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MORE ON BRAND POSITIONING FOR PHARMACEUTICALS AS SEEN IN
DTC PERSPECTIVES
Take a Stand
Brand marketers need to develop a compelling positioning
and make their DTC brands stand for something in the minds of consumers
By Kevin Clancy, Ph. D., and Steve Tipps, Ph. D., June 2005
These days, it's not at all unusual to see a TV spot for Botox and Cialis run along side commercials for Coke and Holiday Inn or see a print ad for Claritin or Elidel opposite executions for Mastercard and T-Mobile. Consumers have come to regard ads for prescription drugs—on TV, radio, print, or online—as expected and commonplace, not jarring or different. And it appears all this familiarity with pharmaceutical drugs and the ailments and diseases they treat has bred its fair share of contempt.
As Peter J. Pitts, a former FDA public affairs official who is now senior vice president for health affairs at PR agency Manning, Selvage & Lee, commented recently to The New York Times, "Direct-to-consumer [advertising] has developed to a point that some drug advertising is barely distinguishable from marketing for Cheerios." Added Ipsos' Fariba Zamaniyan, "Advertising for prescription drugs has reached maturity….The marketplace has become much more crowded with more than 60 brands being advertised for treatment across a spectrum of ailments. Therefore, it is much more difficult to get noticed and to be unique or relevant within a $3 billion market."
We recently did some performance assessment work for one client with two brands and over the course of three years invested over $100 million in advertising for each. Though 33 percent-40 percent of sufferers reported they saw each campaign, only about a third of them (12 percent-15 percent) could recall anything that they had seen. Worse, one brand spent $100 million while the other spent $200 million with the exact same disappointing result. Examples like this are becoming more and more common.
Evidence of waning consumer attention comes in the form of declining response rates. Ipsos PharmTrends found only 19 percent—that's two in 10 consumers—reported that DTC advertising inspired them to call or visit their doctor to talk about any advertised prescription drug and this number has steadily declined since hitting a "peak" of 25 percent three years ago. Only one in 10 consumers in the Ipsos study reported they asked their doctor for the prescription drug advertised. "It's simply getting tougher to persuade more consumers to ask for your branded prescription drug following ad exposure," continued Zamaniyan.
More disturbingly, Copernicus Marketing Consulting and Research discovered similarly low response and compliances rates among sufferers—the primary target audience for prescription drugs. Cases of poor sufferer response in spite of huge advertising investments are also becoming more frequent. The number of men suffering from erectile dysfunction and taking impotence drugs, for instance, has stagnated and total sales of the big three erectile dysfunction treatments—Viagra, Levitra, and Cialis—have leveled off even as the marketers of these treatments have poured record amounts of money into advertising.
Now some may take these disappointing performance indicators as yet another addition to the mounting pile of evidence pointing to the declining effectiveness of traditional media, particularly television. According to a recent UCLA study, for instance, just 5 percent of viewers pay attention to TV commercials and total print circulation is down 26 percent. Yet the problem plaguing DTC advertising goes well beyond the medium—while traditional media's decline isn't helping matters, it isn't the root cause of the declines in response rates and investments in advertising yielding little or no sales effect.
No Raison D'Être
There's more than a ring of truth to the argument that DTC advertising
has become indistinguishable from advertising for, say, cereal, SUVs,
and fast food restaurants. Just 7 percent of 340 primetime commercials
in a recent study communicate any sort of positioning for the advertised
brand and only about 8 percent of consumers can say anything about the
two leading brands in the fifty largest product categories that we could
begin to call a positioning. A positioning is, of course, the message
the company wants to imprint in the minds of buyers about its brand and
how it differs from and offers something better than competitors. Yet
in most companies, if products, services, and brands are positioned at
all, it appears to be in the minds of marketing managers and not consumers.
Following the lead of their consumer product and service counterparts, DTC advertising also seems to have forgotten all about positioning and this is a fundamental reason behind disappointing performance. It more often than not fails to imprint the brand's raison d'être—why a sufferer should ask his or her doctor for a prescription in the minds of consumers.
Brand awareness alone will not generate prescription sales. There are arguably very few people in the world who haven't heard of Coke and McDonald's, yet Coke's market share, as the company readily admits, has dwindled. Until the rollout of the "I'm Lovin' It" advertising campaign in 2003, McDonald's sales also languished and the company recorded its first ever unprofitable quarter. Likewise, very few men (and women, for that matter) haven't heard of Viagra, but when Cialis hit the market, it lost 14 share points—a tremendous one-year loss in a stagnating market—and new prescriptions continue to drop precipitously. There has to be a reason to remember the advertised drug's often complicated brand name, ask a doctor about it, and fill a prescription.
Many DTC marketers seem to confuse symptomology with positioning. Sure, in the absence of any other branded competition, you can distinguish your brand from drugs in other classes by describing promised relief from symptoms. Most branded prescription drugs, however, either have or soon will have significant competition that will also claim to relieve the same symptoms—it's the price of entry in the category. Promised relief from symptoms may get a sufferer to call the doctor, but it'll take something else—an added benefit, some compelling point of differentiation—that will spur the sufferer to remember and ask for a specific brand and not another.
Think of it this way, does GlaxoSmithKline rely on, "It cleans your teeth," to get consumers to go to the store and choose Aquafresh instead of Colgate or Crest? No. Sure the company makes it clear Aquafresh cleans teeth, but its point of differentiation is that it freshens breath. Exceptional positioning does more than give a product or service context, it gives it a reason for being.
If a drug brand does something different, that's the best positioning of all. Though that's rarely the case, it doesn't mean there's no other point of differentiation a DTC marketer couldn't build on. Perhaps there's an attribute—Ortho Evra is birth control available in a patch instead of a pill, for instance. Maybe there's an added benefit—Ortho Tri-Cyclen, a birth control pill, prevents pregnancy, but it also clears up your skin. Conceivably there's an occasion or situation where the product would be valuable—Botox before a high school reunion, for example. There's celebrity endorsements, sports teams connections, qualifications (e.g., most rigorously tested, associated with UCLA Medical Center), social responsibility (e.g., 20 percent of all profits go to WHO immunization programs or the American Cancer Society), and a host of intangibles such as "makes you happy to be alive." The possibilities are endless.
To develop a compelling positioning, we recommend marketers enumerate 50-300 potential attributes and benefits, tangible and intangible, that might motivate customers in a category. These should include a host of the creative, "out-of-the-box" ideas we just talked about—don't constrain your thinking to product features and medical benefits. Determining how motivating each of these characteristics is to the market target and how buyers perceive competing brands on each of them calls for quantitative research undertaken among a cross section of at least 200 (and preferably 500 or more) sufferers.
Next, measure each attribute on three dimensions: dream detection, the extent to which sufferers want or desire each attribute and benefit; problem detection, the difference between the dream and the reality of how well Rx brands deliver; and brand preference detection, how well different attribute ratings predict purchase preference and behavior. Motivating power, as we have discovered, is not just about dreams, problems, and behavior, but is a composite of all three. A weighted average of the three components will establish the true motivating power of each attribute. A detailed methodology for doing this is described in Kevin's book Counterintuitive Marketing.
We have also discovered that consumer reaction to positioning strategies cannot be predicted based only on the motivations in a category. You also have to know how buyers perceive your brand and competitors. DTC marketers need to find the attributes and benefits that are high in motivating power and for which the prescription drug brand enjoys (or could enjoy) an edge. By examining in a strategy matrix motivating power and perceptions of your brand and competitors simultaneously, you can discover the true positioning opportunities.
Take a Stand
In a perfect world, we would all have unlimited time and a consumer's
undivided attention to tell him or her anything and everything about a
prescription drug brand. But there is a time limit and consumers are notoriously
inattentive, so the most any company can say are those few things sufferers
care about and will remember. You want to fix a succinct message in sufferer's
heads that compels him or her to go to the doctor and ask for a prescription
of the brand and to encourage refills among current users. A process to
develop a powerful positioning is valuable because when you have one,
other marketing elements follow naturally. Most importantly, you won't
spend $3+ billion for mixed effect.
The Wall Street Journal's advertising reporter Brian Stemberg noted that, "direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs is still in its relative infancy, and consumers already are chafing at ads featuring cartoon characters, rhymes, and jingles that seem to sell medicine as if it were pizza or soda." And on the heels of the Vioxx/Celebrex controversy, the task to penetrate consumer consciousness—which is likely more predisposed than ever to ignore marketing messages from pharmaceutical firms—will be even more challenging.
It's difficult to grab consumer attention and be perceived as distinct and important if you're not really doing anything to convince them of this in the first place. If DTC marketers want to get sufferers thinking, acting, and talking to doctors about their brands and filling prescriptions, they've got to take a position and stand for something meaningful and motivating to sufferers.