Soul searching

By Sunny Shah, executive VP, strategy and client services, inVibe, a Division of THREAD.

COVID, SCHMOVID … Of all the trends that have accelerated over the past two years, none are more striking and impactful for pharma marketing than a renewed focus on the patient experience. That involves a holistic approach to patient engagement and empowerment that goes beyond traditional disease education, treatment, and support messaging.

While the world was locked down and physician offices stood empty, pharma marketers got the unprecedented and long overdue chance to soul search. We asked ourselves: What’s truly important for our constituents? What do patients and their providers truly care about? How can we best create and sustain relationships, rather than toss advertisements at people?

We’ve been asking ourselves these questions for years, of course, but the global health crisis forced us to rethink how we do what we do and why we do it from the ground up. Rather than take traditional channels, platforms, and tactics for granted, we had no choice but to re-engineer our plans and reallocate our budgets in ways once thought impossible or infeasible for years.

The result has been a renewed focus on striving to better listen, understand, and act on the needs and expectations of our audiences – instead of falling back on old habits, many of them started before digital changed everything. That shift has demanded fresh and innovative approaches to market research to bring the patient and professional voice back into the mix.

Here at inVibe Labs, we’ve strived to infuse the patient and provider voice into every milestone of the drug development and commercialization life cycle. From pre-launch clinical trial design and recruitment to downstream campaign development, activation, and testing, pharma brands are now able to literally listen to the actual voices of the audiences they wish to empower.

Since all that’s needed from our test subjects is their own phone to receive stimuli and respond with their own voice for as long and however they prefer, the doors have also been opened for otherwise disenfranchised segments of the population to have their voices be heard. By eliminating all barriers to entry, technology has created truly egalitarian market research.

This dual trend – independent of COVID yet further reinforced by it – has helped augment traditional qualitative and quantitative market research methodologies with a proven third option. Bringing the depth of qual with the convenience and immediacy of quant, voice-based research coupled with AI and human linguistic analyses and dynamic reporting sets a new standard.

The even better news is that the patient experience is no longer a trend that flies under the proverbial pharma radar due to the industry’s inability to implement it. With the help of a mix of innovative tech and acute sensitivity to healthcare stakeholders’ needs, the once elusive dream of pharma brands hearing directly from their audiences is a long last coming true.

As the pandemic shifts in response to new variants and evolving approaches to mitigation and treatment, trends such as improving the patient experience will only continue. Thanks to innovative tech combined with heightened sensitivity and creativity, once-marginalized and ignored voices are now not only being heard, but listened to for the betterment of public health.