15 seconds.
That’s all you have, every day as a marketer.
15 seconds is the maximum amount of time a cognitively overloaded healthcare professional (HCP) will spend considering prescribing your brand in a live situation. That makes those 15 seconds everything to pharma marketing teams – and to you.
While the industry likes to think that prescribing decisions are rational, behavioural science shows that they are, in fact, driven by emotions and heuristics (mental shortcuts); and brands are at the heart of these mental shortcuts. When delivered well, brands guide the heuristics that drive which patients receive the treatment and why. A consistently delivered brand allows companies to own the narrative around their product and ensure its success.
This truth of those 15 seconds is in danger of being forgotten by pharma marketers. By re-engaging with it, you can build strong brands that help HCPs make the right, complex decisions for the benefit of their patients. It can also help your company make more money, and help you in your career.
Over the last ten years, focus has moved to commercial ‘innovations’ including omnichannel, customer experience and artificial intelligence (AI). We are obsessed by ‘new for new’s sake’ and have constant fear of missing out (FOMO) about the next shiny thing. These all have their place and can support commercial success, but only if they build on and complement the brand strategy, which must support the consistent delivery of the brand’s look, narrative and ‘feel’. If you are a marketer, ask yourself – what is the emotional benefit of using your brand? If you cannot answer without looking it up, you probably are leading a product, not a brand.
Great brands are built on great insight. Such insight does not come from data – which can only tell what or when something is happening – it comes from deep primary market research, which can tell you what your target audience needs and why. Offering a treatment that (at best) solves a recognised need (especially if emotional) is the recipe to the rapid creation of a prescribing heuristic featuring your brand, and hence commercial success.
An example of a fundamental insight that transformed a brand was with Cialis. The team identified that patients and their partners sought intimacy rather than just sex, and this enabled them to create a positioning that demonstrated the benefit of the longer mode of action (the consequence rather than the functional effect) in a manner that the target audience truly valued.
You as a marketer need to be brave. Brave in ignoring internal opinions that say ‘brands aren’t for HCPs’, ‘that’s not how HCP’s make decisions’ or ‘that doesn’t apply in my market’. Brave in creating something bold that cuts through the noise and isn’t about creating ‘hope’ or ‘confidence’ or ‘freedom’ because all pharma brands can do this. Brave in being truly differentiated in a competitive market.
Great brands are simple, but simplicity requires focus. Marketers must be willing to cut through the noise and deliver a clear, concise message that can be articulated in a sentence or two – because that is the amount of HCP head space you can hope to occupy. The need your brand addresses should not require any explanation for HCPs to understand it, as they are overwhelmed by the volume of ‘education’ being sent their way by pharma. Remember – it is just 15 seconds.
You also need to be consistent. Consistent in execution so that the message sticks. Consistent when briefing teams on the messages. And consistent when you take over a new brand as part of a promotion. Resist the ‘action imperative’ to change a brand – nothing kills a brand more quickly than change. Brand building takes time, and with most marketers in their role for two years, the temptation to tinker can be strong.
So, this is a call to arms. Building brands matters in pharma. By creating an emotional connection with your brand that is based on insight, you are helping busy HCPs make extremely complex decisions, in a way that makes intuitive sense to them and benefits their patients. That’s a pretty cool job to have.
