Archive for March 2008

Bizarreness reared it six eared head last week, when hordes of photographers and art fans descended on Savemain pharmacy in Essex Road, Islington, after Banksy painted a large mural on the wall depicting three children pledging allegiance to a flagpole with a Tesco plastic bag flying from it. As a fan of the artist, a person fascinated with HCPs, and this being my local pharmacy I felt I had to go and have a look. Speaking to Anand the pharmacist at the family-run business, he said: “We are a little bit surprised at all the fuss - it’s certainly not something we see every day. We had no idea, we just came into work on Monday morning and there it was. Hopefully no-one will do anything to damage it. It would be nice if it helped business.” His uncle Raj hilariously added that “they were considering whether to sell it”

The Islington Gazette has subsequently carried a comment from a spokesman for Tesco, who have a store in Essex Road, who said: “If this proves to be genuine and all indications are it is, then we’re flattered to have been thought of by one of the UK’s foremost contemporary artists. However, we’re not art critics and will leave it to individuals to decide on its poignancy.

Have they missed that this is clearly Banksy’s comment on the demise of the independent pharmacy?

In the Rx marketing process, healthcare professionals have long been viewed as the biggest kids in the room, the holders of the power. Our first need was to have them on board, understanding and agreeing with our key messages, weighing up the facts and writing scripts like mad. Get the gate open - step back and watch the newly medicated sheep trot through. Understand the HCP, connect with their emotions and functional requirements and bang, product launched, sales incoming, off we go.

In these less bullish days (fewer new products, more chronic care, empowered patients), a new challenge has knocked on our door. Driving depth of use, and not just breadth, is an urgent requirement. It’s no longer enough to get a prescription written. We need to ensure that the sufferers have some part to play - complying, understanding, loyalty, enjoyment.

But as we shift towards end user strategy, we cannot lose sight of the HCP role. We need to acknowledge that instead of guarding the gate, the professional is becoming part of the medicine experience for the end user. This new dynamic means different ways of insight delving, tactical delivery etc.

We would be daft not to review how other industries have made this transition, especially other industries with gatekeepers as part of their brand journey. There isn’t a direct equivalent for the healthcare professional in industries such as automotive/computer/banking, but a lot of our challenges have been faced by these groups. In other words, these professionals are rarely or never responsible for public safety, but they also contribute to the brand experience for that most important player - the end user.

BMW invests hugely in understanding its end user. Only then does it understand its store environment, and then its independent sales advisors. In reconciling these insights, the showroom scene becomes a piece of the brand experience set up to gain loyalty from the customer.

I was lucky enough to sit next to a biggie at First Direct at dinner recently. With this service offer, their telephonists are the main touch point for consumers, their position is of unusually high responsibility within the brand journey. The satisfaction and loyalty of First Direct customers in general suggests that other companies could do well to infuse their call centre staff with new levels of responsiveness.

These two examples, and countless others, are strongly relevant to the healthcare model. They can help us learn how to respond to this turning environment, as we stand besides an open gate and really get to know those sheep.

A few weeks ago we were delightfully asked to present our credentials to a prospective client. A meeting was set up, but soon we received another call. Instead of presenting creds, could we help contribute to solving a problem? Would we immediately take a brief and instead present our thoughts on the issue? Absolutely! we cried in unison, excited at the prospect of adding value from our very first meeting.

After receiving the brief, we formulated our plan, reviewed our existing knowledge, spoke to contacts in this category, defined areas where we had gaps, gathered 2 (Qual) groups of healthcare professionals, confirmed/chucked out some stuff, structured our argument and wrote the presentation. Last Friday, we got on the train, rehearsed, arrived and presented.

Once it was over, we began to think about this slightly off-centre approach. Why do we stick with generic credentials presentations that often serve up a beauty parade of materials but don’t get to grips with our team, approach and hunger? Getting instantly into a project with a challenge is a better test of our strength. We’re here to solve problems, not self promote. It struck us was how much better it feels to be serving a purpose. Rather than demonstrating the past, we worked with the present to directly benefit the team we were with.

The agency world insists on its clients understanding its audience. We strive for brands to have meaningful conversations with people, not self-obsessed monologues. It’s great to be afforded the same with the agency brand and its potential client team. I guess for us the learning is always to ask whether there is something we can help with, rather than taking the easy option of the off-the-shelf slide deck.

Printing guilt. When a simple web document inexplicably turns into tens of senseless, almost clean pages spitting out of the Laserjet. When the last page of your print-out is a single URL or a useless banner (Streetmap.com - sort it out!).

Until now, those with a conscience have tried fiddling with printer settings (e.g. choosing “Page 1 only”) or ditching hard copies altogether for downloadable PDF views. Now there’s freeware that does this for you, and more. GreenPrint analyses web pages and allows you to bin those with insubstantial content, saving on paper, ink and time. You can also choose which pages, images etc. you want to build into a PDF version of your document. GreenPrint even keeps track of what you’ve saved in terms of pages, cost (in USD) and number of trees. Also, anything that reminds us to print double-sided and on waste paper, is a good thing.

It’s not preachy, it’s practical. Result: Big thumbs-up from Hive. Click on the banner below to start printing green.

For the best blog post we decided to give away 2 months free use of Napster. We have this playing in the office and its brilliant - every album and every track you’ve ever loved instantly at your finger tips. Millions of tracks, from a catalogue of 5 million. Dozens of suggestions of other artists - its totally changed the way we listen to music here.

Well after much heated debate, we have decided to award two months of musical brilliance to twice posting Bambi. Access details on their way, enjoy April and May on us.

Healthcare is a complex world to work in, whether we sell products or services. On top of our day to day business, we’re struck by reams of science, mode of actions, molecular specs, and more.

The result is that in healthcare, we are surrounded by distractions. When we’re asked to explain what it is we do, we get immediately sidetracked into describing stuff that is really besides the point. To be fair, there are times when we have to pass the time; fill in gaps in conversation. Perhaps this is why this kind of pointless talk has been described as “elevator speech”, or the more stylish “martini monologue”.

But sometimes it invades boardrooms, too. We lose sight of our brand as “the moral of our story” when we plan our communications. Or maybe we understand our brand in our own heads, but fail to produce a short, consistent description when asked. We prepare in the wrong ways, getting tangled in details when it’s really not necessary.

How do we get to that core of what it is we do? By asking yourself one question: why it is that we (or our service) can meet customer’s needs better than anyone else. If you can find a way to verbalise this to a stranger in a lift or a brand director over lunch, you’re practising engagement. That brand story will find its way into communications materials too - the places that you build on with key messages, that complicated MOA diagram, and so on.

Martini anyone?

Hope everyone enjoyed the OTCs last night as much as we did. Well judged, great food, lots of laughs all round. Huge congratulations to those who bagged an award. Very deep thanks to organisers Debbie and Val for letting us sponsor the event with our charming honey vodka-issuing ladies Ebony and Danielle. We trust everyone had a chance to sample our nectar. All together now: 1, 2, 3, 4, Hive!!

Fact: the green stamp WILL fade eventually - don’t panic. (If anything has worked for you please let us know.)

All of us here are getting ready for the OTC Marketing Awards. A few last minute emails to write, one job bag to put to print. Hope to bump into you there, after dinner enjoy a shot on us.

A recent comment from a client made me think about how pharmacists act as brand enhancers for patients/consumers.

Pharmacists are highly educated healthcare professionals. Patients have long relied on their valuable skills and used their advice to make a purchase. However, it has been traditional for organisations to communicate with them principally in business terms. This retail-led approach creates dissonance between the relationship pharmacy has with a brand’s manufacturers and the one they have with the brand’s users.

The new Contract, however, changes things. Although the uptake of enhanced services seemed slow to begin with, pharmacy’s growing relationship with patients is now much in evidence. (As it is with other HCPs: the growing weight of pharmacy has strengthened links with prescribers.) With almost 2 years since the independent prescriber act, there are far better opportunities to be had than talking “stock pressure and profit on return”.

Instead, manufacturers who understand and enhance the close relationship between pharmacist and consumer will gain more end-user engagement. A recent study showed that when pharmacists intervened in the sale - not by recommending, but by providing an informed brand initiation - patient compliance increased and patients were more likely to make a repeat purchase. Proof that what can be good for profits can be great for patients.

As the professional identity of the pharmacist sinks in, their challenges revolve around setting the clinical scene and promoting new services to patients. Pharmaceutical companies must continue to track areas of progress and deliver a rounded offer that benefits in-house experts and their patients.

There’s a really interesting new theory circulating called transmedia planning. A quick background: transmedia storytelling was a trend identified by the cultural academic Henry Jenkins, where entertainment brands used different media streams to tell pieces of a story or plot. Transmedia planning was born when a number of strategists, including Faris Yakob, adapted Jenkins’ theory for the marketing world.

TMP places control in the users’ hands by asking us to “Allow your audience to assemble your brand story”. It’s an interesting evolution of 360° marketing where one idea is expressed uniformly by multiple channels. TMP allows ideas (or parts of ideas) to reach consumers from a slightly different point of view, but deliver consistent value and meaning around a brand.

Hive’s business plan adopts a transmedia approach in the context of the important changes happening in healthcare. You don’t have to have read our recent blog comments to know that informed, or partially informed, patients are increasingly the norm. Growing access to different information sources gives patients more control over their treatment. The web allows communities to form and discuss treatment and results. Consumers are showing they need more than shallow promises and that’s where TMP fits the bill.

We have to remember though that the transmedia concept evolved in an unconstrained consumer world. In its purest form, TMP can’t apply directly to prescription brands because of the necessary limitations on patient communications. However, prescription drug users still form communities to share experiences about treatment, particularly those with chronic conditions. Using a transmedia approach here involves setting up the dialogue between prescriber and patient, but acknowledging that some of the dialogue and beliefs around the brand may also be acquired from less informed sources. The reality for patients/consumers is, the relative weight of advice sourced online vs the prescriber is not always as you would imagine.

Building relationships in any industry is about engagement with people. In the healthcare mainstream, the critical commitment may still be the prescriber’s. But it’s vital to remember that the prescriber is not the person experiencing the brand in a hands-on manner. Its time our communication to professionals and patients alike began to reflect that.