Lawrence Binding is vice-president, general manager of Marketel Pharma in Montreal.
Is pharmaceutical creative an oxymoron? A quick flip through any Canadian medical journal will often lead you to exactly that conclusion.
There is, however, some good stuff out there, and the potential for much more. So rather than dwell on the negative, I’d like to outline a few key points to bear in mind when developing advertising for medical professionals.
1. Understand the capabilities and limitations of the medium
Let’s start by looking at pharmaceutical advertising through the eyes of our customer – the physician.
Think of the various sources of drug information as rungs on a ladder. Continuing medical education would be near the top, along with peer referencing. Sales representative detailing, meanwhile, would be somewhere in the middle. And advertising would occupy a bottom rung.
One of the most common mistakes in pharmaceutical marketing is to treat advertising as if it were at the top of the communications ladder. Given all the information packed into a typical journal ad, one could easily conclude that advertising is an important educational medium for doctors.
It isn’t. Medical professionals do not consider advertising the proper forum in which to learn anything. They have neither the time nor the inclination to take advertising that seriously. In fact, my suspicion is that they are highly skeptical of what they see in journal ads.
Medical journal advertising can do two things for your brand: It can create awareness, and it can deliver a single selling idea. If you want to use advertising to educate physicians about your product or category, then I’d suggest you deposit your money right into my personal savings account. Believe me, it’ll do you as much good there as it will in your media plan.
Used wisely, journal advertising can be an important awareness-building tool. Two simple questions can help you determine whether your ads will deliver the desired impact: Is there one clear idea, powerfully delivered? And does your brand name appear proudly front and centre?
The same considerations apply when developing support materials for your salesforce. Whether they’re leave-behinds or keepers, these sales aids should be as clear and compelling as possible. No marketer likes to sit through numbingly detailed presentations, and doctors are no different than you or I in this regard.
The pharmaceutical industry’s salespeople are among the most thoroughly trained in any business. So resist the temptation to provide detail aids that are essentially scripts; the rep should be using the material simply as a prompt. Be frugal with text and use solid graphics to present charts and statistics.
If the sales aid is intended to be a leave-behind, then it should obviously provide more detailed information for the medical professional to peruse. But don’t forget that the sales rep will still be using the piece as a conversation prompt. It’s a good idea, therefore, to highlight the critical passages – it assists the rep during the sales call, and will help draw the customer’s eye to the key information later.
2. Be disciplined, and set professional standards
When assessing advertising ideas, you need to rely on more than intuition alone. The last thing a creative team needs to hear is: ‘My gut tells me this won’t work.’ Your gut may well be correct – but it’s important to have a rational, systematic means of evaluating ideas, to support your instinctive, emotional reactions. This process doesn’t have to be complex. In fact, the more complex the process, the less likely it is to result in effective product.
At our shop, we apply four basic criteria to evaluate ideas and ensure that our communications products meet high standards:
– Compelling clarity: Is it crystal clear and intriguing?
– Originality: Does it surprise the customer with a fresh approach?
– Impact: Does it get noticed?
– Legs and Latitude: Will the idea stand the test of time? Will it work in a variety of media?
Try grading creative ideas against these criteria on a simple scale of one to 10. With a process like this, you’ll have a clearer understanding of what your gut is telling you.
3. The critical ingredient: courage
Courage plays a key role in our business – especially when it comes to looking at research.
How many times have you heard that ‘research kills great ideas’? It’s not true. Bad research kills great ideas. Poor interpretation kills great ideas. And faint hearts kill great ideas.
Consider this scenario: You’re doing a focus group with a roomful of doctors, and you ask them to evaluate some ads. Naturally, they’ll have an immediate gut reaction: Indifference. Confusion. Hate. Love. Whatever. But then, because they are highly trained, analytical professionals, they’ll attempt a more sophisticated assessment, based on a set of empirical standards they learned back in medical school. They’ll begin to rhyme off all the things that they need to know about the product: efficacy, side effects, safety considerations, dosing regimen, formulary coverage, cost and so on. So you dutifully incorporate all of these into the body copy of the advertising – only to discover that, back in the real world, doctors don’t actually read long-copy journal ads.
The moral of this story? By all means, do the research – but have the courage to ignore the doctor’s orders, if they conflict with good marketing sense. Stay focused on the two questions I discussed above: Does the ad deliver the selling idea compellingly? And is your brand name strikingly clear? If you can answer yes to both of these, then you’ve got creative capable of realizing the full potential of advertising in this environment.
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