In our post “What we believe about pharma branding”, we gave a brief overview of the history of branding and the adoption of the FMCG branding model by big pharma where value is driven by the product.

Within FMCG the unique selling proposition (USP) is at the heart of mass market advertising but in the sales and marketing of pharmaceuticals, this thinking neglects the value offered by the corporation, or to put it in another way – the importance of the business relationship between pharma and health care professionals (HCPs).

We argued that the corporate brand has a significant role to play in creating value for all stakeholders including prescribers.

Market segmentation can allow for the reality that some HCP’s derive little value from the product brand and vice versa.

HIGHLY SPECIALISED MARKETS

The above approach arguably still holds in today’s ‘Primary Care’ markets but what happens in specialised (or niche) markets?

Let’s look Australia’s Section 100 (s100) market.

The Highly Specialised Drugs (HSD) Program provides access to specialised Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) medicines for the treatment of chronic conditions which, because of their clinical use and other special features, have restrictions on where they can be prescribed and supplied. In most cases, medical practitioners are required to undertake specific training or be affiliated with a specialised hospital unit to prescribe these medicines.¹

In s100 markets, it is not uncommon to see 80% sales driven by 40 – 80 customers (at both the hospital and individual prescriber level). It is also common to see companies work with HCP’s in setting up treatment centres. In other words what we have is a small number of prescribers with a strong relationship with the corporate brand.

As the number of key prescribers reduces, it becomes possible (and even desirable) to segment by individual customer – not at all unlike a ‘customer-centric’ sales approach.

VALUE IN A HIGHLY SPECIALISED (NICHE) MARKET

This nimble approach with an understanding of the importance of the corporate brand – rather than a focus on product differences – is the key differentiator between companies that succeed or fail in these highly specialised markets.

THE FUTURE OF BRANDING

With advancing genetic research, highly personalised medicines are on the horizon. It is even foreseeable that products will be developed for individual patients, leading to a hyper-fragmented market. Clearly this will radically change the way pharma thinks about branding. The one constant in this rapidly evolving business environment will be the corporate brand.

 

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1. Source: https://www.pbs.gov.au/info/browse/section-100/s100-highly-specialised-drugs

 

Over the last decade, the pharmaceutical industry has seen significant change. There are many views on the role of branding. We have heard champions of ‘customer centric’ sales models pronounce the death of branding. Is that simply another expression of the antagonism between sales and marketing or does big pharma need to rethink its approach to managing brands?

In his book “On BR@ND”, Wally Ollins identifies the selling of patent or proprietary medicines in post-Civil War America as the origin of modern branding. Coca-Cola was created by a failed chemist and included health claims in its original advertising and Kellogg’s was originally promoted as a cure for indegestion.¹ Whilst patent medicine people were the early pioneers, it was the makers of household goods such as soap, washing powder, shoe polish, tea, chocolate and cigarettes who refined the approach by combining consistent product quality with standardised pricing and advertising in cheap daily newspapers in the late 1900s. FMCG powerhouses like Cadbury, Unilever, Nestlé, Heinz, Kellogg’s and Procter & Gamble were born and they were built on ‘brands’. Companies like Cadbury, Heinz and Kellogg’s used their corporate name on the product, but most FMCG companies created a ‘House of Brands’ – in some cases hundreds of brands – and the corporation behind the brand was rarely if ever seen by the consumer.

Traditionally pharmaceutical companies have followed the Unilever and P&G model – investing in building product brands within a ‘house of brands’ structure, with the corporate brand hidden in the background. This model assumes that it is the product brand alone that delivers value.

THE PRODUCT/CUSTOMER VALUE MODEL

Of course this is a little simplistic and assumes that all consumers (or customers) are the same. In practice markets are targeted by segments – a practice that again was created by consumer goods companies.

VALUE IN A SEGMENTED MARKET

THE LIMITS OF PRODUCT BRANDING FOR PHARMA

Government bodes rightly regulate the pharmaceutical industry in terms of how they promote products. In Australia, this largely restricts brand managers to tangible brand promises and attributes – to claims that can be supported by clinical evidence e.g. indications, mode of action, dosage, tablet load, efficacy, safety profile etc. Anything beyond that creates a ‘red flag’ with reg affairs.

The challenge is that powerful brands typically live at the intangible end of the spectrum. It is where a unique brand promise can be created and defended. Corporate brands have no such restrictions, allowing brand managers to create emotional connections between the brand and stakeholders.

LEVERAGING THE STRENGTH OF THE CORPORATE BRAND

The ‘House of Brands’ focus on the product brand has its weaknesses. The rise of consumer activism, coupled with the world wide web and later social media created an environment where it became impossible for the brand owner to remain in the shadows. Brand owners began to realise that investing in the corporate brand was an important activity in ‘building equity’ to mitigate against reputational damage. The consumer of the 21st century however is far more savvy than the 1950s.Today authenticity is an imperative.

Increasingly pharma companies are also recognising the role of their corporate brand in delivering value to stakeholders. This is certainly the case for investors, government bodies, partners, media, insurance companies and hospital pharmacy but what about individual prescribers?

THE CORPORATE/PRODUCT/CUSTOMER VALUE MODEL

VALUE IN A SEGMENTED MARKET

If we apply segmentation to this mix, we will quickly see that for some customer groups, product delivers very little value, but the corporate brand creates engagement. For example, it is not uncommon for some key opinion leaders to be non-prescribers. The product may be a vehicle through which research can be undertaken, but it is the relationship with the corporate brand that is the primary value driver.

Furthermore many pharma companies develop expertise and a strong product pipeline in particular areas e.g. oncology. Clearly the corporate brand has a key role in not only delivering value but also in creating marketing efficiencies across the product portfolio.

SUMMARY

At Leo Creative, we believe big pharma can no longer rely on product branding alone in creating value for prescribers. The corporate brand must be incorporated into the value offering. This becomes even clearer when we look at the role of the corporate brand in highly specialised markets.

 

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1. Ollins, Wally. ON BR@ND (pp. 48-69). London: Thames & Hudson, 2003

After delivering our first project targeting Veeva’s iRep platform, here are some initial thoughts on creating content for these two widely used apps.

In many ways comparing Next Interact with Veeva iRep is not a fair comparison. Next Interact is a platform dedicated to managing and displaying digital content. Veeva’s origins are as a cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. In this area, Veeva is a market leader in the industry and it’s Closed Loop Marketing (CLM) capability is an add-on. In other words, Next Interact is a dedicated CLM, whereas Veeva iRep does both. Clearly the additional capability of a CRM gives the Veeva platform many advantages, but this review will focus on content development in the CLM area only.

Media compatibility

The following table is an overview only:

Next Interact

Veeva iRep

HTML 5

Yes

Yes

Video

Yes

Yes

PDF

Yes

Yes

Interactive PDF

Yes

No

Next Interact has a slight advantage here in that it supports Interactive PDF’s, which are often a cheaper alternative to HTML development were complex interactivity and animations are not required. We do not see this as a major issue as we expect Veeva to simplify content creation in the future.

Metrics

One of Veeva’s key selling points is the ability to gather metrics. Whilst some sales reps may see this as yet another intrusion, quantitative data on what messages are viewed most for example, has enormous potential to improve and tailor future messages. As content creators, we are excited to see where this will take us.

Development Costs

Veeva’s ability to collect metrics can affect development workflow. There are two ways for developers to prepare presentations for metrics collection. In single html sites, content creators can use Veeva’s Javascript library to write data to Veeva’s Call Clickstream object. The other option is to separate a site into individual html pages (or slides) and upload them separately together with full-screen and thumbnail images of each slide. The advantage of this approach is that the Veeva iRep UI uses these thumbnail images as navigation elements. The disadvantage is that it increases development time significantly. As part of a broader Commercial Cloud solution, Veeva streamlines the end to end content review, approval, and distribution process. New Veeva capabilities planned for this year are expected to dramatically simplify content development and administration and become a competitive advantage for the Veeva platform.

For now, developing HTML content for Next Interact is more streamlined and with an Interactive PDF capability, makes the Next Interact platform a more cost effective platform from the perspective of content creation.

Interactive Surveys

Another interesting feature is Veeva’s support for interactive surveys including the ability to embed surveys into sales presentations. This will enable marketers to control the flow of a presentation i.e. a physician’s response to a question can guide the presentation to appropriate messages. This opens up a number questions for pharma. Firstly, what are the legal and privacy issues around surveys? Secondly, what view will Regulatory Affairs have on this capability and thirdly – is it appropriate within the context of our customer relationships? In other words “Just because we CAN (technological capability), does not mean we CAN (legally), and just because we CAN does not mean we SHOULD (relationship management)”. In addition, Medicines Australia will likely have a view on this issue, so it is perhaps a case of ‘watch this space!’

Our views on surveys are influenced by our work in highly specialised markets. We do not envisage a strong need for surveys in markets where the prescribing group is small and the relationships between clinicians and industry is strong. Quant data in larger speciality areas and primary care however, can be incredibly valuable eg. market segmentation.

Conclusion

We are big fans of Next Interact – purely on the grounds of ease of use. Purpose built as a CLM, its support of interactive PDFs is very attractive and content development is relatively simple. Veeva’s dominance as a CRM however, plus its ability to gather metrics and embed surveys, clearly positions Veeva as the market leader. Whilst content development is more involved and costly, this is largely the result of Veeva’s additional feature set and not likely to be of major concern to big pharma. We would anticipate that for Next Interact to survive will require either a merger with (or sale to) an existing global CRM player, significant investment in a CRM platform or expansion into non-healthcare markets.

To discuss your next Veeva or Next Interactive project, contact Justin at Leo Creative.

Note: Leo Creative is not a Veeva Agency Partner

An audit of Barker College’s advertising and a review of quant and qual research led to a new brand story for Barker College.

Following the successful delivery of a new enrolment prospectus, Barker College engaged Leo Creative to develop a new advertising campaign. Before developing a brief and strategy, our first step was to review the school’s existing campaign through a visual audit.

Brand Discovery

Campaign Audit
The audit uncovered a number of issues including:

• visual inconsistency;
• message inconsistency;
• a lack of focus in messaging (too much copy), and
• the absence of a consistent single-minded proposition.

The audit also included a review of Barker College’s key competitors and outlined the opportunities for the brand in the new campaign.

A follow-up meeting to discuss the findings of the audit revealed a problem that Barker College had been wrestling with for many years – “What is our brand proposition?” The school had struggled with defining a single brand promise across its preparatory, junior, middle and senior schools. They had tried, having worked with other agencies, but had failed. As a result, their brand communication lacked strength and consistency.

Review of Existing Research
Barker had recently completed quantitative and qualitative research with Barker families at different stages of school life. From quantitative research, the top three drivers of school selection were:

1. School Reputation
2. Academic Excellence
3. Values/Culture

Interestingly only one of these is tangible and measurable. If we define brand as a promise of value, then ‘reputation’ and ‘brand’ are one and the same. Furthermore, a direct correlation exists between an organisations values & culture which influence its behaviour, which in turn builds its reputation (or brand). This can be expressed as:

Behaviour = Brand = Reputation

These findings were similar to research commissioned by the Sydney Morning Herald, which also identified the importance of values and culture in driving parents perceptions about schools.¹

In turning our attention to the qualitative research, we had one task – to discover Barker’s values and culture. We knew that this would be the key to revealing a compelling and authentic brand story.

Word clouds for values and culture were created for each research segment and key trends across the parent community were explored. This approach identified a long list of potential attributes to define the brand. These attributes were then ranked and mapped using a set of tools that we also use in a workshop process and the results presented for discussion with the client.

Brand Promise

In discussion with the client, a final set of distinctive brand attributes were selected and a brand promise was developed and approved. Barker’s new advertising campaign would be about bringing those attributes and the brand promise to life.

Brand Expression

From the beginning the project was approached with the following principle in mind:

‘We are not in the business of “selling” Barker College. Our task is to make it easy for parents who share the schools values, to identify Barker as the right school for their children.’

The campaign would be about raising the Barker ‘flag’, inviting those who are like-minded, those who share our values to join us.

A new brand theme: ‘A bigger picture’
A new brand theme (or proposition) was developed as a strong, simple and memorable expression of Barker College’s brand promise.

A new photographic style
Another issue identified in the visual audit was that photographs were too staged and did not capture real life in the school. We were able to persuade the client to give their photographer Gerrit Fokkema more freedom to work in a reportage style. It helped that we had worked with Gerrit before, confident that he would capture powerful images.

Note: Barker College’s Brand Attributes and Brand Promise were not disclosed as this information is considered commercially sensitive by Leo Creative