While the pharmaceutical industry has spent the past several years
optimizing its ability to reach and target physicians through a diverse
array of new communication channels, it is becoming evident that companies
must now increasingly adopt more innovative approaches to positioning
and message development. This is primarily because the proliferation
of the industry’s marketing communications capacity has produced
an unfortunate consequence: physician attention-deficit disorder.
Ironically, this side effect is the direct result of the overabundance
of pharmaceutical promotions aimed at medical providers. Together
with a number of other factors, this promotional noise has caused
physician time available to attend to, filter and assimilate information
to become increasingly scarce.
Thus, while it is now easier to reach and target physicians, it has
never been more challenging to truly access them – to command
their attention and to deliver effective, memorable, prescription-driving
messages. Drawing on thoughts expressed in a seminal book by
Ken Sacharin, Attention!, the central challenge that pharmaceutical
marketers will increasingly face is to communicate effectively with
physicians without simultaneously adding to the deluge of messages
that are causing doctors to filter out – or completely ignore
– the promotion.
This quandary will force companies to adopt a new set of message development
practices that are based on the new realities of this hypercommunicated,
hypercompetitive medical marketplace.
The first new reality is that marketers can no longer
count on physicians paying attention – and if the physicians
are not paying attention, they will not hear the message. The
second new reality is that, more than ever, physicians are
now learning about medicines through a multiple number of sources.
These sources (including such diverse media as detailing, seminars
and symposia, e-detailing and other interactive media) must be individually
optimized and carefully coordinated if a product’s story is
to be told with maximum efficiency. As part of the third new
reality, due to the extraordinary level of competitive pressure,
companies are stepping up their counterdetailing efforts, taking every
opportunity to exploit their opponents’ weaknesses. Thus, product
managers must be careful to tell a story for their products that both
sells and inoculates them against attack by competitors. A
fourth and final reality is that new regulations are increasingly
limiting how companies use certain types of promotional tactics. Thus,
we will no longer be able to "buy" physician participation
in promotional events (although whether we could ever buy their attention
is debatable!).
One solution to dealing with all of these issues simultaneously resides
in a product positioning and message development approach developed
by GfK V2, called Information Architecture. Essentially, Information
Architecture involves a series of marketing research techniques that
systematically assign the constituents of a brand’s message
to their optimal roles in a logical and coherent brand story. In fact,
Information Architecture incorporates methods derived from academic
investigation into the psychology of persuasion, and has been refined
through GfK V2’s extensive real-world experience assisting many
pharmaceutical brand teams in crafting their positioning and message
strategies. As the competitive pressures in the industry intensify,
approaches incorporating the basic principles of Information Architecture
are becoming not only more prevalent, but in fact, standard practice
in pharmaceutical brand positioning and message development efforts
at several leading pharmaceutical companies.
To learn more about how you can create a story for your product, click
the link on the graphic image above to download the guidebook, Beyond
Product Positioning: Creating Your Product’s Story, in
which the pioneer of the Information Architecture methodology, GfK
V2 Chief Executive Officer Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D., examines:
- Existing positioning and message development
techniques (what we call “Simple Messaging”) and drawbacks
of these methods.
- The concept of building a story for your
product through the Information Architecture process and how it
differs from more traditional “Simple Messaging” techniques
- Details on the Information Elements, or building
blocks, that help build the product story:
- Attention-Grabbers
- Benefits
- Reasons to Believe
- Hygiene Factors
- Close
- Who Cares
- The product lifecycle stages and market scenarios
where it is most optimal to implement Information Architecture
- The six steps involved in the Information
Architecture system:
- Step 1 – Generating the
Information Elements
- Step 2 – Exploring and
Triaging the Information Elements
- Step 3 – Generating the
Product Story:
Using
Stakeholder Input
- Step 4 – Determining
the Consistency of the Story
- Step 5 – The Wrap Up
- Step 6 – Developing and
Testing the Creative
