5 pharma marketing mistakes and how to fix them
Dr. Andree Bates outlines key strategies for making rational marketing decisions
By on Jul 5, 2011
I can’t hold my silence any longer. Too often in meetings I hear a few things uttered from pharmaceutical marketers demonstrating irrational leaps in logic. Let’s take a look at my top few and see if you yourself have ever used these to justify your sales and marketing spends…
1. My gut instinct is…
Now, for ‘gut instinct’ to be accurate, it depends on who has it and how much experience they have and what their track record of success with that gut instinct is.
If you are using gut instinct to make marketing decisions, you must be very wary and should always seek to confirm your gut instinct with fact-based measurement.
I was totally against gut instinct in any situation for a very long time, but I did find that I had to step back after one incident and be ever so slightly open to it, which has led me to the ‘it depends on who has it’ proviso.
I was working on ROI with all directors and marketers at Pfizer in one country. There was one table of directors and numerous tables of groups of marketers.
We were doing ROI analysis of various marketing activities and, to illustrate why you should not rely on ‘gut instinct’, I gave everyone certain scenarios of numbers for specific marketing activities and they had to look at these and decide which ones would provide the strongest ROI based on gut instinct—before we actually ran the numbers to see the reality.
Every table of marketers was unsuccessful on the ‘gut instinct’ area but one table consistently had their gut instinct match up with the reality once the real calculations were done … and that table was the director’s table.
So, it can work but you really need to have the experience to be able to make it work and the majority of marketers who rely on it are leading themselves into troublesome waters.
Be careful if this is the mainstay of what you rely on.
Just remember that every product that is not growing could have the full support of someone's gut that was ‘never wrong’.
2. Doctors say...
Doctors may say something is influencing their decision to prescribe but keep in mind that what people say, and what people do, are very different.
Every pharmaceutical product that is not growing has a wealth of market research behind the decisions that have been made to support it growing.
Something somewhere is not working. Humans like to rationalize why they do what they do, and doctors are no different.
Intent to prescribe research, in particular, is a very poor predictor of what will actually happen.
When the AMA did a study linking what doctors said they would do with what they actually did, they found that when the doctors believed their individual prescribing would be checked up on, they still only had around 75% toward doing what they said they would, whereas the ones that did not know they would be checked on had less than 10%.
You really need to be wary of believing what doctors (and consumers) say when researched.
If you ask people what they do, or why they do it, or what they think, I suspect you will learn much about their self-concept but little about their behavior unless validated against what they actually do.
Our own research has shown again and again that what doctors say is important in their prescribing of a particular therapy/disease area is NOT what actually drives their prescribing.
For example, in one specialty area, doctors said their top three drivers of prescribing were large body of clinical evidence to support the brand, impressive write ups in journals, and good patient compliance.
In fact, the data showed that the real drivers were that the brand should be highly effective in maintaining remission, safe in the long term, and safe in the short term.
We have examples in virtually every therapy area known to man where what doctors say is important and what actually drives prescribing are completely different!
Another cautionary tale comes from the sleep disorder drug Rozerem in the US.
There was a lot of consumer research around the ‘Abraham Lincoln and the beaver’ ad campaign series that showed that it would absolutely convince consumers that the drug would send them to sleep.
Much money was spent on that ad campaign (that won a lot of awards for the agency) and yet sales did not rise as expected, highlighting the fact that research may show something but you need to validate that research!
3. It won lots of awards...
Speaking of Rozerem, this is not an unusual hypothesis: ‘The advertising won loads of awards, so it must be good.’
This has been a problem for numerous brands and reminds me of another incident where this logic was an issue.
It was a very cool car advertisement wherein a camera was attached near the tire so the view of everywhere the car went was from that angle—a very fun and interesting ride around a city.
Everyone was talking about the ad, everyone loved it, it won loads of awards, but who could remember the car or even the car manufacturer? No one.
During that year, the overall sales for cars increased, however that specific manufacturer actually decreased their sales, bucking the industry trend for that time period.
Clearly, the ad may have won awards and may have been cool but it didn’t grow the sales as expected and a lot of money was wasted on it.
One other thing to keep in mind with awards: Who is awarding them?
Advertising advertising agencies or their clients award awards for ‘Best Copy’, ‘Most Original’, etc, not by whether they actually did what they were meant to do; i.e., grow sales or even drive brand awareness.
One of my favorite marketers is Sergio Zyman, who used to be the global director of marketing for Coca Cola.
He did an amazing ad that everyone was talking about and it won awards and he pulled it after a very short time.
There was uproar and when asked why he said, “Because our sales are static since it aired and we spent $5 million on this ad and we could spend another $5 million a week but why if the sales are not growing from it?” Love that man!
Spare yourself the trouble that using this logic can cause and just admit that the number of awards your work is getting is great for your ego—but has nothing to do with your actual results.
By all means, though, consider using validated analytics that can actually demonstrate the relative impact of your ad spend is having on your customers prescribing versus your other tactics!
4. Awareness is up...
Awareness is not sales. What if everyone knows about your advertisement but no one is prescribing your product? Is that something to congratulate yourself about? I don’t think so.
It means you probably did a memorable but ineffective ad or other program.
This is not success so I would not go boasting about it until you have something a little more concrete
Did the awareness translate into actual increase in sales and profit?
If it translated into sales—great—but if you spent more on the ad/program than you received in additional sales, not so great.
The key is to make sure you can demonstrate the impact that each of your programs and channels is having on actual prescribing.
5. Sales are up...
Okay, this is better than ‘awareness is up’ but why are sales up? Can you definitely link it with a specific activity?
Just because they went up when you ran a specific activity doesn’t tie the two together exactly.
It is tempting to make this leap of logic but you could be wrong.
A great example of this was Harley Davidson in the early 1980s when sales suddenly increased when the company changed its advertising campaign.
They all congratulated themselves on the great advertising and the impact of it.
However, interestingly, at the same time the tariff on imported motorcycles increased from 4.4% to 49.4%.
Is there a possibility that this may have had any part to play in the home country advantage for Harley?
If sales increased when you ran a particular activity, great, but be very careful in making the assumption of cause and effect without proper measurement.
Make sure that you are able to disentangle the results of ALL aspects of your sales and marketing mix (messaging, different channels, individual marketing programs, sales force activities, pricing, etc) have on prescribing before cracking open the champagne!
Take a second look
All people, even marketers, are subject to irrationality. It's not a question of how smart you are, but of having evolved in an environment where impulsive actions kept us alive.
Hunter-gatherers who paused to ponder whether a nearby roar signaled a hungry lioness or a mischievous parrot didn’t last as long as those who simply ran.
Indeed, magnetic resonance brain imaging indicates that we are wired to believe the first possibility that enters our heads.
Taking a rational, second look isn't instinctive. It's something we must train ourselves to do.
Much of today’s marketing works, but a good deal more has little or no effect, and some actually drives sales down.
That much shouldn’t surprise anyone who understands bell-curve distribution.
What is surprising is how few marketers have a clue as to where in the curve their marketing falls.
This is not to imply that most marketers willfully deceive. Many have simply and unwittingly embraced time-honored marketing myths—usually based on leaps that someone made long ago without checking for parrots.
Either that or they just don’t know where to start looking for accurate information that tells them how to avoid the need for these gut-feel responses and link programs and actions to actual prescribing in a truly rational way.
Good news, marketers. You needn’t be subject to irrational leaps.
Here are four tips for making rational marketing decisions.
Perform a valid analysis
The trick is to stop asking people to tell you their behavior (ALERT: ‘Intent to Prescribe’ Research Alarm) and discretely watch and measureit instead.
Human beings like to believe we are rational and not influenced by advertising, sales reps, or whatever.
How do you think a doctor will respond if you ask him or her if they use clinical evidence or advertising to make clinical decisions? It is a no brainer.
But it doesn’t just apply to doctors. What about marketers? Even we as marketers like to think we are making our decisions on rational unemotional bases, each of the points mentioned above illustrate a way to make something illogical appear rational.
There are lots of ways to accurately analyze cause and effect; just make sure your method is one of them and that it has been properly validated!
Eradicate emotion from your decisions as much as possible
Do not be emotionally wed to your ideas to the exclusion of logic and data results.
I can think of so many examples of this. One is from me 15 years ago.
I was working in the pharmaceutical industry in Japan and we had an advertisement for a drug proposed by the agency.
It was a flower arrangement in the form of a woman. I really hated it. I wanted it stopped but then I stopped. I am not a Japanese doctor.
The agency assured us it was the right approach. I put my emotions on hold and went with the advice.
The ad was a huge success and sales went up based on all tests including regional tests with control groups and study groups.
My emotion was wrong and I had to let it go for the real results we needed.
Another is more recent. A pharmaceutical marketer I know told me that their product was only competing with other drugs in the sub class, but not the broader Rx category.
The data did not agree but they insisted on looking at it that way and ignoring the data and could not understand why their efforts were not producing stronger results.
Data does not lie. It may be confusing but you need to act like a detective with the data and dig deeper until you understand why it says what it says and what you should do about it.
Sober up. Your objective is to sell drugs, not to bolster your ego.
As you design a valid analysis, decide in advance to accept the results, even if they fail to support your pet theories.
Don’t jump to conclusions too quickly
Ensure that you collect evidence. Remain skeptical about what the evidence says—as opposed to what you want it to say – and then weigh up all the options before deciding on your course of action.
If you aim to catch yourself when you make wild leaps of logic, and instead approach marketing from a rational viewpoint, you will find yourself creating and refining marketing that is demonstrably andmeasurably successful in terms of increasing sales and profits.
In doing this, you will magically find that the next time a CFO turns their eye on your budget, you won’t have to defend your with things like ‘the advertising did well in focus groups’ or ‘I feel in my gut that it works’.
Your results will speak for you and your budget will remain intact!
For more on improving marketing techniques, join the sector’s other key players at the 2nd Annual eMarketing Canada on November 8-9 in Toronto and the 11th annual Marketing Europe in November.
For more on improving sales techniques, see ‘Dr. Bates’ Talkback: How to get more value from existing products’.
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