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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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
-
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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