Pharma’s familiarity problem: a new model for brand growth

“Had an understanding of the nature of brands been more widespread, the theory of the Unique Selling Proposition could never have achieved its pernicious popularity. By encouraging companies to identify – or more often to confect – some functional product distinction, and to trumpet that distinction verbally and repetitively, USP practitioners inflicted on a luckless public some of the most insensitive advertising ever perpetrated.”

These are the words of ‘Ad land's greatest philosopher’, Jeremy Bullmore, describing consumer marketing in the mid-20th century. But he could’ve equally been talking about the situation with pharmaceutical marketing today.

Modern day brand management emerged in the 60s due to a combo of mass manufacturing – making good quality products far more accessible – and mass media – making it far easier to tell people about them. The result was ‘brands’, that created differentiation not just on functional benefits, but emotional ones.

The goal of branding as Jeremy Bullmore explains is ‘familiarity’.

“Familiarity is acquired and maintained directly through experience and remotely through communications. The word “maintained” is important: familiarity can never achieve permanent status. When direct contact becomes less frequent or disappears altogether, familiarity fades.”

Pharma's familiarity problem

There lies pharma's dilemma. The industry has historically relied on sales reps to maintain familiarity. Field teams would literally be the face of brands. Like human marketing funnels delivering value, driving consideration and product choice. It meant pharma marketing and advertising was (and still is) very rational and product focussed - as it's all about sales enablement.

In a more virtual world, where direct contact is reduced, communications needs to pick up the familiarity slack…and that means revisiting how pharma brands behave.

Function will always be essential. But for communications to build brand familiarity, the focus needs to be less on features and more on feelings.

Most doctors aren't ready to prescribe

The traditionalists will argue this approach isn't relevant to pharma. But the reason harnessing emotion is important comes down to a simple fact: the majority of the time, doctors aren't in a position to make a prescribing decision.

Eversana’s recent paper, How Pharma Brands Grow, demonstrated this with the data of over 100,000 HCPs prescribing choices. Even with relatively common conditions such as breast cancer or psoriasis, the average likelihood of an HCP prescribing a new brand in any given month is less than 20%. Meaning at best, they prescribe a new brand twice a year.

What this means for pharma marketing and communications is that - as with B2C and B2B categories - the primary goal is not activating customers to prescribe. It's to build memory links for the brand in the customers mind - so that when they are ready to prescribe, the brand is the one they think of.

Building pharma brands people remember

If the goal is being remembered, what does this mean for how pharma brands are marketed?

The industry has been applying the 'brand' treatment to it's products for some time, developing campaigns that try to harness emotion and create distinctiveness. But due to the strict compliance placed on prescription medicine communication (for good reason), there is only so much that can and should be done with creativity.

That doesn't mean product communication needs to be devoid of emotion but a much richer brand building territory lies beyond medicine.

Broad-reach brand building

Moderna has been capitalising on it's COVID fame to build it's corporate brand. It's strategy for 'relentless relevance' is establishing itself as the RNA company, educating all audiences on the technology behind the medicines. Activations include broad reach consumer advertising in the 'Welcome to the mRNAge' campaign, appearing at trade shows like CES and US Open tennis sponsorship.

The approach acknowledges a post-pandemic trend of consumers seeking to understand more about medicine and how care is conducted. As Moderna CMO, Kate Cronin states,

"While consumers aren’t the primary purchasers of our vaccines, their understanding of mRNA and questions around it does impact and inform what health care providers and pharmacists think about it, too."

In most cases though, consumer sponsorships and multi-million-dollar ad campaigns won’t be commercially viable. For marketers and business leaders that want to dip their toe in the brand building water, focus can start a lot closer to target audiences by maximising presence along the patient journey.

Category brand building

At the moment, pharma marketing's focus is almost entirely around the product. Making sure customers know the product, how to use it and which patients will benefit. As the data shows, this is only relevant for the minority of customers that are ready to make a new prescribing decision.

Instead, brands should look beyond medicine to the challenges along the patient journey. From patient identification to pathways and health education to adherence, tackling the challenges that matter to audiences will be a richer territory for brand building.

By combining cross-functional skills and services with the principles of brand advertising, pharma can create solutions that ‘make brands easier to think of and find’ while also delivering value to customers.

This value-beyond-the-product approach is common practice in B2B. It can be as simple as content listicles and white papers built to address common customer challenges. Or big brand building creativity like this from paint company Sherwin-Williams.

Brett Knutson from Wunderman Thompson, the agency behind the campaign, summarises it nicely...

“While product innovation is critical, being a leader means that innovation goes beyond the product itself to help customers realise their vision along the entire journey.”

How do we move forward?

Familiarity is not just about awareness. It can't simply be achieved with new channels or more attention-grabbing advertising. It's about relevance.

In order to increase relevance, pharma needs to broaden its focus. Beyond product messages. Beyond the minority of customers that are 'ready-to-prescribe'. The goal of marketing should be as much about priming future customers to consider brands, as it is converting existing ones.

It starts by understanding the goals of category target audiences (practically and emotionally) and how well these needs are served by the market. Identify the levers brands can pull to create differentiation and distinctiveness. And unite the cross-functional team behind 'beyond medicine' strategies that deliver against them.

In healthcare, relevance is about being helpful. The key to familiarity lies beyond medicine.

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Thanks for reading.

At The 4th Partnership, our ‘value beyond medicine’ approach applies consumer brand growth principles to pharma. Building brand familiarity, while delivering value to healthcare systems, patients and society in the process.

To find out more, drop us a message: hello@wearethe4th.com

See you next month for more OUTSIGHT°.