Marketing ROI - What goes around comes around
These are concepts that are taking the consumer marketing world by storm, but are they relevant for pharma?
By on Sep 26, 2006These are concepts that are taking the consumer marketing world by storm, but are they relevant for pharma?
Paul Marsden, a London School of Economics expert formerly of AstraZeneca, and Baba Awopetu, International Product Manager for EMEA Stryker, both speakers at eyeforpharma's 6th annual Pharmaceutical Marketing ROI Congress Europe, 23-24 October in Amsterdam, think so.
Word of mouth is incredibly important for pharma in driving demand, says Marsden. And it's a concept that actually began with the pharma industry in the 1960s, he says.
Columbia University did a study then, Marsden says, in which it examined whether it was actually worth advertising to physicians. The group concluded that about 10% of any given target market actually listens to advertisements and other marketing material.
But physicians who listened, didn'st do so because they hadn'st already made their mind up, Marsden says. They were the people who already had, and what they wanted was extra information to convince their colleagues, peers and friends that they should be doing the same thing.
The 10% of targeted physicians that respond to pharma advertising are considered opinion leaders or influencers. According to Marsden, the researchers at Columbia believed all marketing spend should be targeted to this group, because if they begin using the product and become product advocates, its use will spread through the market like a virus.
Now, consumer marketing is actually going back to those early pharma studies and adopting some of the techniques and evolving them, Marsden says. What's interesting, though, is the consumer marketing world has thrown millions of dollars behind how to do word of mouth on a scalable, predictable and sustainable basis, and have come up with some great little tricks for how to actually turn opinion leading buyers into brand advocates.
Marsden promises to share a number of those techniques with conference attendees, including how to market with people rather than at them.
It's all about engaging them and letting them call the shots, he says. Recruiting opinion leading users as advisors to a brand creates an incredible loyalty and advocacy effect, as well as good will.
Marsden also will examine a new assessment concept called the net promoter score, based on how likely a consumer is to recommend a product to a friend or colleague. The strength of response allows users to be separated into three groups: word of mouth promoters, word of mouth passives and word of mouth detractors, he says.
A lot of consumer marketers are trying to segment this way and are developing unique marketing strategies to address each group, Marsden says. There are a lot of powerful examples that this works well.
Awopetu says a similarly useful concept is diffusion of innovation another 1960s concept finding new life. Everett Rogers, and other sociologists at the time, demonstrated that there are patterns to how new ideas catch on and spread, he says.
People fall, generally, into five categories, Awopetu says innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and conservatives or laggards and do so in predictable percentages for any given population. For instance, about 2.5% of any group can be expected to be innovators, he says.
A survey by IMS of about 18,000 physicians, Awopetu reports, confirms that the concept and breakdown of percentages per category hold true for healthcare provider groups and that doctors's behavior can be identified and predicted. This concept, he says, can be used to help boost marketing efficiency and ROI.
If you can convince earlier adopters, that will have an impact, Awopetu says. And every percent of the early adopters that you miss will have an impact on the rest of the populations. Late adopters rely on the opinions of early adopters, so if the early adopters don'st endorse it, it won'st diffuse very far.
Are we really looking at innovators and early adopters the way we should? How does diffusion of innovation fit into product lifecycle?
Awopetu says answers to these kinds of questions are more important today than ever, given the other pressures on the market. And he promises to help answer them in Amsterdam.
So be sure to join us to learn how word of mouth marketing and diffusion of innovation approaches - and other techniques and strategies - can deliver the ROI you need from your marketing spend. To learn more and to register for the conference, visit www.eyeforpharma.com/marketing06 or call the eyeforpharma team at +44 (0)20 73 75 7203.