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7 Discoveries about DTC Advertising Campaigns
While
double- and triple-digit spending on direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising for prescription drugs
is continues, the success of most DTC advertising
campaigns remains marginal at best. Through our work with our Copernican
Discovery™ DTC Simulated Test Marketing Model, we
have made the following discoveries about the characteristics of DTC
campaigns:
- The inability of
DTC 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 DTC 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 DTC
marketer targets "highly involved" sufferers, the more likely
the success of marketing efforts.
- DTC
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." Likewaise, diagnostic analyses of DTC campaigns can sometimes transform an apparent failure into a success. A DTC marketer can develop and launch a new marketing program, which yileds a more positive outcome.
For an example of
a Copernican Discovery™ DTC campaign forecast, click
here. Or to read about applications of the Copernican Discovery™
to defensive response modeling, click
here.
Learn more about the Copernicus Smart Solution designed specifically for DTC marketers.
The Copernican discoveries
about DTC advertising campaigns is one of the many Copernican intellectual
properties that differentiate our work.
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