This month’s published document for The Orange Pages focuses on two new books written by the innovative and insightful author Seth Godin and how the content of each can be applied to health care marketing and marketing research.
In the first book, Meatball Sundae, Godin makes the simple point that what you sell and how you sell it need to be aligned. While many have flocked to e-media as their promotional vehicle of choice, Godin points out that trying to sell older, comfort products through this medium generates a disconnect in the mind of the customer. A blog for a fruit jam, for example, would make little sense to anybody, while not having a blog if you are selling state-of-the-art electronic equipment would be equally misguided.
In Godin’s other book, Tribes, he points out that traditional corporations are engineered to prevent change. As such, they are shaped like a pyramid, with those who do things the old way best being promoted, slowly but surely, until they reach what the Peter Principle describes as their maximum level of incompetence, i.e., where they have been able to do all previous jobs satisfactorily but now are at a point where their performance no longer permits them to move further. In a marketplace such as health care, in which the old ways of doing business no longer work, the pyramid approach will not bring change.
Instead, Godin argues that the structure of a tribe, where one individual sees an effective way to change things and gathers a growing but select group to help him/her, has a far better chance of producing fundamental advancement.
The point of all of this? Health care marketing, pharmaceutical marketing and probably your company or agency have become old and stale in the way they do business and need to change substantially. Accomplishing this goal will take self-appointed leaders who have a good idea, think it through, communicate it to others and see if they can attract enough tribe members to follow them and make the necessary changes happen.
To download the complete January 2009 discussion on how tribes can change health care marketing, please click here.
The monthly issue-based discussions that we publish in this newsletter
can also be distributed to you in hardcopy format via a complimentary
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Orange Pages. The Orange Pages is intended to serve
as a living, breathing resource of “Information, Education and
Issues Exploration for Today’s Pharmaceutical Marketing Researcher”
that we hope will be read with interest and kept within reach for
ongoing reference.
The format is a three-ring binder designed to hold packets of content
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