Marketing Planning

Copernican Discoveries about Direct-to-Consumer Campaigns

While spending on direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription drugs is expected to increase to $7 billion by 2005, the success of most direct-to-consumer campaigns remains marginal at best. Through our work with our Copernican Discovery™ Direct-to-Consumer Simulated Test Marketing Model, we have made the following discoveries about the characteristics of direct-to-consumer campaigns:

  1. The inability of direct-to-consumer marketing communications vehicles, particularly advertising, to imprint the brand name and its raison d'etre in the minds of consumers contributes to the high rate of direct-to-consumer failures.
  2. Sufferers—even if they become "aware" of a product—will contact their physicians and ask for an Rx by name much less frequently than conventional wisdom holds. While many direct-to-consumer marketers believe that the conversion rate from awareness to behavior hovers around 30 percent, in fact, the rate falls closer to 10 percent.
  3. Movement from awareness to physician-requested conversion varies considerably depending on sufferer "involvement" in the product category. The more a direct-to-consumer marketer targets "highly involved" sufferers, the more likely the success of marketing efforts.
  4. Direct-to-consumer campaigns may have a greater impact in physicians than their patients—which explains why in many cases, direct-to-consumer marketers observe sales increases for the advertised Rx, without seeing significant shifts in patient awareness and behavior.
  5. The performance of most DTC programs can be predicted well before any money is spent on a real world, national introduction. This is what makes "traditional" test marketing such a theoretically useful tool.
  6. However, real world test markets may not be the wisest way to "test" a DTC campaign. They're expensive, time consuming, give away ideas, are susceptible to sabotage and often not projectable. In many cases, market response modeling is an appropriate alternative.
  7. As emergency room physicians sometimes say, "a body that comes in cold is not necessarily dead." Likewise, diagnostic analyses of direct-to-consumer campaigns can sometimes transform an apparent failure into a success. A direct-to-consumer marketer can develop and launch a new marketing program, which yields a more positive outcome.

For an example of a Copernican Discovery™ direct-to-consumer campaign forecast, click here. Or to read about applications of the Copernican Discovery™ to defensive response modeling, click here.

The Copernican discoveries about direct-to-consumer campaigns is one of the many Copernican intellectual properties that differentiate our work.

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