The Illuminating Power of Compassion

“He who knows the customer best, wins.”


That’s what one of the best planners in the business, Nat Puccio, once told me when I started in DTC. Now, years later, I feel that knowing the customer is necessary, but is insufficient to win the hearts and minds of healthcare consumers. Instead, I now believe that, “He who has the most compassion for the customer, wins.” 


My view evolved because the most valuable insights I have seen generated came from a client who developed true compassion for the patient. And they are these shifting, tectonic insights that result in creative executions that truly connect and motivate. When patients are moved to tears by the self-awareness they feel from a headline, you know you have made a deep connection. 


So how do you get to the point of having true compassion for your patients? To go beyond the point of knowing, you have to spend real time with them, not just observe them from behind a computer screen or two-way mirror. You have to interact with them continuously over time. You might not have a breathtaking insight with every interaction, but if you keep at it long enough, you will uncover some rich nuggets that change your view about your patients.


It is often the small, seemingly inconsequential interactions that resonate most powerfully:


• The panicked call from a patient at 6:30 am when she reads the hotel invoice slipped under her door and is worried about fronting the expense
• The jaw-dropping respect you feel in the presence of someone who has overcome addiction 
• The anguish of the soft-spoken, dignified patient who “fell off the wagon” due to grief at the death of his two beloved chihuahuas  


Deep insights have the power to change a negative sales trajectory, even in the most mundane categories. P&G’s legendary sales turnaround in 2006 was driven in part by a consumer immersion program that resulted in more tailored products and better communication campaigns. This program included sending marketers to the rural village in the Shaanxi province of China to do laundry, and to small shops in low-income areas of Mexico to see how customers shopped. 


According to interviews with P&G’s CMO at the time, Jim Stengel, the benefits to marketers are multiple. First, interacting with customers gives marketers a larger perspective, “one in which Pampers is not about diapers, it's about helping a mother with her baby's development.” And secondly, it changes their attitudes about their jobs. People come back from fieldwork “more pumped up” because they “understand the product has a role in someone’s life.” 


They are these changes in perspective and attitude that I think make the critical difference. When you develop a more compassionate attitude towards patients, you begin to have more of a sense of urgency to solve their problems. You give it an extra oomph by fighting for a more generous support program or spending an afternoon running around the company to get a product shipped to a patient. It’s part of a larger concept that I call compassion marketing.  


So in thinking about your research needs for 2013, consider adding some potential compassion builders—opportunities to interact directly with patients—into your plan. These interactions can happen in multiple ways:


• Research companies that organize weekends where marketers closely interact with patients 
• Invite a patient to your office for a set of meetings 
• Work one-on-one with a patient to develop materials 
• Use patient ambassadors and field “ride-alongs” to hear patient stories 


If you listen long and hard enough, a patient will say something that will change your view about your product, your therapeutic area, or about healthcare in general. And this tiny, brightly burning insight could change you and your business in unexpected, positive ways. 

Thanks for letting us share.

Dorothy

Next Wednesday’s post introduces Customer Service - how pharma can learn from IBM

To read previous 2013 Planning Thought Starters posts about:

Marketing Drivers Are Changing, How About Your Metircs, click here.

Marketing Insights of the Grateful Dead, click here.

Planning the Extended Total Office Call, click here.

Reimagining the Website, click here.

Marketing Drivers Are Changing, How About Your Metrics?

Good planning focuses resources on the key elements that drive product choice. If sales are dependent on patient requests, then we like to say Brand X is a patient-driven brand.

We can measure patient requests for a brand.

Then we drill down a little deeper and consider: What is getting in the way of patient requests? Is it:

• awareness of the condition?
• awareness of a potential solution? 

We can measure awareness issues.

But because we don’t know how to measure the effect of the family and friends phenomenon, often called word of mouth marketing (WOMM), we tend to ignore it. WOMM is, however, quickly becoming an important source of information for patients who will ask their doctor for a drug by name.

Patients are increasingly:

• looking for,
• relying on, and
• trusting

commentary about medicines that they get from their friends and family. So how a patient feels about—and what they say about—your brand and company can be a real sales driver.

Consider these three facts:

• 68% of all adults ask a friend or family member when they need information about dealing with health or medical issues
• 34% of Internet users—or 25% of adults—have read someone else's commentary or experience about health or medical issues on an online news group, website, or blog
• 18% of Internet users say they have gone online to find others who might have similar health concerns. For adults living with a chronic condition such as high blood pressure, that figure rises to 23% 

But don’t worry, we can measure that too.

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the sentiment people have about a brand in one, single number that correlates to sales and profit growth. Marketing masters General Electric and American Express use NPS to help measure the quality of their relationships with their customers. NPS relies on one question:

“Would you recommend this brand to a friend/family?”

For a more complete overview, the 2008 Harvard Business Review article, How the Net Promoter Score (NPS) Can Drive Growth by Fred Reichheld does a great job.

The economic benefit of a high NPS score is derived from what Reichheld calls the Loyalty Effect. Basically, patient brand-promoters are more likely to:

• use more of the product for a longer period of time
• cost less per person to serve
• say positive things about your brand

An NPS might have been helpful to Sanofi-Aventis in determining the effect on sales of the highly publicized Taxotere issue, where a woman flooded the media about the product’s side effects. If Sanofi-Aventis had understood the impact of the woman’s complaints, their marketing department may have considered investing in monitoring and responding to patient comments online.

Conversely, if we understood how one positive interaction with a nurse educator impacted NPS, we might invest more in nurse educators and less in direct-to-consumer advertising. It’s about matching investments to business drivers.

If NPS has captured your imagination, consider putting one of the courses offered by Satmetrix  on your 2013 agenda. You should know that using NPS correctly is a significant undertaking. Instead, you may want to start smaller by adding the NPS question to an ongoing tracker, or conducting a quick online study.

With customer commentary and relationships controlling business more than ever before, doesn’t it make sense to start measuring the impact that customer word-of-mouth communication has on your business? Maybe even plan for a few customer-care initiatives in 2013 (see our next Thought Starters post)?

Thanks for letting us share.

Dorothy

Next Wednesday’s post introduces Compassion Marketing^TM—how a deeper understanding of your target can lead to significant benefits.

To read previous 2013 Planning Thought Starters posts about:

Marketing Insights of the Grateful Dead, click here.

Planning the Extended Total Office Call, click here.

Reimagining the Website, click here.