 |
An effective pharmaceutical advertisement is one that is instantly appealing to a physician and that visually embodies the promise of the brand over time. Beyond excellent planning and promotional development groundwork, crafting an advertisement that successfully infuses the right message requires a blend of creativity from the advertising agency and analytical techniques from the marketing research vendor.
In an article authored for Medical Marketing & Media, Noah Pines, Executive Vice President, GfK V2, and Cathy Su, Senior Manager, Market Research, Gilead Sciences, focus on ways to involve physicians in the process of developing an advertisement, specifically discussing the qualitative marketing research methodologies that can be used to systematically gather and channel physician input.
Conducting marketing research with physicians can be challenging and this is especially true when advertising testing is involved. It is important to keep the following points in mind:
- Physicians tend to be skeptical of pharmaceutical advertising primarily because of concerns about exaggerated product claims. They also claim their decisions are based upon science and not symbolism – and thus have little regard for advertising.
- While physicians respond more uniformly to product messages, each becomes an “art critic” when looking at advertising, often bringing varying opinions and personal preferences to bear in assessing visual imagery.
- Advertisements often are designed to appeal to physicians’ emotions and intuitions in addition to their rational sensibilities. However, doctors often are reticent to admit that emotion plays a role in their prescribing calculus.
- Physicians pay cursory – if any – attention to advertisements when looking through medical journals. They look at ads more in depth in marketing research than in real life. Therefore, it is essential that the team creates advertisements that are at once credible, deliver the message and communicate this message in an immediate, at-a-glance manner that does not require work on the part of the physician.
Since the creation of an effective advertisement requires much work on the part of the creative team in channeling feedback from customers, several rounds of marketing research should be expected. Each round, as explained below, is intended to refine and narrow the spectrum of promotional concept candidates.
- Round One: Start Broad. This initial phase involves conducting IDIs to test a variety of promotional concepts. During this process, physicians are asked to browse a gallery of images. Based on the feedback, the brand team selects the winning concepts to advance to the next round of testing. Special consideration should be given during this step when working with specialists as to how they process visual stimuli.
- Round Two: Refine the Winners. During this phase, physicians go through a more in-depth evaluation of a narrower set of concepts. In contrast to the art gallery approach used in the previous step, they see “flashes” of ad imagery (no headlines, taglines or body copy included) to determine which concept has the best visual recall power. This second drill-down round is designed to reduce the range of ads to two or three that can be used for final testing.
- Round Three: Qualitative Testing and Semantic Differential Scales. After qualitative research, the brand team may choose to conduct a quantitative analysis of the effectiveness of the remaining ads with a large sample of the physician specialties. Often used here is “tip-in” testing, where the ad is placed in a mock medical journal to gauge its stopping power, and/or semantic differential scales, which measure how concepts perform with respect to a series of abstract themes such as “good-bad”, etc.
When making decisions about the development of an advertisement, it is always important to balance the input of physicians as one aspect of the process, with the other aspects being experience and good marketing judgment. It is also helpful for the researcher to have some useful comebacks to dispatch the concerns of physicians who are either skeptical of or object to pharmaceutical advertising. One that has been particularly useful in these situations is reassuring them that the advertisement is part of a broader mix of promotion, which would include scientific presentations, data and medical education.
To download the article, Crafting Effective Ads, please click here.
|
|
The Science of Creative: Using Marketing Research to Create Effective Ads
