Healthy Skepticism Library item: 19741

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Ed.
The mechanics of marketing ROI
eyeforpharma.com 2004 Oct 28
http://social.eyeforpharma.com/uncategorised/mechanics-marketing-roi

Abstract:

As many of you know, we’re busy preparing for our 4th Annual Pharmaceutical Marketing Conference – Marketing ROI for Pharma taking place 8-9 November in Amsterdam. But we recently had a chance to catch up with one of the thought leaders slated to speak at the event, Albert Cortada, CRM Manager for Boehringer Ingelheim to ask him a few questions to set the stage for the conference. (10/28/2004)

Full text:

We wanted to take this opportunity to share his insight with you.

efp: In a broad sense, Albert, how can targeting and segmentation strategies improve marketing ROI?

AC:For a long time, pharmaceutical companies have been working with a product oriented approach. Marketing executives used to see different product management as isolated areas with isolated objectives; and isolated strategies have been developed to achieve these objectives. Due to this approach, lots of inefficiencies have been established as the unique way of doing things.

Targeting and segmentation strategies have changed the focus to the customer – prescribers in our market. This orientation implies a lot of changes. Our companies are not used to listening to the customer, and this is exactly what we aim to do. It has been a hard process in lots of different markets but always it has been demonstrated that there is nothing more important than listen to the customer.

efp: How can sales help marketing to improve marketing ROI?

AC: In much the same way that marketing departments designed product-oriented strategies, sales people used to implement product-oriented strategies. The rep himself is the one that best knows the real importance of the customer, but they used to implement, without any complaint or red flags, strategies that were not customer-oriented.

Now, the challenge is to make sales forces realise that all is changing and this approach is no longer valid. The best thing for the business is to adapt in a proper way and take advantage of it. We have to optimize all our efforts and implement customer-focused strategies that in the end will make it even easier to promote our products to the same customers in a more natural way.

efp: What are some key strategies for transferring marketing success from one brand across a company’s portfolio?

AC: The most important thing is to think about the doctors’s needs. It is very easy to promote something to someone that needs what you are promoting. These are marketing basics and sometimes, and more in our controlled market, we forget about them. We need to design strategies in a coherent way across the company’s portfolio in order to easily reach the prescriber and achieve success with it.

efp: How can marketing plans be used to monitor marketing success?

AC: It is very difficult to analyse a market in an unstructured way. You need a method. You need a specific, well designed process. Targeting and segmentation is not philosopher’s stone. You have to design around a good analytical process. A good way to begin is to establish measurable objectives for each type of customer and monitor it systematically. This will help to analyse reasons behind strategy success or failure and, more important, this will give you feedback in order to establish new strategies. Definitely, this will lead you into your “loop”. This will provide a crucial retro alignment for your strategy definition.

We’sd like to thank Albert Cortada for his insight and invite you to meet Albert and a host of other industry thought leaders at Marketing ROI for Pharma. Join us in Amsterdam by registering for eyeforpharma’s 4th Annual Pharmaceutical Marketing Conference Marketing ROI for Pharma 8-9 November at www.eyeforpharma.com/marketing2004