Yesterday I spent the day at the eyeforpharma eCommunications Summit where brands including Novartis, Bayer, Pfizer, J&J and many others shared thoughts and perspectives on using digital communications to reach patients and healthcare professionals. As someone who has spent a significant part of my career working in pharma marketing - but also has worked outside that industry, my topic was one that I have often wished that more pharma-oriented events would include: lessons from other industries.
Generally when I consider sharing a case study from another industry outside of pharma, it leads to a debate within our internal teams and also with clients about whether those examples could ever be relevant enough to offer value to a marketer working in the pharma industry. As I shared at the event yesterday, this usually comes down to what I call the “pharma case study excuse matrix” - a collection of four points that most marketers in pharma use as rationale for why their situation is unique.
It is not that these points aren’t valid or important, but solely using those as justification to make the conclusion that there is nothing to learn from other industries is a mistake. The problem is that when marketing consultants like myself bring in examples from outside the industry, often it is used to compensate for the fact that they don’t have any examples from within the industry to share. When you look at those external examples with an eye towards the relevant lessons, however, there are some very important lessons that those industries could offer. Here are a few of the lessons I shared at the event yesterday:
- Financial - Be real people instead of faceless companies.
- Automotive - Share your “insignificant” backstory with the world.
- Consumer (CPG) - Give meaning to the habitual, so people share more.
- Technology - Inspire pride from your employees by telling a bigger story.
- Travel & Tourism - Fulfill a real need and be useful to stand out.
- Retail - Focus on timing and taking advantage of seasonal behaviours.
There will be a video to the entire presentation coming out in the next few weeks, and I will share that video here as well. In the meantime, the bottom line lesson that I repeated at the event was this: the best thing you can do is to move from using case studies as PERMISSION for you to start a program, and to instead see them more as INSPIRATION for what you could do. Inspiration can come from anywhere, and paying attention to examples from outside pharma might be the most important thing you can do as you prepare for 2011.
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