Marketing

We need to put our marketers in white coats!

We need to put our marketers in white coats! Not to carry them off to the asylum, but to energize them around their role as partners in the relay race that brings end-to-end scientific delivery of products to the market so they can reach their full therapeutic and marketing potential. Surely thats the least they deserve!
Our R&D colleagues demonstrate the clinical efficacy of our drugs under controlled, experimental conditions. Its our job as marketers to demonstrate the efficacy of the drug in a diverse and complex environment our patients busy lives.

I have great respect for brand managers and their agency partners and I feel their plight. They are given a hefty mandate: Change behavior, return a grand ROI, and do it quickly. Its a huge demand in a space where the tools to achieve the desired change are sparse. We wouldnt ask a builder to build our ideal home (or garden shed for that matter) without an architectural plan. Likewise, we shouldnt expect brand managers and agency partners to build behavior modification programs without the architectural blueprint that comes from the psychological underpinnings of the behavior.

There are a number of reasons our adherence efforts to date have not returned a substantial contribution to the bottom line or in improvement of worldwide health.

The Problem: In my opinion as a Cognitive Psychologist and an industry expert in adherence, any behavior modification program must start with a theoretical interpretation of the behavior being changed or designed. To think that an adherence program will change behavior when there are no proven constructs of behavior embedded in the program is like expecting water to freeze just because you put it in the ice tray. If the temperature isnt below freezing it doesnt matter how many trays you fill or how well you fill them, its not going to produce the result you want the mechanism simply is not in place.

The Solution: There are an abundance of sound theoretical approaches to mal-adaptive health behavior. Just a quick search on Google Scholar returns over 175,000! To illustrate, here are three . . .
Ciechanowski (2001) The Patient-Provider Relationship: Attachment Theory and Adherence to Treatment in Diabetes. American Journal of Psychiatry.
Courneya (1995) The social influence-exercise adherence relationship: A test of the theory of planned behavior. Journal of Behavioral Medicine.
Courneya et al (2002) Correlates of Adherence and Contamination in a Randomized Controlled Trial of Exercise in Cancer. An Application of the Theory of Planned Behavior. Annals of Behavioral Medicine.
. . . and as I mentioned, 175,000 more are referenced on Google! So stop reinventing the wheel and start reinventing your role.

Would we expect our R&D colleagues to ignore the mass of past scientific discovery in their drug development? By the same token, we should pay regard to the wealth of information that exists on consumer behavior, motivation and cognition if we are at all serious about creating a behavior change. In other words, we are just as dependent upon a scientific solution to manage behavior change as our drug development colleagues are in developing new molecular entities.

Case Example: The approach taken at Mind Field Solutions Corp is to field test selected theoretical hypotheses in the therapeutic category of interest (with cross validation for other portfolio categories as required). Theories that test well are then used to develop an architectural blueprint or Cognitive Architecture of the multi-dimensional relationships between the theoretical cognitive constructs and the dependent behavior being predicted, such as non-adherence. The value in having a solution that is based in cognitive theory is that the essential ingredients necessary for the behavior change program are clearly laid out, in rank order of predictive power, providing the marketing manager and ad agency with the appropriate armamentarium to create a truly scientifically-based CRM program, that is, one that will change behavior in the direction intended.

Previous proprietary work conducted using this method was presented at the EyeForPharma 4th Annual Adherence Conference in Philadelphia in 2006. This model contained 13 key cognitive constructs that, taken together, explain 92% of the variance in a patients individual decision to persist with therapy, or not. Id go so far as to call that the silver bullet of adherence.

From my consultations with big pharma, it seems that two of the large firms have this type of robust predictive model nailed down and are executing against it and another one is in the process of developing a model. Reading between the lines, the early adopters are those who have been dabbling in the adherence space for a few years now perhaps the cold, bitter experience of successive flat ROIs is a necessary precursor to the adoption of the evidence-based approach!?

As a word of wisdom to the new entrants into the field, dont wait for the inevitable failure of traditional methods of CRM design to make your transition. Marketing to improve poor adherence is not conventional marketing. The 21st century consumer is beyond old-school DTC and is a complex cognitive processor that requires a scientific explanation of decision-making and choice. The new era of Evidence-Based Marketing is here! Are you? . . .

Next Issue: The Basic Tenets of the Scientific Method and How to Apply It for Market Growth

Author: Dr Andrea LaFountain
Dr LaFountain is the CEO of Mind Field Solutions Corp., a Philadelphia based consulting firm that specializes in the application of Cognitive Science to Consumer Marketing. She can be contacted on (484) 472 7752. www.mind-field-solutions.com