Marketing Effectiveness
- Does the positioning of your brand truly leverage its strengths across your most attractive physician and patient segments?
- Do you successfully use differentiated messages to address varying needs and motivations of different physician and patient segments?
- How do you more accurately evaluate the ROI of your marketing programs?
- Are you most effectively allocating resources across all elements of the market mix?
Contact us to discuss any of the above questions.
OUR PRACTICE AREAS:
Actionable Segmentation
Too many segmentation studies end up collecting dust on a market research manager's desk. Physician segments must be projectable to the entire target universe to be of practical use.
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Needs Based Segmentation
Needs-based segmentation, that groups customers according to the drivers of their behavior, is very appealing to marketers. However, uncovering customers' true "needs" is not a straightforward task.
In primary research settings, respondents often say one thing and do something else in real life. They try to give the "right" answers rather than reveal their true preferences and motivations. And they tend to overstate rational, tangible characteristics of a product, and understate the true importance of emotional attributes or intangibles. This leads marketers to overemphasize product attributes (e.g. "fewest drug-drug interactions") instead of leveraging benefits (e.g. "convenient choice for geriatric patients") in their positioning and messaging strategies.
To avoid this trap, segments need to be differentiated on derived importance of product attributes, not stated importance. The good news is that there are several analytic approaches to achieve this goal.
Attitudinal and Behavioral Segmentation
Pure attitudinal segmentation can be informative; but frequently, wide differences in attitudes don't translate into significant variations in behavior. To make matters worse, in many instances, attitudes don't align well with observed behavior, e.g. the physician segment that is supposed to be "aggressive treaters" turns out to have the highest share of less potent generics.
Similarly, pure behavioral segmentation has desirable properties, but often falls short of providing the rich insights that the marketing team needs to develop effective positioning and messaging strategies. Again, behaviors don't always align with needs and attitudes, e.g.
- Physicians look like they behave the same way (same market shares or volume), but do so for different reasons (e.g., managed care)
- Physicians prescribe differently, but do so for similar reasons (e.g., Drug A for potency and Drug B for potency)
In order to avoid this disconnect and achieve insightful results, the segmentation analysis should be performed on attitudinal and behavioral variables simultaneously.
Segmentation Success Criteria
The best segmentation schemes meet the test of identifying segments that are:
- Differentiated in their behavior and the drivers of that behavior
- Likely to respond similarly to marketing and/or sales initiatives within each segment
- Linked to financial potential
- Highly actionable and projectable to the universe
Segmentation & Targeting
Too often, the brand team's efforts to incorporate segmentation results into targeting and differential messaging are lost in the call planning process. This is mostly the fault of outdated systems that don't provide the flexibility of considering multiple priorities in targeting. Companies that want to stay competitive in this business need to seek out targeting/call planning systems that allow marketing and sales to communicate and cooperate seamlessly.
Targeting Dimensions
Traditional measures used in physician targeting such as category volume and brand share are certainly important in estimating "volume potential." However, a larger set of variables should be considered to enhance targeting effectiveness, e.g.:
- Needs-based segment membership
- 'Managed Care Favorability' index
- Share growth / decline
- Volume growth / decline
- Early adoption behavior
- Demographics
- Geodemographics of the patient population
- Generic vs. branded usage
- Competitor affiliation – e.g., overall competitors' share across categories
- Use of analog drugs outside the category
- DTC responsiveness
- Incidence of treating comorbid conditions
- Overlap with current targets of other drugs presented by the same sales force
- KOLs