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Seth Godin has been described by many as one of the ultimate entrepreneurs for our Age.
Anyone who chomps through business books is bound to have read at least the first half of either Permission Marketing, Tribes, All Marketers Are Liars, and Purple Cow. He is healthily intolerant of widgets, NPD, and patents, and lends a good deal of confidence to marketeers striving to achieve the ‘remarkable’.
Technology is one thing, but the value in it is the application. In light of this and to the 1250 people who read our blog every month here’s your chance to contribute and help us.
We have a competition going on in here. Come up with a great idea that we can put on the ipad and commercialise within the healthcare sector and win the sodding thing. We thought we’d extend it to everyone. So it’s simple. Send us in your ideas; however straight forward and the best idea submitted wins the ipad. The best way to start is probably to answer the question “what if you/ we could…” It needs to be relevant to what we do, supporting and communicating healthcare and medicines to people, but that’s as tight as the brief gets. We’ll do the judging, we’ll decide who wins, and the judge’s decision is final. Normal competition rules apply; see here for the legal stuff, names of winners published on request etc. Competition closes on the 18th July so get those grey cells working.
To enter leave a comment here, or send your thoughts to beapart@hivehealth.com.
Competition rules available from http://hivehealth.com/privacy/
Buzzing.
That’s how I felt after 2 hours hearing from the gurus of Facebook and Google. They have changed our world and they will continue to do so. Search and social media. Without them brands and their web-presence are increasingly irrelevant.
Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.
The power of this mission is extraordinary. The passion of those that work there is contagious. There are 400 million active users. Returning regularly. Sharing their favourite things with those they know. Did you know that your propensity to click on an article or join a group if you know that one of your friends has, is multiplied around 80 times? The joy of “Your friend likes this”. And it’s free! Community networks and social media are more enormous and more powerful than any media that has gone before. Social media can turn a marketing monologue into a consumer dialogue. It can give a brand talkability, shareability. Ignore it and miss out.
Google = Search.
A concept that the global population is very used to. But, the future of search is making the past look antiquated. It’s mobile and almost human in nature reflecting voice, eyes, skin and location by using speaker, camera, touch-screen and GPS to replace the Google search bar.
“Not being top of search in Google is like the modern day equivalent of being out of stock.” This comment came from one of the most senior marketers at one of the top pharmaceutical companies. And it really stuck in my mind. How often has search been the last thing on the list?
So what can we learn from all this? A lot. Search and Social Media – If no one can find your brand and no one likes your brand, your brand has a problem. But on the plus side, the opportunities these create are endless. Thank you Google and Facebook for changing the world and making it a better and more connected place.
The latest instalment of Hive Poly’s (motto - Velle est posse) strategy training sessions discussed leadership, project management and the joys of singing songs. All via a case study covering Ernest Shackleton and his 1915 ill-fated Antarctic expedition
We reviewed all aspects of the trip, planning, disaster management and eventual rescue. It’s a great way to review the elements of leadership, how plans must remain flexible, and team culture, alongside a solid direction really helps when you get yourself trapped in ice. Shackleton proved a great example of entrepreneurship, self-promotion and of obsessive dedication.
I found the ad Shackleton use in the The Times to recruit for this expedition – showing also the value of a sense of humour when asking people to take part in difficult adventures. I love the honesty of ’safe return doubtful’.
Most of you will know our entire business revolves around the concept of consumer empowered medicine. Patient centricity. It comes by lots of names, but fundamentally it’s about the future role of us as determinants of our healthcare solutions.
Many of you will also be aware of our enthusiasm for TED lectures, and particularly the TEDMED series which revolves around medicine. This morning on the train I watched on my smart phone a lecture by Dr Topol, (not of Fiddler on the roof fame), but about the evolution of wireless technology in medicine. It is fascinating and worth 16 minutes 58 seconds of your time. We are already using these types of technology for a client in chronic clinics, but this really broadens our ambition and the tech team are on it now. Hope you like it.
Just back from a really inspiring evening held by a client for 250 pharmacists at Wembley Stadium.
Alongside chicken satay and chardonnay was a really fresh approach.
Half way between stand-up and business school the slide presentation avoided a focus on products, ingredients, features or benefits. And elevated the discussion to value and driving an understanding that customer satisfaction was the common ground that existed between the audience and organisers.
The two hour presentation waxed lyrical on the value placed by customers on the interaction and the urgent requirement for pharmacy to wake up to engaging their customers in the non product elements of the consultation.
Delivered in a fresh, unusual and pretty compelling way it’s the first time I have seen this challenging approach and style of presentation given live with customers on a mature brand.
It’s pretty common to train and educate on launch brands during a med ed’ phase, but this focused on Business ed’ and went down a storm. It provided a real opportunity for the company to demonstrate commercial expertise, partnership . Probably most importantly it elevated the discussion from product flogging to a genuine adult to adult dialogue. A business talking to another business for mutual gain, rather than supplier and stockist fulfilling the usual adult child cliché.
I hope to be able to get some footage to show you.
Ian rocked into the office this morning, fresh from a PM magazine all agencies round table shindig with a number of agency leaders, MDs etc.
These mornings are a feast of fun for us in the office, a usually calm, collected and considered Ian, can barely contain his overnight simmer. He positively is busting for a chat, and Jas and I can almost feel him ready to boil over.
Anyone who encounters Ian will know it’s pretty hard to get a rise out of him (I can lay claim to managing to do this almost once – in an incident, involving my 6th Nokia N95 in 2 weeks and a pint of cider. Although Vodafone’s dismal approach to customer service is co-culprit)
This need for an outburst lasted all through our first-thing-Friday People meeting until he could take it no longer. No AOB? BANG. The topic of this rare eruption? Innovation, advertising agencies, the nature of conceptual creativity i.e. the ability to do a different more connective ad, versus innovation – the ability to provide solutions our clients are not expecting. Jas shouted INCOMING and we all hit the deck.
What stuck me – is the clear struggle Ian was having with wanting desperately for the industry, or more specifically agencies to grow up and evolve and stop boring each other with tales of clients, late adoption blah, blah (anyone still awake?), With the pleasure he was getting from seeing innovation being falsely encapsulated by an obsession with the ad, what goes into an A4 page, and whether illustrative style, or a bloody banner can be seen as ground breakingly progressive. blah blah blah.
I think what we were viewing can encapsulated by the term Schadenfreude. In fact I know it is because I have just spent ten minutes on Google trying to spell it. I was eventually able to confirm this is the case and that the term definitely isn’t German for pork chop.
I think one could argue that Communications holding companies buy ‘established innovation’ i.e change that’s margin friendly. Be that agencies that show high levels of creativity, an unusual regional speciality, or integration model. It certainly was the case with the three I have been under (although I can only speak for healthcare). Their model is set up to buy novel agencies at the top of their game, and make sure that they keep doing what they are good at, never deviating too far from a formula that got them purchased. No risks and certainly no investment without return.
I was told that the agency world’s approach to innovation was ‘bloody stupid’ by a clever guy, Craig, I often sit next to at the Company of Cutlers in Sheffield. He put it a bit like this; his world; the stainless steel industry is split into revenue from commoditized and specialist products. And all the players in the market know this. (To me it’s a bit like artwork, design, traffic and the sexier agency products services). They know that the commodity business is always under margin pressure and threat (when was the last time a page of artwork cost £400?). And they know that the specialist products migrate to becoming the commodised ones (conceptual writers at medical writer rates).
Sheffield steels answer to this reality is to set up R&D, cap the maximum margin and devote the remaining resource to innovation, partner with academia and the great and the good to push constantly what drives ultimate value – providing services and products that are first to market. Find ‘unused to’ products that meet existing needs but do so either more efficiently or in better way.
Given this I couldn’t figure out why agencies don’t have R&D. Why don’t they someone tasked with research, with finding new ways of solving established problems.
Is it because 20% margin and 4 out of 5 on the annual review is fine, and innovation requires investment and less short term returns?
I’ve been sitting here waiting to type this blog for about twenty minutes, trying to decide what to write about the launch of eBee.
I could mention the guerrilla marketing at the digital marketing awards.
I could mention that it was a night of firsts for me – first company I’ve launched, first time I’ve ever used spray paint, first time I’ve been asked to remove it.
I could tell you about all the people who have made this possible: clients, patients, a team of inspirational, passionate individuals and the 5 months spent pre launch collecting amazing technologies to play with and developing the technical development capacity to make them work for brands.
I could tell you how lucky I feel to have been asked by the founders of Hive (the mothership) to turn a business concept founded on ‘borrowing’ innovation from other industries, making it healthcare relevant and turning them into reality.
But instead I’ll just invite you to visit and you can decide what you’d like to know for yourself
On Wednesday, Kieran and I went to see the BP ‘Classified’ exhibition at the Tate Britain. Two things stood out for me and really got me thinking.
The first was an oil painting by Gillian Carnegie. Using only black paint she’s created an amazing picture of trees, which seems to have more texture and atmosphere than a coloured painting would have had.
But what made her decide to do it in just black?
The second was a collection of sculptures by Jake and Dinos Chapman. At first glance they look like traditional aborigine sculptures, but when you look closer there are numerous references to McDonalds. It’s a comment on our lack of understanding and appreciation of the culture that this type of art originates from, and also on our own culture, and the predominance of huge commercial organisations such as Maccy D’s.
Again, it’s such a clever idea, but what made them think of it?
At Hive, our business is built on doing things differently, thinking in a different way. But it’s all too easy to get stuck thinking ‘differently’ – and then different becomes the same. The challenge is to keep finding the inspiration to think outside an ever-changing box.
Our ever loving ears hearken once more to the digital pitter patter of patient empowerment. UCB Pharma have partnered with patientslikeme.com to bring an Epilepsy community to the site.
Patientslikeme.com is a privately owned initiative that encourages patients to post details about themselves. This real world, outcome-based data is shared with individuals and organisations who work to improve health outcomes, including pharmaceutical companies, research organizations, and non-profits.
30% of epilepsy patients are refractory to treatment, so this move is good news for patients, HCPs and even competing Pharma. Over 37,000 patients are already registered on the site as well as 3,000 caregivers. Any epilepsy community should include the voice of caregivers, as a significant proportion of epilepsy sufferers are elderly or have learning disabilities.
Patientslikeme.com doesn’t just collect data from patients, it provides quality information and allows them to blog and communicate with peers. It’s a site that really does seem to have patients’ interest at heart. That’s why we like it – and so congratulate UCB for being a part.
A report today by the BBC confirms what many of us have been expecting. The NHS has a big problem looming. Now I’m not an economist and my understanding of the financial levers required to prop up the economy in a downturn are pretty non existent, but I do understand what has happened before. Recessions hit tax revenues (less people working) and so the Government has less to spend. Even if we ignore all the other stuff like quantitative easing and budget deficits the simple fact remains, money is tight, and its going to get tighter. Add to this an ageing population, the threat of pandemic viruses and a grossly over-administered system the impact on the health service has no choice that to be considerable. Inevitably the spectre of large scale cost cutting, drug tariff pressure and even new drug prescription caps become the norm. There is no doubt in my mind that our industry and our clients business are in for difficult years as soon as the election is called. The policy maker the BBC interviewed called it 7 years of pain from 2011 . In my humble opinion the industry future requires us to be more innovate in the way we plan and launch new treatments, more cognisant of who needs to have meaningful relationships with medicines and more accommodating of the multiple layers of influence that will become normal. It’s true that innovation normally is more prevalent in crisis and whilst no one welcomes what is going on, I am confident that through adversity will come opportunity. We need to mirror the radical reform that our principal customer will undergo, recognise that doing what we have always done will not change anything and embrace the need for new thinking. Thankfully, that’s sort of why we set up…
In the city of Portland, Oregon, ‘Mrs. Smith’ has invited Intel Corp to equip her house and its contents with hi-tech sensors. These sensors map Mrs. Smith’s movements through her home, and measure her average stride length. They note the volume at which she speaks, and the amount of time it takes her to recognise her granddaughter on the telephone. They keep track of her nocturnal activity, including bathroom trips, midnight snacks, and ‘romantic encounters’. Urgh.
Researchers at Intel Corp will translate this data into a ‘behavioural baseline’ for Mrs. Smith. Any deviation from the norm could be a signal that something is amiss. Although research is at an early stage, it is hoped that the technology will eventually be able to recognise the patterns of behaviour that are characteristic of certain early-stage diseases, like Alzheimer’s.
It would currently take many years to determine if Mrs. Smith was developing dementia, and this technology shows promise to shorten this timeframe considerably. Early diagnosis translates into improved outcomes, and so intelligent houses may become an efficacious (although expensive) healthcare intervention. However, as with all nascent technology, many people are worried about the potential for abuse. You’d be worried too, if you’d seen Demon Seed.
My friend Kate sat in my kitchen looking through a pile of papers. Then she laughed a short, scornful laugh:
“Wikipedia? Why would you print anything off Wikipedia?”
Silence. A loose ball of cat hair tumbleweeded past.
I stirred the tea and hung my head. Why can’t I get into good debate with Kate? She makes me feel dumb. Nevertheless, I had to talk to someone about my thoughts on Wikipedia.
Unlike a real life Encyclopedia you need two hands to carry, Wikipedia is generated and edited by its users. There’s an article for just about every search term out there, and it’s often the first link on the search results page.
What came first, Wikipedia’s popularity or its accessibility?
Anyway, thousands of iterations by users shape a package of apparently relevant, well structured content, updated into real time. But with any piece of information plucked from the net, you should fact check your finds against your own research.
For very casual research, I don’t have a problem with Wikipedia. It is fairly obvious to see which content has been approved by a substantial body of readers. And we know that scientific rigour is based in sample size. 2 approvals – not very rigorous, 200 approvals – much better. However, it’s true that we don’t know what these people are agreeing upon. I have never really checked out the references (not called references but “Notes” – suspicious).
Obviously Wikipedia was never made to fly with academia. There is also this satirist who calls Wikipedia an example of “truthiness” – the repurposing of “gut feeling” as equivalent to hard evidence.
Then again, Wikipedia is a soft target because it’s such an annoying buzzword. It’s high street, common, unfashionable. It’s in the distressing realm of the hyper-real (Wiki isn’t a real word). It symbolises our separation from what we were… think of the massive encyclopedia clutched to the chest with tiny child hands…the effort of finding the page we wanted.
But it should be fashionable for at least a couple of reasons – it’s free, it doesn’t make any money, it’s community-led.
People wanna get their facts straight!
Sermo is a social networking site we have been following here for a little while. It’s bloody successful – 3,000,000 comments, 30,000 discussions and the largest physicians only network with around 50,000 members. Sermo continuously reinforces its value proposition, making its community secure, more user friendly and in-line with its stated goals and vision.
The Sermo community has had a few tests over the last 8 months or so – each time with naysayers being promptly being put into place by the community. From my old politics days – it was one of the fundamentals of sovereignty that a state provides for its members during peace time and expects those members to look after it when under attack. Perhaps this tenant of nation state theory can be stretched online? I hope so – it make 3 years of my life less of a waste of time!
Initially pharma’s role in this community was seen as something to be defended against. CEO and founder of Sermo Daniel Palestrant stated in an interview with (the ridiculously named) New Paradigm; “As a doctor I thought that other doctors were tired with interacting with Pharma…then we started having more and more members of the community saying, “Hey, where’s Pharma… why aren’t they in the system?”.
Sermo sought further input asking – “Do we want Pharma in here? The result – between 60% – 80% of the community felt a need for Pharma involvement somehow.” This feedback has been taken to heart and given rise to a recent announcement a partnership with Pfizer. Reading this made me feel warm about the benefits of online communities and the requirement physicians have for us lot to be involved.
Children with chronic disease often fail to adhere to prescribed treatment regimens, especially self-administered treatments. This is a significant challenge to overcome. Several cognitive and motivational processes are thought to influence adherence, including: (i) knowledge about the therapy and its relationship to health; (ii) perceptions of one’s ability to influence health outcomes (perceived control); and (iii) confidence in one’s ability to meet the demands of treatment and recovery (self-efficacy). This is true of both children and adults, although the specific barriers to adherence most likely differ depending on age. Children-specific interventions to improve adherence, in my experience, fail to engage. And engagement is a necessary component of effectiveness.
Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled across Re-Mission, a computer game designed to improve adherence to self-administered chemotherapy in children with cancer. In the game, players control a tiny robot, called ‘Roxxi’ (strangely attractive, see picture) within the body of a young cancer patient – the objective is to ensure that the virtual patients engage in self-care behaviours, such as taking oral chemotherapy to combat the cancer cells, taking antibiotics to fight infection, using relaxation techniques to reduce stress, and eating food to gain energy. The game is very playable, and there’s something intrinsically therapeutic about blasting the crap out of a malignant cancer cell, even for me
I know what the cynical among you are thinking, because I thought it to. Gimmick. And that’s why I was especially pleased to learn that Re-Mission had been evaluated in a peer-reviewed journal, and that the evaluation is positive. The conclusion? “The video-game intervention significantly improved treatment adherence and indicators of cancer-related self-efficacy and knowledge in adolescents and young adults who were undergoing cancer therapy. The findings support current efforts to develop effective video-game interventions for education and training in health care.“
As part of my development plan I recently attended an event celebrating Women’s Enterprise Day. ‘Rising to the challenge’ hosted a panel of award-winning women inventor-innovators sharing first hand experiences of overcoming the many challenges of getting a new product idea to market and establishing a young business.
Notebook in hand I was aiming to learn what it means to be innovative – what are the secrets behind it and indeed is there a set formula that can help us to ensure that our work is always as relevant and insightful as possible.
Speaking at the event were 4 successful inventors all well in the swing of marketing and production and on their way to what seemed to be a fairly common goal of making money! What interested me the most was the similarities in the principles and attitudes of these inventors to our industry. So what did I learn…?
The need to have an idea but to accept that it will evolve was potentially the rule that most resonated for me. Ideas – no matter how inspirational they may be, need to adapt and change and most importantly they need to be relevant to the end user. Without knowing your customer, what makes them tick and why they would be interested, your idea is likely to sink. Whilst these 4 inventors were unique in the way they described their experiences, they all had this understanding in common. They demonstrated a vast understanding of the market within which their product/idea sat and talked passionately about who their customer was and how they interacted with their product. Finally the importance of having a brand that wraps the idea and being a true advocate for the brand (with a small air of arrogance and belief) was something that I’m sure has guided their success.
Whilst I am still not convinced that I have a set formula in my armoury to help me to learn the art of innovation, I was certainly reassured that we too are doing something right…
