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Tim Cooper, who has been described as an insights leader and independent thinker, spent quite a few years in the pharma space at both Merck Sharpe & Dohme, where he managed the Customer and Business Insights team, as well as Novo Nordisk, where he worked mainly on global product launch.

Tim Cooper, who has been described as an insights leader and independent thinker, spent quite a few years in the pharma space at both Merck Sharpe & Dohme, where he managed the Customer and Business Insights team, as well as Novo Nordisk, where he worked mainly on global product launch. But Tims diverse background also includes working in several countries with stints at companies like Vodafone and Avis. Tim, who currently is Associate Director, Customer Analysis for Westpac Marketing at Westpac Banking Corporation in Australia, will be speaking at eyeforpharmas upcoming Sales Excellence and Business Intelligence for Pharma Australia conference in Sydney, September 1-2.

 Tim recently answered some questions for us on customer insight exactly what it is and how to get it - that we thought youd find interesting and perhaps helpful in your quest for better customer insight.

eyeforpharma: In pharma, we talk a lot about customer insights, but what does this really mean?

Cooper: I think we first have to start with considering what we mean by insight.  Do you mean the same thing by this as I do?  If not, we're looking for different things (and that's gonna cause problems)!

My published business definition of insight [1] is: New information giving you actionable ideas to drive your business in your stated direction and provide competitive advantage.

So, this means that an insight is not repeatable, unless you have a corporate memory of a goldfish. Neither does a monthly report typically deliver insights, unless you've not looked at them properly and should be fired.  

 An insight requires you to do some thing different to discover and action it.  We never achieve something different by doing the same thing, so what is it you are going to change?

 People use terms like data or insights interchangeably.  If you do this, then people see them as the same and youll get buried in data when you want the business accelerating a-ha! instead.  Use the DIKI model to understand this:

• D for Data: facts that can be Qual/ Quant/ Explicit/ Implicit, e.g. 25 C


• I for Information: is structured data, organised in patterns, such as a summary table


• K for Knowledge: context is provided to show why this is relevant information, what is the implication of the information -  its about what, how or why


• I for Insight: knowledge that is valuable, unique/ rare, inimitable, actionable.  This is the distilled aha! that you can take to the bank, or at least means youll do well on your next performance review!

Why are insights important - why do companies claim they want them?  How do companies react when given an insight - and what can you do to ensure uptake of them?

Once you have a definition of insight, consider what makes a 'big' insight vs. any other size?  How can you get more of them? Can you design your company so that it outperforms competitors in terms of number and quality of insights?  Where can insights be most effective?  Where are you wasting your time generating insights (e.g. no chance of up take)?  

This requires a defined process or approach and we can discuss that a bit more in a few minutes. 

eyeforpharma: How has your experience in other industries changed the way you look at customer analysis?

Cooper: Customer analysis starts by walking in the customers shoes and thinking and feeling like a customer.  How else can you generate win-win relationships between customer and company?

I once spent a week living like someone with diabetes injecting three times a day, blood sugar testing, diet watching and exercising so I could get closer to what end consumers experience.  I have a deep respect for anyone who has to do this all their life and I still take the stairs every time.  Getting this close to customers is an essential foundation for customer analysis.  Market research should add to this by painting detailed pictures that direct your inquiries by generating hypotheses.  

To really understand and certainly to act, you need specific, relevant data accessible at an individual customer level. Only gather data that is directly related to your aims, else you will drown in nice to have data and probably annoy customers through hassling them for their data.

Next, you need people to capitalize on the data.  I separate people who use data into two categories: what people and why people.  You need why people with boundless curiosity and business knowledge to create the a-has that lead to insights.  The what people are the do-ers that push their way through the data to deliver.  

Ultimately, the insights must be solidly sold into the business and followed-up for them to have any value, so this hand over is critical.  Getting stakeholder involvement from the start helps to support this, as does ensuring that the analysis will deliver results that strongly support strategy (rather than just supporting the latest half-baked idea from half-informed people that have less than half-thought about what they will do with the results).

Most analysis-related jobs are over-staffed by what people, rather than driven by why people.  The why people need to be relatively strategic. So, this may not be the role for every former sales person, who may have achieved past success through tactical strengths and that often dominate marketing areas of pharma companies.  Ask your marketers for an on the spot definition of strategy, and see who can do well at this.

Very few organisations are using a holistic, company wide insight-driven approach.  Where it happens, it is more the inherent culture than a planned approach.  This begs the question of how to plan to generate insights - more on this in a minute.

The attitudes on using data vary considerably between industries and even within the same industry, and in different countries.  The more closed an industry is to people from other industries moving into it, the less dynamism of ideas.  Jack Welch, turn around CEO of GE, said that competitive advantage comes from only two sources: learning more about your customers faster than the competition AND turning that learning into action faster than the competition.  

Where direct marketing has been long established and well tested, such as in the US and parts of Europe, there are a critical mass of people experienced in using marketing data to drive businesses.  But this doesn't necessarily translate into pharmaceutical companies using it (much).  A UK based pharma company promoted a new device by direct mail and got hugely and publicly criticized by relatives of recently deceased recipients of the mailing.  This pharma company concluded that direct approaches didnt work, when it was actually bad marketing practices that caused the problem.

Industries like banking and telco use data at an individual level all the time and take for granted that this is a good way to operate.

eyeforpharma: With the advantage of hindsight, would you say that pharma is currently getting customer insight right? Where are we missing the mark? And what can pharma learn from other industries when it comes to delivering and analyzing customer insights in organizations?

Cooper: The idea of individual level data (on prescribers, influencers and even consumers) in pharma in Australia has typically not been the focus, but seems to be gaining momentum. Market research generally is the reflex to answer any question that may arise when better questions may be answered for almost no cost via a robust database.  The database may contain individual data, such as on GPs, matched with secondary data from a range of sources, both within the industry and from outside (e.g. ABS, MOSAIC etc).  By understanding the market, this data can be combined to create new information of considerable power for targeting and grouping GPs.

Even better is to put market research and the database together under the same manager. Then you can combine them to test ideas about how the market works and identify opportunities arising from this.  For example, if GPs in Market Research say that they prescribe more to women of a particular demographic, can you find evidence of this in the database.  What if the database contradicts this market research finding?  Well, this is GOOD NEWS as you know that resolving this apparent conflict will probably tell you something new - hey, that's an insight!

For example, if IMS data shows that sales are about the same in hospitals where your company's representatives don't call or do call, you're going to ask 'why?  In other words, you need an eh? to get to an a-ha!

This shows that insights can arise from simple analysis.  As another example, a table of value by four Target Levels showed that GPs not allocated to a Level had the same value as the second Level customers; clearly, targeting the unclassified GPs would be a quick-win in unlocking new value.  So, what counts more than type of analysis is the thinking that leads to good questions that require analysis.

The sequence of events from hypothesis to question to answer to solution are very similar whether insight is generated, or just knowledge that answers the question is generated.  Acknowledging that not every hypothesis can lead to an insight, the key difference between getting just knowledge versus insight comes down to two components:

- Interactions quality, diversity and frequency
- Information Information available/delivery for the interactions

Driving insights requires curiosity, business knowledge, information and opportunity.  You can increase opportunity by more effectively working together this also helps with uptake of the insights. Interactions that have the following characteristics prove creative and have higher chances of generating insights:

• Get stakeholders into the meeting being very clear on meeting purpose, duration and approach.


• Ensure that people arrive with a minimum of information already understood so that the context to the question to be addressed is already clear.


• Facilitation skills are essential to run a planned or spontaneous workshop that has open debate around what ifs that generate possible ideas that can lead to insights -  e.g. Start with review of the key business question and define exactly what this means and doesnt mean. Then, irrelevant of available data, how could this be answered? And further, if we assumed certain facts in place of absent data, what does this suggest different scenarios would look like? And so on *
  *(Note: Review the last part of Fast Innovation by Michael George for how to structure and progress innovative interaction discussions)

Discovering an insight may be as simple as observing an unusual feature in the market and asking Why does this happen?

The Marriott Hotel story includes this type of insight:

J. Willard Marriott, later founder of the hotel chain, started with food outlets in Washington DC in the 1920s.  On a visit to his store near Hoover Airport he saw passengers en route to the airport picking up food for their flights.  This struck him as something extraordinary.  Very rapidly he made arrangements to provide pre-packaged lunch boxes to Eastern Air Transport and soon other airlines.  This was an opportunistic approach: he saw what people were doing, understood why and saw an opportunity where others had not.  The act of noting the pre-flight passengers behavior is just information gathering, but Marriott asked why.  He then had a big a-ha moment when he realised what it would mean if his company provided the airlines with pre-packaged food.  Insights come from asking the good questions (not necessarily from complex analysis).

An insight may arise through something as simple as marrying two data sources together that had never shared a page before.  Suddenly, a relationship between two facts is discovered that had never been appreciated, leading, potentially, to new insights and actions. The possibly apocryphal story of the discovery of an increase in beer and diaper (nappy) sales on Friday nights the father on his way home picking up the essentials - led to a supermarket placing these two items right next to each other, accelerating sales.

Go hunting for insight rich approaches.  Look for the following sign-posts:

• Anomalies or unusual features in the data, e.g. Marriott in-flight catering story


• Conflicting or contradictory information, e.g. why is our market share almost as big at non-target malls as at targeted malls?


• Gaps in market understanding raise questions, e.g. Why does this happen? stimulates insightful analysis


• Assumptions, business rules and definitions: Challenge, critique these - a fertile area for new views on the market + insights. - -  Listen carefully to your stakeholders, especially to managers and directors as they describe a situation: the words that should set sirens blaring are terms like well, obviously . . or assuming . . . or where they reference a business rule or assumed industry approach, stated or unstated.

There is a movement in pharmaceutical marketing toward recognition that more value can be unlocked by taking more sophisticated approaches.  The fact that pharma has had it so good for so long means that it has been slow off the starting blocks compared to companies like Vodafone that developed in the data-driven age and see this as a natural way of doing business.

eyeforpharma: Banking, in particular, is held up as an industry that really understands and leverages customer insight. What about banking has pushed it to get customer insight right? And how might pharma use bankings approaches and learnings in its own efforts to better understand, communicate with and deliver to its customers?

Cooper: Banking and similar industries have years of experience in using data to drive their business.  They have proven the benefits and understand that basics and theyve set up data structures and expect to see certain outputs.  Pharma will develop strong parallels with FMCG, looking for incredible efficiencies and strong branding, requiring quantitative approaches.

In pharma, this critical mass of data experience is largely in the early stages of development.  There isnt the same legacy of using data to drive a business, so arguments center on justification - and misunderstandings abound.  There are fewer pharma data-driven examples published and fewer urban myths about how certain ideas and successes were created as well as less well-experienced staff.  I know its difficult to recruit out of banking, telco or FMCG into pharma, but we need their experience.   Also, there are fewer insight-focused service companies in pharma pushing to unlock value and those that are in this space face the justification hurdle.

In the end, you dont know what you dont know, but with generics rising and blockbusters fading, its time to find out how to unlock the value in the data you can hold.

[1] Enhancing insight discovery by balancing the focus of analytics between strategic and tactical levels. Tim Cooper. 2006. J Database Marketing & Customer Strategy Management. Vol 13. Nbr 4. P 261-270