8 Pharma takeaways from iStrategy May 25, 2012
Posted by Kay Wesley in CRM, Marketing, mobile, Social Media, Websites.1 comment so far
I had a good two days at iStrategy London this week with Complete Digital colleague @mariaatomaca. The event was at Chelsea Football Club so the mood was up-beat in the venue generally (as you might expect) and it was good to see a few pharma industry colleagues there from Pfizer, Lilly, Novartis and Shire.
1. Marketers are experience architects
‘People forget what you said, people forget what you did, but people never forget how you made them feel’ (Maya Angelou) – so quoted @BrianSolis in an inspiring opening keynote that set the tone for the conference. The main thrust of his talk was: rethink the experience, don’t use social networks to do traditional marketing. A ‘Like’ is not an ‘opt-in’ for push marketing.
This point was re-iterated by Twitter, who’ve implemented ‘sponsored tweets’ instead of banner ads (although how users will accept this remains to be seen) and Facebook who pointed out ‘Ads are not content’ and you should give your page fans real, valuable content.
For pharma? This shift in mindset is the most important challenge facing drug companies. For many, marketing is still very much about ‘how can I push my message to this customer’. Yet in a content and expertise-rich space there are many opportunities to engage customers by providing the services they want, where they want them on their own terms.
2. Why Red Bull is a Media company (aka ‘Content is King’)
Red Bull have taken ‘Content is King’ (And as Rebecca Powell of @EbuzzingUK put it ‘Distribution is Queen’) to a whole new level and become a content company. Known as a carbonated drink, in fact Red Bull also has a complete international media operation with TV, radio and magazine production and distribution services. All of this is in-house and monetised. The content celebrates what Red Bull is known for – Formula 1 motor racing and other extreme sports. They showed the trailer for an amazing feature-length movie, ‘The Art of Flight’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh29_SERH0Y). The movie has had 42 sold-out premieres (and made over €1 million so far) and even the trailer has had nearly 10 million YouTube views. Redbull claims to be the third most influential social brand in the world with 28 million FB fans, 600,000 Twitter followers, 280 million YouTube views.
For pharma? Most companies provide content as a service to healthcare. If we are serious about healthcare outcomes it is a duty of the leaders in a therapy area to provide high quality content to support patients and healthcare professionals. It’s important that we think about content formats beyond traditional text and flash – consider video and gaming (see below), and how to make our content ‘social’.
Think of ‘KISS’ – Keep it Simple and Shareable. 
3. The power of video
Following on from @RedBull, iStrategists repeatedly emphasised the importance of video and the social nature of it – Pete Blackshaw (@PBlackshaw) from Nestle said the ‘instructional video’ is a major untapped opportunity for many companies and brands. We spend 16 years of our lives in front of video content by the time we are 60, according to @RIBenjamin. Harry from Google cited the TippEx interactive ‘Birthday Party video that makes him want to buy the product even though he doesn’t need it…a great example of making a ‘boring’ subject engaging.
For pharma? Lots of healthcare video opportunities – there are some good examples with J&J Health channel on YouTube, Pfizer Health and for professionals, webcast KOL videos are now mainstream, and companies are exploring other video services such as Lilly’s Oncochannel.
4. LinkedIn – the profile search engine
Everyone who attended @NealSchaffer’s LinkedIn session went away determined to spend more time regularly updating their company, group and personal profiles. Why? LinkedIn is perfect for getting connected professionally because of the power of its information-rich ‘profile search engine’. If you are looking for an employee, an agency, a discussion group, an answer to a question, you may well find it there.
For pharma? There are 2500 pharma-related discussion groups on LinkedIn and 8500 about healthcare. Neal’s tips: update your status regularly, join big groups to expand your contacts, ensure you have some personal recommendations, join discussions that interest you. You never know when those contacts may be useful.
5. The four stage Facebook model
Alexander Schlaubitz of Facebook shared their 4 stage model for brands on Facebook: Connect, Engage, Influence, Integrate. Connect – they recommend you should aim to get 20% of your market to Like your page. How? They recommend offering specific services (e.g. a discount voucher). Engage – frequent light interactions, the brand should stimulate discussion but not ‘tell’ – the discussion should be between fans. Influence – treat fans exclusively with ongoing special services. For example Nike has launched products to FB fans first ahead of the public. Integrate – Facebook should be part of the relationship ongoing and should build over time, it is not a one-off campaign.
For pharma? With nearly a billion people on Facebook how can we engage those with a particular healthcare condition and what can we learn? There are some strong health related groups and pages on Facebook such as the NHS Organ Donation page, but the industry is under-represented beyond corporate brand presence.
6. We’re all (social) gamers now
Gaming is no longer just the domain of young males. 82% of people play online games regularly – 98% of children (I wonder what the other 2% are doing?). Some categories such as puzzles, city building and bingo games are more popular with females. Studies show that game-playing offers three times the engagement level of watching a video. And gaming is increasingly social. 500 million Facebook users play games, 300 million of them weekly, 60 million daily.
For pharma? We’ve seen patient disease awareness games (check out http://www.back-in-play.com/) and booth games for doctors are always popular – such as ‘Ward Wars’ (infection), ‘Vascular Quest’ (cardiovascular), and the ‘Diabetes Challenge’. How can we make productive use of social gaming specifically – anyone know any good industry examples?
7. Influencing the influencers
Ford has used social media to transform the brand in recent years and make it fun, relevant and popular Doug the Ford Focus puppet (@focusdoug) became a minor YouTube celebrity.
They ran a Facebook competition with the prize of a new Fiesta – the impact in terms of sheer numbers was greater than a SuperBowl ad. In another initiative, Ford turned negative bloggers into advocates by inviting them for a factory visit and immersion day. Their word cloud was transformed overnight.
For pharma? Why not offer company immersion days to proactive healthcare bloggers, especially inviting vocal industry critics?
8. Using expertise to engage customers
Stephane Lee talked about connecting experts in the organisation with customer. For example, Peugeot have an ‘ask the expert’ service for each new car. Customers can ask anything they want and the question is put to the appropriate person in the company – engineer, designer, sales person – who answers online, building up a Q&A resource that other customers benefit from.
For pharma? Medical Information is a perfect service function that should be providing online service. Pfizer in the US and Canada offer Click to Connect to get live chat services. Abbott’s brilliant https://www.crohnsconnect.co.uk/ offers expert patients the chance to share their stories with others.
Those are my 8 take-aways. Were you there? What do you think?
I ought to give a shout-out to the iPitchers that I liked – those given 6 minutes to pitch their idea to the audience. My favourites were @Brandwatch who used low-tec videos of their team (extensive use of cardboard) in the office to promote their SM monitoring service, and Kinetise from @funandmobile- an app-builder that Piotr Pawlak said is better than all the others simply because it is ‘the only one that really works’. Anyone want to challenge?
App-athy and the Wild West: eyeforpharma Mobile Strategies London Dec 2011 (#e4p) December 8, 2011
Posted by Kay Wesley in CRM, Marketing, mobile.2 comments
At last week’s excellent eyeforpharma Mobile Strategies event in London (1-2 December) there was an interesting dichotomy between how embedded ‘mobile’ seems to be the lives of the delegates and how far from embedded it is in our professional communication strategies.
In a mini-poll I did as Chair of Day 2, 75% of the delegates had an iPad, 86% a smartphone. Three-quarters of delegates had used their phone as their alarm clock that morning, the same number admitted signs of anxiety if they didn’t have their phone and would not leave home without it.
Yet still we are not necessarily drawing on our personal experiences in order to develop the insight to deliver value for our customers. Here are my five take-aways:
1. Mobile App-athy
Brand teams and marketers in pharma are excited about the potential of mobile apps but our customers are perhaps less enthusiastic. As a result there is a large number of pharma-sponsored apps (one estimate put the total health apps at 34,000) with just a few downloads each. A panel discussion (chaired by Chad Daugherty from Lilly with Len Starnes – @lenstarnes, Duncan Arbour – @rbour and Andreas Claus Kistner) concluded that pharma is too keen to invest in “shiny things” without real insight into customer needs.
Companies want apps but many have not optimized their email and websites for mobile – even though doctors and patients use mobile devices mostly for email and websites. Too many emails will not even display properly on a mobile device, and Sam Walmsley (@sammielw) pointed out that only 12 of the top 2 pharma companies’ websites are mobile-friendly.
To me it feels like the late ‘90s when brand managers everywhere were saying “I want a website” without taking a strategic look about how the web might fit into the overall communications plan. Many useless websites later, companies started taking a more strategic, customer-centric view and websites grew up.
My advice – if your objective is to build an app, don’t. Spend time defining an objective that is about customer value, then see what channels/tools can achieve it.
2. The Mobile Physician – who?
We learned that Doctors download 50 apps on average, but like everyone else, use just 7 regularly.
A panel discussion with Doctors Rob Hicks (@DrRobHicks), Peter Ilves and Henrik Andersson observed that there are “mobile” and “non-mobile” doctors. “Mobile” doctors are doing hospital ward-rounds or travelling from patient to patient and need handy reference services in their pocket – often it is treatment guidelines, symptom checkers, calculators. One example of a this is the Psoriasis PASI calculator from Janssen, a simple tool to help determine the severity of the rash and therefore appropriate treatment.
“Non-mobile” doctors are sitting in their office seeing patients and will mostly use a laptop or desktop computer. We need to provide multichannel services to fit the requirements of each.
One interesting doctor-patient app we saw was the mini-atlas from EC-Europe – anatomical atlases for iPad, designed for doctors to share with patients, the most recent version of which allowing the doc to draw on and annotate the image, then send to the patient. Pharma companies are sponsoring these atlases and the platform is well chosen – 93% of tablets sold to HCPs in the US last year were iPads.
Rob Hicks put it simply: the doctor’s daily workload is already very high and overloaded with multi-channel information – ““Don’t give us lots more to do – give us stuff that will save work and time.”
3. The Mobile Patient and mHealth
MHealth is now an established force in the developing world, where mobile technologies are providing much-needed access to health care and changing lives. In the developed world, however, the picture is more fragmented and, as for physicians, there are a great many under-utilised health apps competing for attention in the app store.
The winners are once again those based on real customer need and insight. For example the Claritin pollen alert for hayfever suffers (I can testify to its usefulness); Medtronic’s Lenny the Lion ‘carb-counting’ game app for children with diabetes, and a sponsored app in Israel for finding the nearest public WC, with links to Pfizer’s advice about bladder control.
The most compelling opportunity to provide mobile health solutions we saw was not for the “walking well” – the traditional pharma targets of asymptomatic patients needing medication reminders – but the moving and inspiring story from the Teenage Cancer Trust. Presented by Simon Davies, CEO, Professor Faith Gibson and former patient-now JimmyTeens.TV developer Tom de Bruin (@deadlyhifi), this told of the problems faced by young people going through chemotherapy.
Isolated by necessity and often very ill, these teens feel even more alone if they turn to Facebook and see their friends having fun without them. They also have a million questions and concerns about their symptoms (as do their parents). The Trust has pioneered web-based solutions allowing patients to ask questions of a cancer nurse and get help, information and support online, as well as connecting with other patients. The mobile potential for this is exciting, and so the Trust and eyeforpharma are running a competition to design such an app.
4. Ready, Fire, Aim! – Reps and iPads
I have stolen the title from Armand Brevig (@BuyingeContent) of Reprints Desk and several of the speakers agreed with the point that companies have taken a “Wild West” approach to iPads for reps, in some cases providing the technology before any application has been identified. Back to those “shiny things” again.
However, there is hope. Roche has integrated iPad solutions for its reps. In the pilot reps said that the ability to update the CRM system right there after the call was saving them 2 hours of data entry each evening. Key learnings: keep it simple and quick, provide offline capabilities, integrate with the rest of the solution (not ‘islands of technology’) and learn to fail fast and learn from mistakes.
My favourite quote of the event is Andreas Claus Kistner’s definition of ‘fail fast’: “Technology is like chocolate, if it is fundamentally bad, you can’t fix it – throw it away and get some new stuff.”
There was also an interesting example from Murat Mendi of Nobel, who rolled out a fully integrated and tracked closed loop marketing system in Turkey with 100% rep adoption based on tablets, not iPads – demonstrating that CLM is about good strategy, strong execution and shifting the culture, regardless of technology.
5. Good Mobile Service/Marketing is Just Good Service/Marketing
Our (@CompleteDigital’s) own Helen Harrison (@harrassedmom) set the tone early on in the event with a story about how the First Direct bank – famous for award-winning customer service – developed their mobile app.
As a bank they had some parallels with our industry – they had a mountain of legal, security and personal data concerns and had to very carefully step through the hurdles and ensure high standards of compliance.
Priding itself on being the top bank in terms of customer satisfaction in the UK, First Direct started with its customers. The team developed clear and detailed customer personas and designed the app with the user at the centre. They chose not to do “everything” but to do the few key things that customers really wanted, really well. They tested, tested, tested, including sketching the designs on paper and sitting with customers refining them, then testing further at wireframe and design stage so that by the time the app was built it needed hardly any testing – it was exactly what customers wanted.
In other words, First Direct did the opposite to “I want an app”, they spent a good deal of time investing in finding out what their customers really wanted, then delivered it. With 100,000 downloads in the first month and 85% 4 out of 5 rankings, it seems to have hit the mark.
Medtronic’s Matt Thomas re-iterated this on day 2 when he advised us to start with the strategy, learn from observing customers and continually analyse in order to refine the service.
The best healthcare mobile solutions, like the best banking solutions, do exactly what customers want, really well. In Helen’s words and put very simply, mobile apps or other mobile solutions must adhere to the first rule of great customer service:-
SUCCESS = WORK NEEDED BY USER < VALUE OF SERVICE
Simple, really.
