brand communications tool. But it’s also hard to manage; it is out of your control and in the hands, or rather the mouths of the consumer and most importantly you have to earn it. Your product/ communication/service delivery/experience needs to be valued or good otherwise word of mouth works equally effectively in a negative context.
Although we are being constantly bombarded by the premise that in the future everything we communicate to our customers will be through, via, in or at least some way involving social-networks, e-mail, SMS or some viral community, the first thing to remember is that studies are actually showing that the most influential word of mouth recommendation is offline.
In the UK Word of Mouth consultancy Keller Fay found 90% of brand based “word of mouth” occurs off-line, especially face-to-face. So whilst it’s tempting to think that viral and digital social media is the only way forward, we need to think more about WHAT will make consumers talk positively to their friends and within their communities on or off-line not the medium in which it is delivered.
The challenge for us in Pharma is to ask ‘what do we actually do to encourage word of mouth communication between Doctors’? It is actually the sharing of great personal or patient experiences, and of course we have success stories in Detail Aids but we cannot rely on case studies written by us because that is all about us telling them. Imagine the power if Doctors could be encouraged to share their successes on a peer to peer basis?
2. The Power of Communities
The lesson here is that naturally occurring communities work best. Brands will do better when they can add value to an existing community rather than companies spending large amounts of money trying to create one. The best place to look for communities is around consumer interests and passions occurring naturally on and off-line, but rarely around brands (with a few exceptions like car and motorbike brands).
Clearly, what pharmaceutical companies can do in social media is significantly restricted at present but the FDA has renewed interest in addressing Internet communications and has acknowledged the special nature of the Internet as a marketing tool and venue. The Agency held a public hearing and solicited written comments from September 2009 to February 2010 and has made the issuance of a policy on social media a priority for 2010. But until FDA issues formal guidelines or new regulations governing Internet communications, you should assume that the FDA will review any social media communications through existing FDA regulations but track warning and untitled letters to avoid the mistakes your peers make when they communicate through social media and pay attention: the FDA’s Internet policy may emerge quickly over the next year or so.
There needs to be a catalyst for discussion; involvement is critical to creating brands worth talking about.
Whether it is Patient Associations or HCP Special Interest Groups – they exist but what do we do to earn their involvement? It’s not about advocating loyalty (yet) but involvement, absolutely.
3. The Power of Involvement
Co-creation: is a great way to involve consumers in something they’re passionate about. Arguably Starbucks is one of the most successful brands in creating an on-line community through involvement. They claim to have 6 million fans and the magic of their involvement is in asking for product suggestions and improvements and then acting on them.
Rate and commentate: For consumers who don’t want to go to the effort of creating something, ‘rating’ comes a close second. Everyone loves to give feedback – rating and commentating systems are an easy way to invite involvement and sponsor sharing.
The Big Idea: Think about the recent Microsoft advertising campaign of “I am a PC and Windows 7 was my idea”.
With these ads, Microsoft is telling users that they’ve listened to customers’ suggestions and used them in the design for Windows 7. As such, Windows 7 is the idea of the people – people like you and me.
Creating an ad campaign that speaks not only to the improvements, but tells us that they are a direct result of people’s feedback, is genius. The “My Idea” ads show regular, everyday people in regular, everyday settings taking credit for Windows 7 features. The guy in his bedroom talks about how he wished his PC could have snapping windows. The dad in his house wants all the computer equipment in his house to work together. These things are now features of Windows 7, and thus, their ideas. The idea is to show that normal people influenced the design of the product, which should make it exactly what people want.
4. The Power of Emotions
It’s never been more important to engage the emotions.
In reality consumers are not sitting around waiting to hear from you; they are being bombarded with around 35,000 messages a day, it’s stressful! With so much information and messaging around, we tend to sift out the messages we want to hear and gravitate to things that make us feel good. So it’s important that messages are re-framed as understanding and recognising us as individuals and potentially gives them something to talk about, with your brand at the centre of the discussion.
5. The Power of Story Telling
However, none of these creative opportunities are possible unless we get the brand story straight. While the connections, channels and ways customers engage with brands have come full-circle; the principles of brand haven’t changed. Brands still need to stand for something, have a purpose, a passion and a point of view.
Brand disciplines are borne from within and need to be aligned to the brand value; otherwise everything else is, at best, creating awareness and at worst a waste of money, time and energy.
Applied to Pharmaceuticals
In this globally driven, regulatory-focused marketplace, more reliance than ever is being placed on the scientific integrity of a brand, leading the industry to ensure they communicate more credibly at every front.
From developing a unique nomenclature and lexicon to position the brand in clinical communications, to establishing visionary campaignability with long-term application, some companies are taking advantage of this shift in grounding professional value propositions by developing innovative ways of approaching branding. What could be more powerful than a Detail Aid and Message Cascade, even the Press Advertisement Campaign being one that is jointly created by HCPs and Patients and us?
A focus on core values is a primary requisite for the opportunity to create uniquely ownable and motivating language and visuals. These branding hallmarks are the most permanent public expressions of the brand’s character or personality – how it looks and feels, as well as its tone of voice. They are important contributors to overall brand equity that are inextricably linked to the brand for its lifetime. While they are certainly a significant component of advertising and promotion, they also live in venues where advertising and promotion do not; such as scientific conferences, on packaging and so on.
Into the future, if we are truly to build and sustain great brands with real value, in my opinion, and in no particular order, we must embrace:
- Tapping into the collective experiences, skills and ingenuity of our customers around the world to change from the inward looking, producer-versus-customer innovation model so common to corporations worldwide
- Requiring a more consensual and integrated approach based on co-creation with key stakeholders, less about telling people why they should want a brand and more understanding of how a brand fits as well as working within a flow of communication rather than trying to control the communication.
- Spend the time to understand how and why our brand fits for and adds value to all stakeholders in their language and fits with their values with a focus on what is important for them not just for us
- Involving our customers in determining how to position our brands
- Getting our customers to help with the creation of our messages and advertising to tell real, powerful stories that they want to hear
- Create a powerful word-of-mouth environment that encourages customers to openly exchange views and opinions (as allowed)
- Listening to our customers views on how to improve and enhance our brands and communication through the encouragement of feedback
- Doing it all repeatedly so that you are continuously adapting to their changing needs and aspirations
This is a long way from sitting in a room in the HQ building and then exploring YOUR ideas with potentially bored and over-researched customers – are you ready for the future of branding in the 21st Century?
About the author
Chris Marks is Brand Services Principal
Originally published as “Co-creation: the future of marketing” in Pharmafocus, January 2011
Brand Creation for the 21st Century
The changes that have occurred within Pharma in the recent past, such as:
are likely to pale into insignificance in contrast to the current most important trend in marketing for the 21st Century – involving customers in what they want, i.e. ‘co-creating with your customers’.
Not because everything has to or will be co-created in the future, but because tapping into the collective experiences, skills and ingenuity of hundreds of millions of customers around the world is a complete departure from the inward looking, producer-versus-customer innovation model so common to corporations worldwide.
Have you ever sat in on or observed a focus group where you have thought to yourself that the respondents are bored or trying to give answers that they think you want to hear? Not a criticism of respondents per se, but it highlights a real need to look at how we have historically have gone about brand, concept and message, creation and testing and represents a real challenge to how relevant are our current methods.
Traditionally, the process for brand development has been for the marketing team (at a global, regional or local level), the medical and sales teams, the advertising agency and the brand consultancy to be closeted in a darkened room in a workshop environment, striving to create the complete strategic brand, with a view to undertaking extensive market research to collaborate their thoughts.
We develop what we think customers want to hear, the value we think they want, to put together an offering and then, and only then, expose it to our customers in the hope that they will like what we offer them!
Is this approach as relevant as it was in the past? The changing environment facing our market today would suggest that we must look further and act differently if we are going to create the compelling brand propositions we need to maximise the success of our products.
In the next decade brands must adapt or die. We need a more collaborative, adaptive and continuous approach to building and sustaining our brands – one that is based at a minimum on the core co-creation principle of doing things with people not at them.
What might be an appropriate definition of this co-creation phenomenon: “The principle of creating goods, services and experiences with the direct and active involvement of experienced and creative customers, tapping into their intellectual capital, giving them a direct say in the positioning, innovation and communication of brands, to produce more profitable products that customers want to buy”.
Although it is not appropriate within the Pharma industry that our customers (either patients or physicians) should be actively involved in R&D – they can play a vital role in the development of the brand, the messages and the creative execution.
Co-creation is founded on three key tenets:
1. Constant customer involvement throughout the entire marketing planning and brand communications process, i.e. maintaining a continuous dialogue with customers; harnessing their ideas and opinions to develop better communications and adapting to their changing needs and tastes in real-time.
2. A continuous process, with no end points as the communication is constantly building and evolving.
3. Creating communities and constantly communicating with them, online and offline.
The co-creation of value
The notion of marketing as a facilitator and ‘structurer’ of the mutual creation of value is gaining credence. The customer should always be a co-creator of value.
Together, the company and customer create value through customised, co-produced offerings. The co-creation of value is a desirable goal as it can assist firms in highlighting the customer’s point of view and in improving the front-end process of identifying customers’ needs and wants.
Looking at the world of consumer marketing, which is often the fore-runner of what will be adopted by the pharmaceuticals industry in time, there is significant agreement that the Top 5 Brand Development and Communication Trends can be summarised as follows:
Substituting the word “physician” when you read “consumer” helps to paint what the picture might look like for Pharma.
1. The Power of Word of Mouth
The majority of purchase decisions are influenced in some way by word of mouth recommendation making word of mouth marketing amongst the most powerful brand communications tool. But it’s also hard to manage; it is out of your control and in the hands, or rather the mouths of the consumer and most importantly you have to earn it. Your product/ communication/service delivery/experience needs to be valued or good otherwise word of mouth works equally effectively in a negative context.
Although we are being constantly bombarded by the premise that in the future everything we communicate to our customers will be through, via, in or at least some way involving social-networks, e-mail, SMS or some viral community, the first thing to remember is that studies are actually showing that the most influential word of mouth recommendation is offline.
In the UK Word of Mouth consultancy Keller Fay found 90% of brand based “word of mouth” occurs off-line, especially face-to-face. So whilst it’s tempting to think that viral and digital social media is the only way forward, we need to think more about WHAT will make consumers talk positively to their friends and within their communities on or off-line not the medium in which it is delivered.
The challenge for us in Pharma is to ask ‘what do we actually do to encourage word of mouth communication between Doctors’? It is actually the sharing of great personal or patient experiences, and of course we have success stories in Detail Aids but we cannot rely on case studies written by us because that is all about us telling them. Imagine the power if Doctors could be encouraged to share their successes on a peer to peer basis?
2. The Power of Communities
The lesson here is that naturally occurring communities work best. Brands will do better when they can add value to an existing community rather than companies spending large amounts of money trying to create one. The best place to look for communities is around consumer interests and passions occurring naturally on and off-line, but rarely around brands (with a few exceptions like car and motorbike brands).
Clearly, what pharmaceutical companies can do in social media is significantly restricted at present but the FDA has renewed interest in addressing Internet communications and has acknowledged the special nature of the Internet as a marketing tool and venue. The Agency held a public hearing and solicited written comments from September 2009 to February 2010 and has made the issuance of a policy on social media a priority for 2010. But until FDA issues formal guidelines or new regulations governing Internet communications, you should assume that the FDA will review any social media communications through existing FDA regulations but track warning and untitled letters to avoid the mistakes your peers make when they communicate through social media and pay attention: the FDA’s Internet policy may emerge quickly over the next year or so.
There needs to be a catalyst for discussion; involvement is critical to creating brands worth talking about.
Whether it is Patient Associations or HCP Special Interest Groups – they exist but what do we do to earn their involvement? It’s not about advocating loyalty (yet) but involvement, absolutely.
3. The Power of Involvement
Co-creation: is a great way to involve consumers in something they’re passionate about. Arguably Starbucks is one of the most successful brands in creating an on-line community through involvement. They claim to have 6 million fans and the magic of their involvement is in asking for product suggestions and improvements and then acting on them.
Rate and commentate: For consumers who don’t want to go to the effort of creating something, ‘rating’ comes a close second. Everyone loves to give feedback – rating and commentating systems are an easy way to invite involvement and sponsor sharing.
The Big Idea: Think about the recent Microsoft advertising campaign of “I am a PC and Windows 7 was my idea”.
With these ads, Microsoft is telling users that they’ve listened to customers’ suggestions and used them in the design for Windows 7. As such, Windows 7 is the idea of the people – people like you and me.
Creating an ad campaign that speaks not only to the improvements, but tells us that they are a direct result of people’s feedback, is genius. The “My Idea” ads show regular, everyday people in regular, everyday settings taking credit for Windows 7 features. The guy in his bedroom talks about how he wished his PC could have snapping windows. The dad in his house wants all the computer equipment in his house to work together. These things are now features of Windows 7, and thus, their ideas. The idea is to show that normal people influenced the design of the product, which should make it exactly what people want.
4. The Power of Emotions
It’s never been more important to engage the emotions.
In reality consumers are not sitting around waiting to hear from you; they are being bombarded with around 35,000 messages a day, it’s stressful! With so much information and messaging around, we tend to sift out the messages we want to hear and gravitate to things that make us feel good. So it’s important that messages are re-framed as understanding and recognising us as individuals and potentially gives them something to talk about, with your brand at the centre of the discussion.
5. The Power of Story Telling
However, none of these creative opportunities are possible unless we get the brand story straight. While the connections, channels and ways customers engage with brands have come full-circle; the principles of brand haven’t changed. Brands still need to stand for something, have a purpose, a passion and a point of view.
Brand disciplines are borne from within and need to be aligned to the brand value; otherwise everything else is, at best, creating awareness and at worst a waste of money, time and energy.
Applied to Pharmaceuticals
In this globally driven, regulatory-focused marketplace, more reliance than ever is being placed on the scientific integrity of a brand, leading the industry to ensure they communicate more credibly at every front.
From developing a unique nomenclature and lexicon to position the brand in clinical communications, to establishing visionary campaignability with long-term application, some companies are taking advantage of this shift in grounding professional value propositions by developing innovative ways of approaching branding. What could be more powerful than a Detail Aid and Message Cascade, even the Press Advertisement Campaign being one that is jointly created by HCPs and Patients and us?
A focus on core values is a primary requisite for the opportunity to create uniquely ownable and motivating language and visuals. These branding hallmarks are the most permanent public expressions of the brand’s character or personality – how it looks and feels, as well as its tone of voice. They are important contributors to overall brand equity that are inextricably linked to the brand for its lifetime. While they are certainly a significant component of advertising and promotion, they also live in venues where advertising and promotion do not; such as scientific conferences, on packaging and so on.
Into the future, if we are truly to build and sustain great brands with real value, in my opinion, and in no particular order, we must embrace:
This is a long way from sitting in a room in the HQ building and then exploring YOUR ideas with potentially bored and over-researched customers – are you ready for the future of branding in the 21st Century?
About the author
Chris Marks is Brand Services Principal
Originally published as “Co-creation: the future of marketing” in Pharmafocus, January 2011