Using market research to capitalize on brand equity
To a certain extent, O’Connor says, all of her company’s brands talk to the same groups of doctors and use similar marketing programs.
By on Aug 10, 2006To a certain extent, O'sConnor says, all of her company's brands talk to the same groups of doctors and use similar marketing programs. So Lilly has created a structure to help coordinate marketing activities to avoid its teams from stepping all over each other and to help them measure the impact of their programs.
One approach O'sConnor is using to coordinate direct mail programs for about 15 Lilly brands is something the company calls zero-based budgeting. During the planning process, she says, each brand team establishes key objectives and then brings in channel experts, like O'sConnor, to help them achieve those goals.
We examine things like how much it will cost and how many times we need to hit a physician to achieve the goal, she says. And I may have to tell a team that for a really complex message direct mail just won'st work, while the peer-to-peer people may identify it as a great opportunity and come up with estimates on cost. So we really do start from zero, saying how many hits we want to have and how much that's going to cost.
Then it is rolled up to a portfolio platform, O'sConnor says, where portfolio directors look across brands and make sure it's all coordinated and makes sense, considering overlap and other factors.
We'sve only tried this approach over the past year, so we'sre not sure yet how it will ultimately go, she says. But I think we'sre doing a good job so far.
Analyzing return on investment (ROI) can help you determine what works and what doesn'st, O'sConnor says, but is a lagging indicator, she warns. So she also advocates the use of market research, which can help teams understand why something works or does not work.
And market research allows teams to focus on brand equity, which can help them determine future directions to pursue, she says. But at Lilly, although they measure brand equity and determine which elements drive sales, O'sConnor says it's difficult to always know how to improve brand equity measures.
What interventions can you use to drive those specific benefits? she asks.
To better understand how to impact brand value, Lilly worked with a market research agency to develop a model structure for one of its brands. The study, which took about six months to complete, involved quantitative market research with about 300 physicians from each of the brand's main segments. But it also included linking prescribing data back to the physicians's stated intentions and beliefs.
We know certain areas of satisfaction, loyalty and value drive our patient share and we have some emotional benefits that we'sre trying to drive, O'sConnor says. People generally make decisions, at least initially, on very functional kinds of attributes looking at the specific qualities of a car or whatever but then you get to that higher order emotional kind of feeling of BMW makes me feel cool's or whatever the case may be.
We know that first, we have to drive functional elements, such as this brand works on these specific symptoms and doesn'st have these undesirable side effects, she adds. And then we'sre looking to see which specific types of activities drive each of those functional benefits the chain of events to drive us from all these individual interventions to drive the functional benefits, the higher order benefits, the outcomes and then the patient share.
O'sConnor says initially with the market research they ascertained the extent to which physicians believed Lilly's brand stood for certain qualities for example, in the instance of the brand tested, mood efficacy or eliminating aggressiveness. And they determined which higher order benefits could be moved by an impact on functional benefits.
For example, it will point out when utilizing an exhibit booth isn'st going to do you any good and you would be better off doing something with your sales reps, O'sConnor explains. So we use this model to determine which specific types of interventions can lead to the specific types of impacts on our benefits that we would like to have. If you have the time, money and market research company that's good at analytics, you can really dig deep and go beyond traditional ROI and really learn what's driving specific pieces of your brand equity.
On a more basic level, however, O'sConnor says is always amazing the opportunities we miss to gather information from our customers about what's working and what's not.
With direct mail, we'sve focused a lot on ROI and it is a strong candidate for that, she says. You can tell who was sent what, who responded and link it back to individual prescribing. We also tend to look at response rates, which are not a very good measure although intuitively it seems like they would be. But in reality, it's all related to what kind of medical or practice-related item you'sre offering.
O'sConnor says that if you offer something cool, like a USB connection kit or some kind of cell phone accessory, you will get great responses no matter what your product materials are. But she says if you offer something educational like a book or CD of a speaker program, physicians don'st respond.
It's kind of sad, she says. We did a market research study where instead of a pen or whatever, we offered to make a two dollar donation to the advocacy program of their choice and we got a less than 2% response rate.
Typically, however, with direct mail, O'sConnor says, it doesn'st pay to do a lot of market research.
We might be sending something out to 20,000 people and it costs $50,000-$60,000, she says. So to spend time and money to do a $15,000-$20,000 market research study on that probably doesn'st make sense.
But she says sometimes they do market research on the look and feel of a whole campaign and they are doing more follow-up surveys. In the previous example, where they got only a 2% response rate, she says they wanted to determine how response rate related to open rate.
If you get a 2% response rate, does that mean no one really opened it; they threw it in the trash? she asks.
So Lilly surveyed 100 people who received the mailer and asked if they remembered seeing it, if they opened it, if they read it and then a lot of questions about what they remembered, liked and why. O'sConnor says 41% of those receiving it recalled seeing it, 26% said they opened and read it and about 20% remembered the brand, although fewer remembered the message.
So while they do focus on ROI, O'sConnor says it's not the be-all and end-all because it's retrospective and only gives broad clues on general direction. When we need more specific information, we use primary market research to fill in the gaps.