In the News: Learn from Amazon
"FCB Health Europe launched a new campaign for the introduction of a new medicine to fight a cardiovascular disease. But this time, everything is different: the communication is digital-first, without use of pharmaceutical representatives and focuses on a specially created omnichannel platform that delivers the most important information as needed and constantly learns – thanks to data. An interview with Alex Muller, Head of Data-driven Marketing, FCB Health Europe below." - Pharma Relations
This autumn you launched a new go-to-market omnichannel model for the introduction of a new medication, what exactly is it about? What is special about it?
Together with our client in the UK, which I cannot name here, we are launching a new medicine with three fundamental changes in communication and marketing compared to traditional launches. First, the client is working closely with healthcare providers in an open innovation approach to implement the medicine in daily practice. This open relationship means they can launch without sales representatives by having a direct access, and lastly all the client relationship, services and journey will be fully managed through data and digital technology.
But?
We weren't just launching a brand digitally without a sales force, we were also establishing a digital transformation with omnichannel and DDM (Data Driven Marketing). We had to get creative, bringing the best talents at FCB Health and Solve(d), to produce a digital-first launch marketing strategy and go-to-market model with sales. We did this by leveraging COM-B (Capability+ Opportunity+ Motivation = B for Behavior change) to inform our content approach, analytics and data to support personalization, and integrated an engagement planning process to execute the plan. We built the first truly non-F2F (Non face-to-face) engagement plan with the first single customer view and analytics dashboard of this plan, using a bespoke measurement model as what we are doing is so unique it required new ways to measure it. Unfortunately, we cannot name the client but I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned in general, that are very interesting.
Let's start from the beginning, what was the problem?
Every year, many people worldwide die from cardiovascular disease, this new medicine helps to fight this. The numbers are large, more or less the equivalent to the population of the Netherlands. And due to dietary changes in countries such as China or India, the numbers and deaths are increasing despite all the medicines we have today at our disposal.
Currently, the standard of care used is unpopular and somewhat inconvenient because it must be taken daily and can have unpleasant side effects. Patients also do not feel the benefits, resulting in them taking the drug irregularly and sometimes incorrectly, too. This costs the healthcare system a lot of money. Many governments have made it a priority to reduce these avoidable expenses. So, there is a need for action, or let's call it system pressure. Our client here in the UK has developed a product that works differently and can be taken less often without known side effects, making it easier for doctors to handle treatment with patients and he asked us for a digital-first introduction.
Why doesn't the pharmaceutical company launch the product through pharmaceutical representatives as it always does?
The pandemic has taught us an incredible amount in the entire health sector, especially about the advantages of open innovation models, remote engagement and digitization. Silos have really been blown up. The need to act and the pressure to suffer from the COVID-19 pandemic have caused governments and individual companies to cooperate directly on a large scale, quickly and efficiently. It was only through the collaboration of key players - such as pharmaceutical companies, health systems and doctors - that a vaccine against COVID-19 could be made available so quickly in the UK. Of course, we are taking these "lessons" into the post-COVID era. For the entire health sector and its communication, there will be no way back; we have arrived in the digital age. If you want to be successful, you have to move with us now.
Who is the initiator or driver of this new approach?
Our client – a large global pharmaceutical company - as a whole is on the move. The client itself is shifting its approach and reimagining the way they work and drive innovation. The company is becoming more agile overall and in marketing, pushing digitization in all areas. And it is doing so as a trendsetter, not playing catch-up. We admire that as an agency partner. All in all, there are of course many different players in this product launch, we as FCB Health are part of a whole and give just as much impetus as we take on board the impetus of others. The important thing is that we are all pulling together as one, even if this means a completely new approach and takes on a previously unknown dimension, but that is also what is exciting. We been working tirelessly since day one at 100 miles an hour, in 2–3-week sprints, implementing in the process a full agile methodology and ways of working with the client. And we did this in the middle of a global pandemic, hitting all our governments and lives hard. Now here we are with an unprecedented launch and medicine that will hopefully change the lives of many patients by reaching the right people with the right message at the right time and place.
What exactly is the difference?
Traditionally, we would prepare an advertising campaign - with print ads, brochures and a detail aid for the pharmaceutical representatives to use with the doctors, possibly patients. In black and white terms: the classic one-way street where we push a message out onto the customer. In six months, we would have the first feedback and evaluate. I don't want to say that this is bad, I just want to say that the digital age, data and platforms simply offer us more today.
What more?
Now we can allow customers to pull information from us that they need and desire. Via our jointly developed platform, we play out the entire information, receive immediate feedback and work our way forward according to the data in a modular principle, i.e., we always add information when it is desired and improve it according to the customer experience. We are creating a new community.
A new community – what about data protection?
It is not us who decide what information reaches the doctors and when, but they show us when there is interest, in what, to what extent and what is missing. We also do this with those that are opted-in to avoid any data protection issues. So we are revolutionizing the entire customer journey, flexibly and agilely. And we can set impulses when interest falters. Communities now play a central role everywhere; we are now transferring this principle to the health sector and are constantly learning. We have learned a lot from the pandemic, but also from FMCG marketing.
Is the pharmaceutical industry lagging behind here?
The pharmaceutical industry is rightly more cautious than Amazon, for example, but exciting insights from the FMCG sector can also be transferred to health communication, especially in terms of marketing technology. Medicines are not mascara. Digital communication can work under certain circumstances and holds a lot of potential, from creating engagement through the targeted use of data to reaching far beyond doctors and into the full spectrum of the medical community.
Doesn't that take away from the human aspect?
The client's message was clear: digital only. But trust, value and reliability are at the forefront of the entire customer experience and service design approach we take. Based on data, we develop a logic that empathically starts from the people’s agenda, and not from the expectations of the pharmaceutical company. This also meant a shift in priorities: empathy, appreciation became much more important. We also call this Human-2-Human Marketing.
But now the representatives are missing?
Correct. With the product launch, the focus is no longer on the pharmaceutical representatives, but on the customer, doctors here. Because they know what their patients want and need, and how to get to where they need to be, we are just here to augment this and be a catalyst. So we are building communication around the doctors, doctor-centered is still human-centered. The platform and the data are the foundation to automate and personalize. If we compare this to an orchestra, then the platform is the conductor, instead of reading notes, it reads data and can bring all the notes together correctly. The doctors sit in the auditorium and enjoy the music, and if they come out of the concert in a good having learned and in a great mood, that helps patients and drives adoption of a medicine. For a pharmaceutical company, this service-dominant logic really means a change in thinking!
Why? What added value do they hope for?
We don't want to tell people what they need. We want to find out whether our product is the best for their needs and challenges with patients. We want to establish ourselves as the problem solver, not as a problem profiteer. As banal as this sounds, in practice this is new to many. Especially in this consistency. We can work in a much more needs-oriented way, and much less in a transactional way. In this way, we also hope that new trust and loyalties will emerge, based on an authentic attitude and in return for our empathetic human centered approach to marketing.
Does this approach mean the end of paid media?
We are changing our mindset. The classic paid thinking of paying for attention instead of building it up is being replaced in some parts. I call it the Red Bull-style of creating content that is informative, valuable, entertaining and just right. On the one hand, we go to platforms where the doctors are; on the other hand, we create the platforms they like to go to.
What role does storytelling play then?
Of course, we want to show people, here doctors and nurses, what advantages the new medicine has, what possibilities they open up. In doing so, we continue to rely on storytelling. But we are limited here in the health sector anyway and - we just spoke about consistency - in this case we are now aligning all materials strictly to the needs of the people. The most important value for people will be that they get information about the product tailored to their needs and doctors can prescribe much more accurately. That's worth more than a photo of a happy retired couple on the beach. But of course, we won't do away with that completely either, we still need great creativity and experiences that move them emotionally.
How did this new approach come about?
Hackathons are, in our view, the best way to find complex answers to the big changes in communication and marketing. When we bring together tech companies like Microsoft, agencies, doctors, patients, nurses, but also governments, healthcare bodies, influencers or the World Health Organization (WHO) alongside our clients, the many insights create the solutions and dynamics that communication needs today to be relevant. We therefore advocate more and more hackathons and open innovative strategic thinking instead of pitches and traditional brand planning, because this also makes it easier to find out who is best equipped for a new task and in which combination.