Mal’s Musings: What pharma can learn from FMCG marketing

Is pharma’s real challenge brand loyalty or patient adherence?



One of the taboo subjects in healthcare marketing is the suggestion that we can learn from our FMCG colleagues. Many point to differences in market, customers and context as reasons why there are few relevant lessons from our consumer marketing counterparts. This perspective is usually driven by an oversimplification of both scenarios and a lack of understanding of some of the techniques used by FMCG marketers.

Patient adherence is one of the holy grails of healthcare marketing—only if the patients will take the right medication for the right duration. In consumer marketing, marketers face similar challenges with keeping consumers; in their world, this is perceived as a brand loyalty issue.

They have the added challenge that consumers usually have to pay for these products themselves and their health does not depend on it. So, they rely on their ability to create excitement and to engage their customers.

Is our challenge brand loyalty or patient adherence? Would we come up with new solutions if we approached adherence challenges as a brand loyalty issue? I think so.

Some consumer marketers think of loyalty in terms of brand love; i.e., how engaged the consumers are about their brands. If Coca-Cola can get consistently high scores for brand love, healthcare companies could trigger similar emotions if we apply similar approaches.

Coca-Cola does not communicate features or benefits, nor does it prescribe when we should use its products. What it does is engage consumers emotionally and make a strong connection between the product and a high-level end state. We are engaged with Coca-Cola because of the emotions the brand evokes, because of the strength of feeling toward the brand. This drives brand loyalty.

Despite differences in context, we get the same benefits as our FMCG colleagues for engaging customers. They will use more of our products and use them appropriately, thereby optimizing benefits.

What would FMCG approach to adherence look like in practice? The first thing is to define the challenge properly. The focus is not on usage and duration but on engaging consumers on broader benefits. If consumers buy into to the vision of what that brand can do for them, they will follow routine better. What we tend to do in healthcare settings is to focus on driving routine, which is necessary but inefficient when not combined with genuine engagement programs.

Dove would like customers to use its products daily to maximize benefits and sales. However, unlike us, it tries to achieve this by engaging consumers in the end benefit of their natural beauty proposition.

We need less emphasis on timing, regime and duration and more effort on getting buy-in and engagement to the end goal. Consumers will seek the optimal route to the end benefit with purpose. Consumers do not care about our routines and regimes until they buy in to the benefits of our solution at an emotional level.

This ultimately means we need to think more about the broader problem we are solving and less about the specifics of our product scenario. Adherence is not the challenge, brand loyalty is.

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