Modern physicians are expecting two-way relationships with brands.

By Renee Wills, president of Trio, an FCB Health Company.

 

When a child is young, his parents are his most trusted information source. He listens to what mom and dad tell him and do as they ask, because his view of the world is largely confined to what they have taught him and their authority is taken for granted. Even his moments of rebellion are procedural rather than substantive – “Why can’t I have more ice cream?” rather than, “Why do you get to decide how much ice cream I can have?”

But when that child grows up a little, this happy paradigm becomes more complex. The world gets bigger, other voices are heard, and suddenly mom and dad are no longer the fount of wisdom. Suddenly as a parent you can no longer simply make your child relate to you in your terms – you have to learn how to relate to them in their terms, assuming you can even figure out what their terms are. Otherwise you may find yourself talking at your child, and your child may start developing that faraway look of impatient disinterest that so many parents of teenagers have come to know.

Which brings us to the relationship between physicians and brands. Ten and 15 and 20 years ago, that relationship looked much like that of a parent to a young child. Today, with sources of information multiplying daily, physician expectations growing apace, and the doors to many practices being closed to sales forces, it looks more like parent/teenager.

While the parallel may not be perfect – physicians generally won’t dye their hair green or beg to borrow the car – for purposes of marketing it is instructive. 

The problem is that many brands are still treating physicians like young children. Have you been to a brand-sponsored physician speaker program lately? If so, what did you see? Was it an interaction, or a broadcast?

Now, imagine this: physicians arrive for a speaker program and are given an iPad pre-loaded with relevant clinical data alongside apps for submitting questions and live polling. Throughout the event they are actively encouraged – both by event staff and the iPad in their hands – to ask questions, to speak up, to act; and at the same time are actively asked at particular points in the program, is this what you need? If not, then what do you need? And a monitored feed of all those questions and poll responses is being displayed in the lobby, so physicians can see how their peers are responding. And a virtual vending machine on the iPad so participants can order additional clinical papers, education materials, et cetera. And the marketing team behind the curtain watches all this in real-time, adjusting their approach accordingly. A closed loop – the marketer’s dream – in miniature.

No one can deny that the technology to achieve this little bit of fantasy is perfectly available. And yet, we continue to stack up binders of clinical data for physicians as if they have some sort of exotic appetite for mountains of paper flavored with copier toner.

We need to stop talking, and listen.

And more than listen, really. All brand teams, if pressed, would say that they listen to physicians. But by the time they get to the execution and deployment part of the marketing cycle, whatever it is they are delivering is still nearly always inwardly focused. We need to listen and respond.

Twenty years ago, perhaps, it was our job as brand marketers to provide physicians with a mountain of clinical information. Back then we were the primary, if not the only, source of that information. But today our job has changed. Today, all that clinical information is taken for granted. Today, we need to show some sort of value that will arise out of their engagement with our brand. And, on top of that, we need to show that they themselves are a valued part of the brand. Today, you aren’t going to hear a physician say, “Wow, that four-hour lecture and clinical slides were amazing, I’m going to write more of that brand now!” Instead, you’ll hear, “This is a brand that really understands what my needs are, understands me as a physician, shows me that my voice is heard, helps me feel a part of a community with my peers, offers me tools to make my job easier.” Encouraging a response like that is the task of the modern pharmaceutical marketer.

This is easier said than done, of course. And one of the primary challenges to achieving it is the siren song of technology. Technology, iPad or otherwise, can certainly be used to invite physicians in to a brand – but it can also be used to dress up unidirectional communications in fancier clothing. If all you have at the end of the development process is the same information as before, except now it is displayed on a fancy animated slide or optimized for a mobile device, all you are doing is erring more expensively. The real value in technology for marketers like us is to give the audience a voice, not just to make our own voices louder.

Of course, just like being a good parent to a teenager, building a bidirectional relationship with physicians is hard. It takes work. Doing it successfully forces us to challenge every preconceived notion about the needs of our audience that we’ve developed over years in this business – and every preconceived notion that our clients have developed, too. There are many forces pushing us in the other direction – the force of tradition, the force of “It’s too difficult/costs too much money,” the force of our clients wanting answers that conform to their own preconceptions, of them wanting to pour out every drop of clinical data that they have so painstakingly collected.

But building bidirectional relationships works. How do we know? Because we’ve done it. Remember that speaker program fantasy we described earlier, with the iPads, question submission, live polling, and the rest? It’s no fantasy. We’ve done it. The rates of engagement, we found, were nearly three times higher than with more traditional programs. Event participants averaged an impressive 4 minutes 40 seconds of engagement time on the iPad – when is the last time that any marketing asset you’ve sent out into the world had that average level of interaction time? One in eight participants ordered patient support materials through the virtual vending machine – about one piece was ordered every four minutes. And every single participant – one hundred percent – elected to have a followup contact with a representative. Impressive as all that may be, none of that data captures the immense value of the feedback loop that our little experiment created, the nuggets of information we were able to gather about the actual needs and wants of our physician audience to make the next speaker program that much more effective. None of this was cheap or easy – running off a few dozen binders full of clinical data would have been lots easier – but now our client’s brand knows a little bit more about the physicians that prescribe it, those physicians feel a little bit more like a community of the brand, and the whole brand team has taken the first step towards a habit of active asking and listening and responding, which will pay considerable dividends down the line.

We aren’t claiming to have discovered some sort of magical insight here. Plenty of marketers in other industries figured out long ago that customers who feel like their voices are heard, who feel like participants in the brand rather than just targets, are happy customers. In the past we as an industry have been able to skate by without listening too carefully because of the monopoly we had on information and, well, “That’s the way it’s done.” But not anymore. Today we have tools at hand that can help us invite physicians into the brand as never before. We need to use them. Physicians have grown up. We need to grow up too.