Tag Archives: pharmaceutical marketing

Posted on by Mar 10 2013

Spotlight on rare diseases: Part 3

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Part 3: Creative Thinking in an Orphan-drug World

How do we best communicate about orphan drugs?

Thus far, we have explored the challenges facing rare diseases and the orphan drugs designed to treat them. Now, we come to the really big questions—who must our communications reach, what do we say, and how do we say it?

There is no textbook or primer to help us answer these questions. We have to employ a combination of common sense, logic, insight, and creativity, to name just a few of the essentials. As marketers, you may already have launched an orphan drug, or you may be in the process of bringing an orphan drug into the marketplace. No doubt, you have experiences from which we can all learn.

Rare Disease Day reminded us that there is always an opportunity to do more. It got us thinking, “What do you wish you could do in the rare disease space? What do you wish you could do differently—or could have done differently—in your personal orphan drug experience?”

At Kane & Finkel, we have worked on numerous orphan drugs in various marketing stages. Here is a bit of what we have learned over the years.

  • We start by recognizing that a careful balance of science, economics, and humanitarianism is needed:
    • We need a plausible science story for the KOLs and clinicians
    • We need to make a real emotional connection with patients and their caregivers
    • We need to address the economics of orphan drugs such that payers and national health services will support a price that is fair for both manufacturers and the concerned public
  • Assessing the true value of an orphan drug—and how that value is expressed to the market—goes beyond economics:
    • We look beyond a QALY or an ICER
    • We consider how patients are impacted
    • We evaluate other metrics of value such as prolongation of stable disease, longer time to additional treatment required, ability to partake in more activities of daily life, and the emotional satisfaction of knowing that patients are not being passed over by the healthcare system
    • Value also includes the quality of a response, and not just the number of responses in a given patient population
  • We exhaust a multitude of possibilities to uncover the right audience for the right targeted messages:
    • Patients, caregivers, and advocacy groups rise to the top of the pyramid in terms of who needs to know about a new treatment
    • Building personal relationships with physicians and other healthcare providers who treat patients with rare diseases is a real possibility because the disease prevalence is so low
  • Expanding beyond traditional communications vehicles is a must in the rare disease space—leveraging new media and new channels allows for more efficient and highly targeted messaging opportunities

Orphan drugs can make an enormous difference in the lives of the millions of people who suffer from rare diseases. Kane & Finkel aims to make an important difference to the success of orphan drugs.

What has your experience been with orphan drugs? What expertise do you feel is essential to the success of an orphan drug? Please share your thoughts or give us a call and let’s talk about it.

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Posted on by Oct 22 2012

Pinterest: Is the latest craze right for pharma?

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We’ve all heard the statistics, but here’s a refresher:

  • According to a Shareaholic study, Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube combined
  • On October 18, 2012, Pinterest had nearly 5 million daily active users and nearly 20 million monthly active users (AppData)

 

Dive a bit deeper into RJMetrics analyses and you’ll see that not only is the number of users increasing, so too is their engagement.

Pinners become more engaged over time.

There’s no denying that Pinterest is one of the hottest social media platforms around, and it doesn’t appear to be going away any time soon. So, is it worth pharma’s attention?

Retailers such as WholeFoods (the clear winner) and Target have amassed tens of thousands of followers based on an understanding that the secret to Pinterest is not marketing to the audience, but rather, inspiring them.

And inspiration is something that pharma serves up daily—along with hope, passion, commitment, and innovation. So yes, Pinterest is tailor-made for pharma.

The Brave Early Adopters

Some pharma companies have taken the first brave step and begun to develop their Pinterest presence—of note, Genentech and AstraZeneca. Both companies are leveraging Pinterest as a corporate platform (AZ is focused on recruitment), highlighting company philosophy, culture, and personalities, as well as their focus on serving the healthcare needs of people around the world.

Using Pinterest as another means to broadcast your company vision expands not only your message reach, but also its engagement potential. And if done right, corporate messaging can tap into a specific interest category—perhaps a disease area—increasing the likelihood that your effort will shatter expected engagement levels and referral traffic to associated company (and product) web properties.

Here are some quick tips and best practices to keep in mind when setting up a Pinterest presence:

  1.  Find your following: Determine what you want to communicate and stick to it. Do you want to use the page for recruitment? Or to convey corporate vision? Or to promote a specific program or initiative? Once you have determined how you want to use the page, secure the vanity URL that makes the most sense and start creating boards that support your goal. For instance, if you choose the broader direction of communicating corporate vision, focus on causes the Pinterest audience can get behind. If yours is a company that specializes in multiple disease areas, consider creating dedicated boards focused on education and disease awareness for each disease category, then populate each board with appropriate promotions (imagery, videos, patient stories/artwork, etc.).
  2. Don’t forget to “repin” and follow: According to RJ Metrics, 80% of Pinterest activity is repinning. This involves searching and finding content related to your page that you pin from another user onto one of your boards. For instance, say you have a board titled The Fight Against Cancer, you might want to repin the quotes and imagery that abound on Pinterest regarding people’s personal journeys with cancer. Through repinning, other users become aware of your page and may choose to follow your activity. In addition, you should find other like-minded companies, associations/societies (e.g., The American Cancer Society), and people to follow as you build your audience.
  3. Be diligent: Understand what you are getting into. Take some time to learn about Pinterest and the legalities of pinning content (always link back to the original source and give credit where credit is due). In addition, as with any social media effort, someone needs to be in charge of keeping the content up-to-date and moderating comments. Unlike Facebook, on Pinterest, comments made by users to your pins can be deleted. To keep engagement up, it is better to respond to a comment than to delete it, but if you must delete, you can. See how Novo Nordisk handles comments to their Pinterest page.

The key to any multichannel strategy is to leverage channels that facilitate delivery of the right message, to the right audience, at the right time. Oftentimes, this means choosing a variety of media and allowing your customers to select the channel that they want to interact with (remember we’re in this to serve the needs of our audience). Clearly, Pinterest is a channel that more and more people are including on their daily online stops. Shouldn’t pharma be part of it?

What is your take on Pinterest? What do you see as its utility for healthcare marketing? Do you have any success stories to share?

If you haven’t already done so, check out our Pinterest page and the content we find “Pinteresting.”

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Posted on by Sep 27 2012

Closed-loop marketing: pharma can learn much from the supermarket

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Individualizing communications by engaging customer insights

Closed-loop marketing—or CLM, for short—is a system of developing and revising communications based on direct and indirect consumer feedback. It’s also a set of technological tools (databases, smartphone and tablet apps, websites) that enable rapid collection and analysis of data, and rapid revision and dissemination of communications. In short, it’s on-demand communications customized for the customer.

Let’s start with a brief analogy: Think about the experience of shopping at the market, and how it’s changed.

  • Your grandparents bought their produce from a local greengrocer, who knew their names, what they liked, when major events in their lives might suggest certain needs or desires for purchases. But the greengrocer’s stock levels were low, inconsistent, and sourced mostly locally. Plus, he only had resources to service a small local neighborhood. (And he had a natural monopoly, so his prices and selection weren’t subject to competition.) “Promotion” was nonexistent, or done entirely through word of mouth and social channels.
  • Your parents shopped for food at a supermarket. They had access to an increasingly broad supply of products, at cheaper cost. But they had no personal connection to the product offerings. The supermarket’s value proposition was variety plus low cost. Other than keeping a keen eye on stock levels, store managers had little understanding of what your parents, specifically, thought or wanted. Promotion consisted of adverts and weekly inserts and coupons—with little to no direct feedback from consumers.
  • Today, you might shop at the same supermarket where your parents did—but your relationship with the supermarket will be different. Now, thanks to loyalty cards and smartphone apps (and website tools), the supermarket knows more about you than the greengrocer did about your grandparents—and the supermarket can tailor its truly global offerings and its promotions to your particular tastes. The supermarket doesn’t bother you with promotions that you don’t care about. Vons, Tesco or whatever your preferred market may be, knows that you’re a vegetarian with two cats (for example)—so they don’t bother you with offers for ground beef or kibble.

The supermarket uses CLM to achieve this—database-driven tools to customize offerings and communications to target demographics, with the ability to shift and realign messages in response to demonstrated customer behaviors and preferences. This same transformation is taking place in pharma.

How can pharma learn from the supermarket?

Adoption of CLM in pharma means that pharma reps and marketers can finally work in tandem with standard database marketing techniques that have been in place for years. It’s the convergence of the best of the old (from the example above, our greengrocer’s customer knowledge and personability) and the new (our supermarket’s global reach and efficiency).

Through several vendors (Veeva, Skura, Agnitio, among others)—database marketing is now available at the sales rep level. Usually armed with an iPad or other tablet, a sales rep can pull up a screen in advance of a discussion with a physician, select that physician’s profile, and automatically customize a presentation to that physician’s needs and interests.

The iPad will show the previous calls with that physician, areas of interest (based on selections from previous details), suggested conversation topics, and suggested interactive engagements.

CLM can also incorporate “self-driven” channels—for example, when a physician or pharmacist visits a product website, or logs in to a dedicated information-sharing portal. This information feeds into the professional’s profile and preferences, adding greater richness to the rep/physician dialogue.

To some degree, CLM isn’t really a new principle in pharma marketing so much as it is an acceleration and optimization of established best practices through technology. With CLM, the basic principles of effective marketing are alive and not just well, but thriving—now we not only identify and communicate a clear value proposition for a product based on the specific unmet needs in the market—we can do it based on the specific unmet needs of Dr. Jones.

Take a moment and share with us your CLM experiences—successes, failures and best practices.

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Posted on by May 21 2012

Tweeting in healthcare marketing? It can be done!

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Leveraging Twitter as part of a larger social media plan is a no-brainer for most mainstream brands. But mention healthcare marketing and people run screaming.

Before you head for the hills, take a moment to consider its utility. Think of Twitter as a bullhorn waiting to be turned on, with investors, potential partners, physicians, and even patients eager to hear what you have to say.

To be sure, this industry faces greater scrutiny and more regulation than others, and it can be a bit daunting to navigate these uncharted waters when the FDA offers so little guidance. But if you choose to take that first brave step and make social media part of your marketing mix, make sure you have clear alignment across marketing, legal, and regulatory teams with regard to guidelines on what is and isn’t appropriate content for the company and/or its brands. Next, take a magnifying glass to your communications goals and see how they align with your social media goals—then map out how Twitter can help you meet both.

Once you’ve determined that Tweeting is the means to the end, you must follow the golden rule of social media: create content worth sharing. Interesting Tweets get read and spread, and engaging Tweeters earn responses and followers, while posts that offer little value or inspiration to connect or share get ignored. To ensure that your Tweets work for you, ask yourself these three questions each time you Tweet:

  1. Why am I posting this? Is it because I have something to say that primarily benefits my business, or is it because I know something my followers would find interesting, useful, or relevant? Consider your Tweet from the your readers’ perspective. If you can’t immediately pick out how they will benefit from the information you’re sharing, think twice about posting, or figure out a way to rework your Tweet so it becomes a welcome, engaging addition to their newsfeeds.
  2. What do I want my readers to do after reading my post? There are many legitimate answers to this, including absorb useful information, visit a link, provide feedback, retweet (RT) a post, offer a counterpoint—in short, ENGAGE. Be sure there is a clear call-to-action to let the reader know what to do. It can be as simple as directing someone to “Check out this link” or asking “What do you think?”
  3. What other conversations or trends can this Tweet connect with? Before composing your Tweets, do a quick Twitter search for a key term related to your topic. If there are any other relevant conversations already happening, feel free to connect with them:
  • RT posts that have a similar or contrasting viewpoint
  • Start a conversation with someone who appears to be an expert
  • Answer a question that relates to your expertise
  • Search for relevant hashtags (a way to mark keywords so they will more obviously appear in searches); then use them in your Tweets. For instance, we actively search out Tweets that include #hcsm (healthcare social marketing), #ehealth, #hcmktg (healthcare marketing), #meded (medical education), among others. There are many hashtags in use, so find (or create) ones relevant to you and your followers.

To wrap this up, Twitter is tailor-made not just for sharing, but also for discovery. So why not let pharma and other healthcare companies play? If you are new to Tweeting from a company or brand perspective, do some listening first. Follow brands that interest you, see how they engage, and take notes. When your objectives are clear and you have aligned your messaging with what’s approvable, apply all that you know about your audience and take that first step. When you do, you will be rewarded with the opportunity to connect on a deeper level with an audience that is ready and waiting to hear what you have to say.

For more tips and thought starters, View our presentation on SlideShare: Twitter 101 and Best Practices

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