GfK Healthcare June 2010
	Turning Customer Ambivalence Into Loyalty By Tom Hartley, Ph.D., Vice President, and Jonathan Honiball, Vice President Pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device marketers are taking a new look at customer loyalty and engagement. We live in the age of declining sales forces, multiple marketing channels, value-added services and ever-increasing demands on the effectiveness of marketing, sales and service. In this environment, understanding customer loyalty is an important factor in sharpening your strategy. What exactly is customer loyalty? As discussed in GfK Healthcare’s recent webcast on the topic, The Compelling Case for Customer Loyalty in Pharma & Beyond, it is a process for measuring the attitudes that drive customer behavior and ultimately determining the actions that create loyalty. It is also an attitude that leads customers to use your company’s products, recommend them more regularly and resist offers from the competition, thereby giving you a larger share of category spend. In essence, customer loyalty is an attitude that companies measure and manage in order to grow. Consider some compelling factors. Because product alone no longer differentiates one company from another, this means: Less product distinction and more commoditization Increasing demands on sales and marketing to become more cost-effective Greater emphasis on sales and service quality More supplementary services used to create differentiation Greater focus on alternative marketing channels as costly sales efforts are scaled back Company loyalty considered an important supplement to loyalty toward a single product When you decide to build customer loyalty and engagement, your company will need to choose the one number that will be your organization's focal point. Careful analysis will help you choose the best metric for your company and build consensus that you have selected the right one. Most companies today choose a metric that correlates as strongly as possible with their customers' behavior. You want your engagement metric to have the closest possible ties to your company's profit drivers, whether that is prescriptions or the overall size of the customers' relationship with your company. You also need to ensure that the end product of the research is actionable. That means asking your customers to rate things that you and your competitors do (or fail to do) and discovering which of these drive customer loyalty. To prioritize effectively, make sure that you are using a powerful statistical estimator that tells you what things physicians want more: the differentiators that turn ambivalent physicians into loyal advocates. Also make sure that your statistical estimator identifies the hot buttons that lead physicians to give your competitors' products the benefit of the doubt. Finally, don't forget that the end game of customer loyalty research is different from other market research. A great deal of research leads to a decision: use this message or that message; keep promoting a product or stop promoting the product. Customer loyalty programs usually lead to actions that must be implemented by many different parts of your organization. So plan ahead to allow for action-planning sessions that translate survey results into specific goals and buy-in throughout your organization. For an even greater perspective on customer loyalty and how and when you can leverage such a program for your organization, access GfK Healthcare’s complete Customer Loyalty webcast. Click here to view the archived presentation. Want to learn more on this topic? Please contact:

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