Healthy Skepticism Library item: 5942

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Publication type: news

Roner L.
Using market research to capitalize on brand equity
Eyeforpharma 2006 Aug 10

Full text:

Using market research to capitalize on brand equity
Author: Lisa Roner, Editor, eyeforpharma Briefing
(Aug/10/2006)

With strategic deployment of market research, pharma companies can go
beyond
traditional ROI to coordinate marketing programs across brands and
understand and capitalize on brand equity. “If you’re not keeping
score,
you’re just practicing,” Sheila O’Connor, Direct Marketing Consultant
at Eli
Lilly told attendees at eyeforpharma’s recent Marketing ROI USA
Congress in
Philadelphia.

To a certain extent, O’Connor says, all of her company’s brands talk to
the
same groups of doctors and use similar marketing programs. So Lilly has
created a structure to help coordinate marketing activities to avoid
its
teams from “stepping all over each other” and to help them measure the
impact of their programs.

One approach O’Connor is using to coordinate direct mail programs for
about
15 Lilly brands is something the company calls zero-based budgeting.
During
the planning process, she says, each brand team establishes key
objectives
and then brings in channel experts, like O’Connor, to help them achieve
those goals.

“We examine things like how much it will cost and how many times we
need to
hit a physician to achieve the goal,” she says. “And I may have to tell
a
team that for a really complex message direct mail just won’t work,
while
the peer-to-peer people may identify it as a great opportunity and come
up
with estimates on cost. So we really do start from zero, saying how
many
hits we want to have and how much that’s going to cost.”

Then it is rolled up to a portfolio platform, O’Connor says, where
portfolio
directors look across brands and make sure it’s all coordinated and
makes
sense, considering overlap and other factors.

“We’ve only tried this approach over the past year, so we’re not sure
yet
how it will ultimately go,” she says. “But I think we’re doing a good
job so
far.”

Analyzing return on investment (ROI) can help you determine what works
and
what doesn’t, O’Connor says, but is a “lagging” indicator, she warns.
So she
also advocates the use of market research, which can help teams
understand
why something works or does not work.

And market research allows teams to focus on brand equity, which can
help
them determine future directions to pursue, she says. But at Lilly,
although
they measure brand equity and determine which elements drive sales,
O’Connor
says it’s difficult to always know how to improve brand equity
measures.

“What interventions can you use to drive those specific benefits?” she
asks.

To better understand how to impact brand value, Lilly worked with a
market
research agency to develop a model structure for one of its brands. The
study, which took about six months to complete, involved quantitative
market
research with about 300 physicians from each of the brand’s main
segments.
But it also included linking prescribing data back to the physicians’
stated
intentions and beliefs.

“We know certain areas of satisfaction, loyalty and value drive our
patient
share and we have some emotional benefits that we’re trying to drive,”
O’Connor says. “People generally make decisions, at least initially, on
very
functional kinds of attributes – looking at the specific qualities of a
car
or whatever – but then you get to that higher order emotional kind of
feeling of ‘BMW makes me feel cool’ or whatever the case may be.

“We know that first, we have to drive functional elements, such as this
brand works on these specific symptoms and doesn’t have these
undesirable
side effects,” she adds. “And then we’re looking to see which specific
types
of activities drive each of those functional benefits – the chain of
events
to drive us from all these individual interventions to drive the
functional
benefits, the higher order benefits, the outcomes and then the patient
share.”

O’Connor says initially with the market research they ascertained the
extent
to which physicians believed Lilly’s brand stood for certain qualities – for
example, in the instance of the brand tested, “mood efficacy” or
“eliminating aggressiveness”. And they determined which higher order
benefits could be “moved” by an impact on functional benefits.

“For example, it will point out when utilizing an exhibit booth isn’t
going
to do you any good and you would be better off doing something with
your
sales reps,” O’Connor explains. “So we use this model to determine
which
specific types of interventions can lead to the specific types of
impacts on
our benefits that we would like to have. If you have the time, money
and
market research company that’s good at analytics, you can really dig
deep
and go beyond traditional ROI and really learn what’s driving specific
pieces of your brand equity.”

On a more basic level, however, O’Connor says is “always amazing the
opportunities we miss to gather information from our customers about
what’s
working and what’s not.

“With direct mail, we’ve focused a lot on ROI and it is a strong
candidate
for that,” she says. “You can tell who was sent what, who responded and
link
it back to individual prescribing. We also tend to look at response
rates,
which are not a very good measure – although intuitively it seems like
they
would be. But in reality, it’s all related to what kind of medical or
practice-related item you’re offering.”

O’Connor says that if you offer something “cool,” like a USB connection
kit
or some kind of cell phone accessory, you will get great responses no
matter
what your product materials are. But she says if you offer something
educational – like a book or CD of a speaker program, physicians don’t
respond.

“It’s kind of sad,” she says. “We did a market research study where
instead
of a pen or whatever, we offered to make a two dollar donation to the
advocacy program of their choice and we got a less than 2% response
rate.”

Typically, however, with direct mail, O’Connor says, it doesn’t pay to
do a
lot of market research.

“We might be sending something out to 20,000 people and it costs
$50,000-$60,000,” she says. “So to spend time and money to do a
$15,000-$20,000 market research study on that probably doesn’t make
sense.”

But she says sometimes they do market research on the look and feel of
a
whole campaign and they are doing more follow-up surveys. In the
previous
example, where they got only a 2% response rate, she says they wanted
to
determine how response rate related to “open” rate.

“If you get a 2% response rate, does that mean no one really opened it;
they
threw it in the trash?” she asks.

So Lilly surveyed 100 people who received the mailer and asked if they
remembered seeing it, if they opened it, if they read it – and then a
lot of
questions about what they remembered, liked and why. O’Connor says 41%
of
those receiving it recalled seeing it, 26% said they opened and read it
and
about 20% remembered the brand, although fewer remembered the message.

So while they do focus on ROI, O’Connor says it’s not the “be-all and
end-all” because it’s retrospective and only gives broad clues on
general
direction. “When we need more specific information, we use primary
market
research to fill in the gaps.”