PM360 March 2010

GUEST COMMENTARY

YOUR CUSTOMER IS NOT A BAR CHART
By Al Topin

THE IDEA OF KEEPING THE CUSTOMER IN THE ROOM AT ALL TIMES—AND reviewing the strategic, creative, and tactical decisions you make with them in mind—is a principle we try to live with at the agency.

We’re always surprised how easily the customer gets lost in many marketing decisions when we are snowed under tons of data or corporate factors are brought into the equation. So we have to keep our target customer right there in the room with us and be sure to remember:

It’s real people who buy products, it’s real physicians who write the scripts. Easy, right? That’s what all this customer research and market analysis is for, right?

Yes...and no. Market research, in the formal sense, is invaluable to clients and agencies, especially considering that we’re rarely personally representative of the customer in healthcare. (You may be the target market if you’re selling beer, for example, but you’re most likely not a physician who writes an epilepsy drug or a P&T committee member who puts it on formulary.) It’s critical to understanding attitudes and gathering input along the way to campaign development.

A Common Pitfall
But thinking in terms of percentages, rankings, and projectable results can create a trap that’s easy to fall into: We can forget that our customers are not numbers, but individuals who often make sometimes simplistic decisions about why or why not to use a brand. It’s easy to get caught up in how many physicians liked product attribute X versus product attribute Y—and completely lose the big picture of why a single physician, at the moment of truth when writing a prescription, chooses a different brand.

Coke or Pepsi?
The truth is that your customers make decisions based on what’s important to them. They’re not running covariant analyses of attributes throughout their mind. They simplify things into basic, human terms: They like it or they don’t. They trust it or they don’t. It meets their expectations or it doesn’t. Think about it. Why do you drink Coke versus Pepsi? You probably don’t separate the sweetness from the carbonation or the aftertaste. To you, one just tastes better than the other.

If you ever want to get the honest truth about why customers do or don’t use your brand, ask your sales reps. Reps have a way of cutting to the chase because they’re out on the front lines every day. After sitting behind the glass for months of research on a brand and being frustrated by why we couldn’t seem to put together a data story that would significantly boost brand prescriptions, the market research manager, who was a former sales rep on the brand, simply said, “My docs weren’t writing it because they didn’t see the effect they wanted.” Oh, that. In that case, it didn’t matter if they thought X was more compelling than Y—simply put, in their perception another brand was more effective. And we needed to deal with their perceptions, not numbers.

So the next time you’re arguing over positioning or evaluating creative, close your eyes and picture who you’re selling to. We’ve helped our own clients do this by bringing videos, audio tapes, or even cardboard cutouts of customers into meetings. Imagine your customer talking about how he treats a disease and the pressures of his practice. Listen as she tells you why she likes certain brands and not others...and why she’s never tried yours. Then take those simple insights, add them to all the quantifiable information you’ve collected, and never let your customer leave the room.

Al Topin is President of Topin & Associates, a healthcare communications agency based in Chicago (www.topin.com). He can be reached at atopin@topin.com

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