| GfK Healthcare | January 2010 |
Portrait of a Customer: Psychographic Profiling  By Rebekkah Carney, Associate Vice Presidentand Michael Hessol, Associate Vice President There may be a point in your career when you have the opportunity to support a product that will expand your company’s portfolio to a new and fundamentally different audience, often without being given the time, budget or personnel to do things by the book. Finding an efficient solution to understanding this new audience is the key to your project’s success. Imagine the following scenarios, and you can understand the challenge: Perhaps your team is seeking to appeal to urologists in addition to the oncologists they’ve served for years, or you’ve discovered that the biologic you’ve taken to market with rheumatologists has applications that would support the needs of dermatologists and gastroenterologists. Maybe you’ve expanded your portfolio to appeal to referring physicians and nurses, who have a critical role in product choice and selection, or it’s time to expand from academic hospital applications to the broader audience of community-based surgeons. Cardiac surgeons may be your biggest fans, but your next product will need to be launched among interventional cardiologists, who sometimes collaborate with surgeons and sometimes compete with them. You may be the brand manager pivotal to the fast-paced launch cycles of medical devices; or the market researcher for an energetic but underfunded brand team at a specialty pharmaceutical company. Or the business developer charged with shepherding a portfolio-expanding acquisition to market for one of the top 10 global pharmaceutical companies; or the ad agency account manager asked to make sure that a line extension of an older blockbuster drug continues to support the bottom line. No matter what the scenario, your company needs to understand its new customers and their interactions with current stakeholders so that the company doesn’t lose its core clients. In all of these situations, you’ve been told who the key customer is for whom your product must be compelling, but you, the team and the company have no firm grasp on who the customer IS, or how to appeal to that customer. This research is not about how customers perceive your product; this research is about how they perceive themselves and how they would like to be perceived. Discovering that and communicating that image successfully and expediently is now your responsibility. The Tools Traditional tools for accomplishing this goal are segmentation studies and ethnography. These are fantastic tools, but if you do not have the time, the budgetary and human resources for these, or the requisite permissions necessary for onsite observation, you may need other tools that will allow you to understand your potential customers and contribute to the words and imagery that will create a draw for your product. Thorough qualitative psychographic profiling is one of these useful alternatives. The profiling approach consists of a series of face-to-face individual depth interviews (IDIs). The number of interviews can vary, depending on the homogeneity or variety in responses from each specialty, but 24 to 30 interviews of 45 to 50 minutes in length will give you some common themes for your new customer set. It is important to include several geographic locations – four to five disparate locations is ideal, and three should be your absolute minimum – to account for cultural biases associated with different regions. It is critical that this IDI feels more like a conversation than a typical qualitative interview – one of our research consultants uses the analogy of speed dating. You are trying to find out as much as you can about physicians who have chosen this particular medical specialty as their vocation. Remember that this is not a concept test, and your company and your product should be injected into that conversation as little as possible, and ideally not at all. Several projective techniques are used at different points in the conversation to gain a deeper understanding of the respondent’s mindset. A typical reaction from respondents after their interview is that they feel like they’ve had an enjoyable conversation about their own interests and their profession, but they don’t have any idea which company or product sponsored the conversation. This conversation typically consists of three central components: Respondent Characterization, Specialty Comparisons and Interactions, and Trends and Adoption. Respondent Characterization The goal of this initial component of the research is to understand the commonalities between respondents’ interests and motivations outside of their profession and how they relate to their motivations within their practice of medicine. This initial section consists of an in-depth inquiry into hobbies and interests, professional motivations and perceptions, followed by a series of mood board exercises, which can be useful in helping respondents connect images and emotions to their choices, actions or activities. Like a projective exercise, the explanation of the selection is the most important component, not necessarily the picture selected. Areas of inquiry may cover:
These sections are particularly useful in helping your agencies and marketing teams identify concepts that will help your new audience identify with your product, so it’s a great idea to have your creative team observing this research. Also, be sure to listen for words or phrases that tend to recur as themes among different respondents. Specialty Interactions, Differentiation and Comparisons This part of the conversation is helpful when there is an interaction between your current core customers and your new potential customers, whether the interaction is collaborative or competitive, and it can help you quickly identify the commonalities and differences. This is important if you wish to create a campaign that will appeal to your new audience without sacrificing the relationship and appeal you’ve built with your current customers. Areas of inquiry include:
Trends and Adoption Your exciting opportunity represents the future for this new audience. It’s a good idea to see how they perceive future trends in their practice so that you can gauge the kinds of effort it will take for the new customers to realize your vision. In medical device scenarios, you will be testing new developments in procedures as well as the products they use. Changes in surgical approach are a steep learning curve for most surgical specialists, so take that into consideration in your analysis. Again, this research is not a concept test, although if you have no other option, this is the section where a product profile can be inserted for consideration. If you choose to test your product portfolio, repeating the mood board and projection exercises is helpful. Also, while looking to the future, don’t forget to ask about the past. Finding out what they did the last time a major shift occurred in their treatment patterns and adoption, how long it took for them to adopt and adapt to that shift, what helped them make the change and what it meant for their practice is often a better indicator of future behavior than a stated intent regarding upcoming trends. Enhancements As we’ve seen, a concept profile may be used as a potential addition to the core research, but there are other enhancements you can leverage for a more powerful understanding of your new customers.
Conclusion When the success of your organization depends on addressing the needs of a new market audience, market research is one of the essential tools to painting a thorough portrait of your company’s new customers, and the results of that research are critical to communicating that profile effectively to your organization. When opportunities arise suddenly, or at critical junctures when time, budget and personnel are limited and preclude segmentation or full ethnographic analysis, other tools must be used. Psychographic profiling can help your organization, from leadership to your advertising agency, understand and address the needs and expectations of the new customers as effectively as you serve your traditional markets, and convert a challenge into your next opportunity. Want to learn more on this topic? Please contact:   |