If you’re a confident and accomplished Pharma Marketer stop reading.
This post isn’t for you.
This is for marketers who’ve lost their way:
Maybe you’re focused on ‘personalised content creation’
Perhaps you’ve been diligently working on ‘omnichannel’ (see my last post)
Maybe you think (and I’m sure I’m going to catch some heat for this) that marketing is simply about getting the ‘right message, to the ‘right person’ at the ‘right time’.
This isn’t marketing.
Yes they’re important components for sure, but let’s zoom out.
Marketing is not telling people about your products, it’s not content down channels.
Marketing is about driving change at scale
Remember?
Sales is about driving change at an individual level.
Marketing is about driving change at scale.
Most of us know this, but I think people forget.
This is critical from an Experience Design perspective - the point of our Customer Experience efforts is to drive change at scale!
And through that lens:
Experiences are the medium through which we drive change.
Marketing is not simply telling people about your products.
Marketing is about driving change at scale.
Experiences are the medium through which we drive change.
Experiences are the medium through which we drive change, Jed Casey (2024)
What Change are you driving?
A couple of weeks ago I wrote an introduction to Outcomes-Driven CX, sharing the importance of becoming much more intentional about the changes we want to drive and the experiences required to drive them.
Any time I work with a marketing team I always ask them this question:
Which customer and what change?
I need to know who we’re designing an experience for and what change we hope to drive as a result.
As you can imagine, this brings a lot of different answers:
“We want Doctors to believe in our industry leading clinical data!”
“We want patients to feel confident that our treatment is the best choice for their healthcare journey”
“We want to be the leaders in our disease area!”
[Scratches head]
All nice things to have on a vision board but by no means an anchor for an effective marketing strategy.
I want to know how people are going to be acting differently as a result of the experiences we create - the more specific we are, the more focused our efforts can be.
Behaviours are the Critical Link
My friend and behavioural science Guru Matt Wallaert says this best:
“Everyone's job is behaviour, everything can be linked to behaviour.”
He’s right. Ultimately, everything we do in business is for the purpose of driving a change in behaviour. There’s a world where patient’s aren’t receiving the life-changing benefits of our treatments, and there’s a world where they are. This gap is what we’re addressing - it’s the various members within a healthcare ecosystem behaving differently (i.e. acting differently) to enable even better patient and business outcomes.
At a minimum, it’s essential to have this level of clarity in our marketing efforts:
Which Customer? (defined at a level of fidelity that makes sense)
What Change? (articulated as a real-world behaviour).
If we don’t have this, we’re flying blind.
Pro tip: If you’re wondering where customer journeys fit into this, customer journeys are simply behaviours over time 😉.
Beliefs are not Behaviours
You might be thinking I’m coming on a little strong here.
“Jed, what are you talking about? Beliefs are super important!”
“Influencing someone’s beliefs and attitudes is foundational to marketing!“
Don’t worry, I’m not disagreeing, but influencing someone’s beliefs and attitudes is only a means to an end. The true goal is that they take a different action (i.e. they behave differently).
When we think about experiences as the medium through which we drive change, we realise that we have many more levers at our disposal.
I’ve seen plenty of instances where a prescriber completely believes in the clinical data for a treatment but the reason they’re not using it is because the signup for the patient support program is horrible, the nurses are nervous about administering the infusion and the ordering process sucks.
Great marketers know this and jump at the opportunity to broaden their tactical approach to reach the outcomes that they seek.
A word of caution:
PLEASE don’t fall into the trap of setting a behavioural goal that is simply “Doctor prescribes the drug”. If this was the case, why even have a strategy in the first place? Every single Disease Area or product strategy would be the same!
Again, the more specific we can be, the more focused our strategy is.
Here are a few examples of behaviours (at varying levels of scope):
‘Physicians using a treatment in late-stage disease extend use into early-stage disease’
‘Patients aged 50+ request cognitive assessments during routine health checkups’
‘Patients with flu-like symptoms visit a GP within 48 hours’
‘Neurologists who attend a certain congress hold local sharing sessions when they return home’
‘Oncologists who have never used an immunotherapy before use for the first time'
‘Oncologists already using the existing immunotherapy switch to an different one’
‘Early adopters share their treatment experiences frequently and broadly’*
Remember, your job is not done when someone believes in your product, the job is done when you drive the real-world change that you seek.
In summary, let’s pull this all together...
An Outcomes-Driven CX is lens is helpful here:
Outcome: Set clear strategic intent captured as an outcome
Which strategic opportunities are we addressing in order to ensure the greatest number of patients see the most value from our treatments?
Behaviour: Define and prioritise the ecosystem behaviour necessary to reach that outcome with as much clarity as you can.
What behaviours do we need to see from which ecosystem members in order to reach those outcomes?
Experiences: Design experiences that enable and encourage those behaviours.
Designing experiences the drive a change in behaviour is a huge topic that deserves it’s own write-up!
In the next post I’ll share some thoughts for how to lean on behavioural design in order to bolster your marketing efforts so that you can more consistently craft customer experiences that drive business outcomes.
This is part 3 in series on Outcomes-Driven CX, where I'm breaking down an approach for more intentionally crafting customer experiences that drive business outcomes in Pharma.
If you're interested in diving deeper into behavioural psychology and behavioural science, I'd recommend Matt's book 'Start at the End', it was certainly influential for me!