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.

Marketing the Holocaust

As a crew of self-professed healthcare marketing junkies, we know we have a triple challenge to:

• engage
• educate
• encourage people to take action 

Like the rest of the extroverts at our agency, I don’t back down from a challenge. But when I took on marketing to 3^rd generation Holocaust survivors in Boston, I thought I might have met my match.

You see, in 2009, my wife, friends, and I started a support group in Boston for Holocaust survivors’ grandchildren (3^rd Generation) called Boston 3G. Marketing was my task.

Tough subject to market.

I was striking out until I considered the success of flash mobs at attracting attention. Could that work for us?

On May 29^th, at 1:20 pm (to honor the 1.2 million children who died in the Holocaust), our group of 115 people froze on cue, right in the middle of Boston’s Fanueil Hall.

For six minutes—to honor the six million who perished—we held our poses, taking time to:

• remember 
• honor the memory of family members
• be thankful that we live in a country where we are free to practice our religion as we choose
• reflect on our own lives  

Was it a success?

One way to measure? Listen to the typical conversations among tourist families, like this one:

“Mommy, what are they doing?” asked an elementary-school kid in his newly purchased Cheers t-shirt, the tag still flopping out of his back collar.

“It looks like they are remembering the Holocaust,” she answered, after reading one of our green t-shirts.

“Mommy, what's the Holocaust?”

That sure sounded like success to us.

Marketing the Holocaust presented a tricky, triple set of challenges, to:

• engage
• educate
• encourage people to take action

Sound familiar?

Striving for success is what we do as extroverts. It is our indefatigable desire to make a difference, with just the right balance of:

• information
• imagery
• imagination

All to leave an impression on the people that get touched by our work.

Thanks for letting us share.

Matt

Planning the Extended Total Office Call

A few years ago, the idea of the Total Office Call was in vogue in pharma marketing. A comment I heard at a recent conference, however, gave me an idea about how to morph this concept into a new way of thinking about an age-old issue—the doctor/patient relationship.

Firstly, let’s briefly revisit the idea of the Total Office Call.

The goal of the Total Office Call is to build a deeper relationship during the office visit by providing services and support to the complete healthcare provider staff, including:

• the physician
• nurses
• billing department

The point is to help all of them better deliver healthcare. Planning strategies and tactics typically include:

• providing information for nurses on how to manage specific patient types
• formulary status, insurance coverage, and patient support options

A comment by Dr. Frank Spinelli at the Pharma Summit Conference in May got me thinking about amplifying this concept into the Extended Total Office Call. Dr. Spinelli challenged the audience of pharmaceutical marketers to extend the doctor/patient interaction prior to and following the actual office visit by helping merge the online and off-line experiences.

The need for extending the doctor/patient connection—before and after the office visit—has never been more acute. Three reasons drive this demand:

1. The Affordable Care Act is coming into play in 2014.
2. Physician payments are going to be increasingly linked to the quality of care they provide.
3. Healthcare providers will be compensated based on the outcomes they achieve.

The pharmaceutical companies that help healthcare providers meet these new challenges will be more welcomed in doctors’ offices.

How can you plan for the Extended Total Office Call in 2013?

Well, start by using the Extended Total Office Call as an organizing principle, both in how you go about planning and in the tactics you consider. First, think about having your teams start off as one integrated unit with the mission to:

• help prepare both the physician and patient to have a productive office visit
• enable the patient to easily obtain any required medicine
• support and monitor the patient afterwards

Traditionally, the three customer teams (and possibly a separate digital team) start the planning cycle by going off separately to optimize their promotional mix, based on their particular customer needs. Then, towards the end of the planning cycle, they meet to check for synergies and disconnects. This results in siloed thinking, which is the antithesis of the Extended Total Office Call.

Next, think about some new tactics. One execution of an Extended Total Office Call tactic could be an app that collects important data about critical patient habits or one that helps the patient develop new, more productive habits. The solid data provided by an easy-to-use tracker app could potentially eliminate a lot of wasted time and patient frustration. An app, of course, is an obvious solution.

To dig a little deeper, I’d suggest gathering an integrated group to consider the following questions at the beginning of the planning season:

• What are the critical activities and information exchanges that must take place during the office visit? 
• What can the physician uniquely contribute to the visit? Is it knowledge? Providing a sense of caring or peace of mind? Providing a solution?
• Would any activities or information exchanges before the appointment help improve the quality or efficiency of the experience?
• What are the barriers for different patient types to actually paying for and obtaining the prescribed medicine?
• What follow-up or activities would help ensure the physician treatment plan is monitored and adhered to?
• Are there any other healthcare stakeholders—such as nurses, pharma reps, support groups, or associations—who could play a role before, during, or after the office visit?
• Is there a different sort of in-the-field support people that could be provided? For example, clinical nurse educators or lay health workers?

It is hard to meet the continual planning challenges of thinking-outside-of-the-box and doing-more-with-less, when we try to answer the same questions year after year. Considering the Extended Total Office Call provides a new set of questions.

Give it a try and let us know how it works for you.

Thanks for letting us share.

Dorothy

Next Wednesday’s post is about business lessons we can learn from the Dead—the Grateful Dead, that is.

To read about the 2013 Planning Thought Starters for Reimagining the Website, click here. 

Introducing Help with 2013 Planning

While summer is the vacation season for most people, for healthcare marketers around the world it means the start of planning season.

So while friends and family may be:

                         • carrying a paperback beach novel, you’re lugging PowerPoint

                           presentations in your overflowing beach bag

                         • heading to pool parties, you're diving into decks of data and

                           financial forecasts

                         • thinking about where to splurge on a summer weekend escape, you're

                           wondering about new creative ways to do more with less

Extrovertic can lighten your load.

This summer, we’re devoting these Wednesday posts to sharing crisp, juicy ways to give you food for thought about your business. We’ll be serving up different perspectives gathered from our Extro-Analog process, which is where we:

                         • explore non-pharma solutions and strategically apply them to the realities

                           of pharma marketing

                         • strip down the problem to its bare essentials

                         • search outside of healthcare for companies or brands that've faced similar

                           challenges

And we never know where inspiration can strike.

For example, we came up with a new way for a client to help patients by studying addiction counseling. We even developed an idea for a new video series based on the Heidi Klum Summer Run. We’ve found that the further out you go, the better the ideas.

So this summer we’ll offer up refreshing pitchers of ideas that’re focused on:

                         • strategies

                         • tactics

                         • measurements

These will include short- and long-term thought starters for your consideration.

Sometimes there are ideas that can be directly applied, while other times these out-of-industry examples provide the root of a new idea that can be harvested or further cultivated. We’ll also point out particularly interesting examples from around our industry.

So, starting tomorrow (June 20^th), check out our Intro to Extro blog. Then, every Wednesday for the next 14 weeks, you’ll see some bright, sunny ways to approach your 2013 marketing plan. We hope you find them useful and thought provoking. Either way, we’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for letting us share.

Dorothy

Tomorrow’s blog can help you answer the question, “What are we doing with our website next year?”

Be the Patient

Every time I’ve started a patient-centric initiative, I’ve given the direction to my teams: Be the patient. I’ve found this helps provide my creatives with a deeper understanding of what an average patient is going through. Recently, I took my own advice a bit too literally—I broke my left humerus bone and spent a day in an ER, followed by a day spent with a highly regarded orthopedist. Having never broken a major bone before, the experience was both very painful and very instructive.

Upon arrival at the hospital, I sensed an information disconnect—I kept asking questions but only got selective information in return. It seemed the hospital staff wanted me to feel comforted by giving me some answers while flat out ignoring others. They weren’t really listening to what I was asking for. This experience got me thinking about how we listen (or don’t listen) to patients in focus groups.

I’ve spent as much time as anyone in dark focus-group rooms, chain-chomping M&M’s^® and taking notes on patient stories. But my accident made me wonder if my previous objectives had been to hear what I wanted to hear rather than to try to understand what patients were truly saying. Since patients are usually quite expressive in focus groups, if we really listen when they speak about how they are feeling, we can end up with keener, truer insights that might change the type of strategies and concepts we come up with in the future. It could also affect the patient’s long-term health.

For instance, at extrovertic we were recently able to discover a valuable truth about a patient group. This truth completely changed how we viewed the group and our approach, which ultimately resulted in very successful pre-launch and launch campaigns. We came to this truth by listening differently, not just to what the patients were saying about their condition, but to other significant experiences they’d been through in their lives. We established a greater understanding of our target demographic through this process.

To that end, listening beyond what patients are saying to truly get at what they are expressing or feeling can continue to help us find patient truths. With those truths, we can offer patients what they really need and not what we think they need. As a patient, I know I certainly would have appreciated being more closely listened to.

Are you really listening to what people are trying to tell you?

-Tom