Posted by Ellen Hoenig Carlson on Tue, Jul 28, 2009 @ 01:17 PM
Last Thursday, I attended Business Development Institute's Social Communications & Healthcare Conference. There were a number of good presentations for Pharma social media. One that stood out was the folksy talk given by Pfizer's VP/Worldwide Communications Ray Kerins. Ray ingratiated the group by acknowledging that Pfizer still has a long way to go, but promised to listen and try to get it right... Or listen to Rick Wion, VP of Interactive media at GolinHarris, co-creators of McNeil's two ADHD social media sites, speak about how to work within the regulatory environment. Jonathan Richman also presented Healthcare and Social Media: Know the Rules. And for conference takeaways, read Sally Church's Pharma Strategy blog The Challenge of Social Media in Pharma as well as Steve Woodruff's Impactivity Blog Pharma and Social Media Progress!. Or follow the many tweets at #BDI.
As part of the conference, I also attended a round table session on Personas led by Carol Banks Setter, SVP of Strategy, WHITTMANHART. Interested in the use of personas in marketing, I wanted to hear what was new...
WHITMANHART uses personas primarily for web design to maximize the user experience- using real insights so that design is aligned with deep understanding of the audience. This allows them to make ‘swift and accurate' decisions throughout a project's design based on each Persona's needs.
Other discussion during the round table centered on whether personas can be helpful tools to integrate on-line and off line brand communications and product design...and whether personas complement, replace and/or extend the traditional segmentation work most often done in pharma today.
Implications for Pharma Marketing
While the use of Personas has its detractors (37 Signals), I am of the mind that-when done well- personas can be an important tool for all brands, including healthcare ones, to:
- Build empathy and increase their ability to deliver patient-centered solutionsby incorporating real needs and usage into the design and functionality of all key marketing initiatives; for many pharma brands, this would take websites and social media activities to the next level...
- Help leverage and execute segmentation strategies beyond their current state; Market Segmentation is an invaluable tool for identifying the groups of people most likely to ‘purchase' your product or use a website and why. However market segmentation is not designed to provide deep insight into how the website, for example, needs to work and how it is best designed to full fill user expectations and needs. Personas drive understanding of how people will actually use the site or product/service. (KM Column: An intro to Personas; Cooper Journal: Reconciling Market Segments and Personas)
- Communicate and integrate all brand design activities(I'm thinking design in the broadest sense here across off line and on-line advertising, relationship marketing, social media, and product/clinical planning); Personas can lead to better decision frameworks for strategy (offerings, channel usage, features), marketing (branding and communications, market research) and design (information architecture, interaction design, visual design, content, user testing).
- Provide a means to consider and test the potential impact of different scenarios against user needs and actions.This can help teams express product/service imperatives for clear prioritization of product requirements and deliverables;
- Facilitate productive brainstorming for cross-functional teams; Personas can help bring focus, channel creativity and encourage consensus.
- Avoid the "sum of all desired features", the logical approach if you canvas the user community, but one that results in weak and inappropriate interaction design (Alan Cooper: The Origin of Personas)
What Makes for a "Real and Productive" Persona?
- Personas are based on real data- quantitative, qualitative and ethnography, field studies/usability testing...Traceable details that researchers heard or observed firsthand
- Personas describe people's current behaviors in the context of their lives. Good descriptions capture: attitudes, work or activity flows, environmental factors, skill level, current frustrations and goals, including end goals, experience goals and life goals.
- A human face and picture adds to the power and credibility of the tool; don't give them funny names-dilutes empathy.
- Maximize usefulness of sets; show how the persona set describes a range of user behaviors. Embody context of entire product/service work flow involving separate individuals.
- Use the personas as a tool within a scenario-based approach to interaction design and communicate design solutions.
- Personas weren't designed for one-time use, but work best as an on-going tool
Times Not to Use Personas
- Product space and target users are extremely well understood by you and all of your decision makers
- You're designing for a very narrow group of users to which you have direct and easy access
- Your users are your stakeholders
Personas are a tool...a means to an end. They are not an end in and of themselves. Good personas aren't fictitious, abstract, or a replacement for user research.
What's your thinking or experience using personas? Could well thought-out personas help Pharma brands deliver a more consistent and superior customer-experience?
For additional reading: Death to Personal! Long Live Personas!E Bacon & S Calde; Cooper Journal: Reconciling Market Segments and Personas; The User Is Always Right: Making Personas Work for your site by S Mulder
Photo credit: iStock
Posted by Ellen Hoenig Carlson on Mon, Jan 26, 2009 @ 09:34 PM
If you're looking for the best "listening platform" to help monitor your brand in today's marketplace, take a look at Forester's new Wave report at Visable Technologies (Courtesy of Peter Kim).
"In response to marketers' changing needs, brand monitoring vendors are evolving to offer a more strategic and comprehensive platform." Forrester defines "listening platforms" as those that deliver insights to shape marketing strategy rather than simply tracking metrics.
"A technology and analytics infrastructure that mines a wide variety of traditional, online, and social sources to extract and deliver insights that shape a firm's marketing strategy."
Evaluating vendors across 62 criteria, Forrester found Nielsen BuzzMetrics and TNS Cymfony to be the two early leaders due to their strong balance of data collection, analytics and consulting services.
With the broad shifts in influence, trust and control of marketing messages from brands to consumers, marketers are forced to do more than just monitor their brands-- They need help:
1) correctly identifying sentiment and key influencers
2) listening across media channels to identify integration points with CRM systems and other traditional customer environments
3) translating data and insights to specific learnings across programs and multiple channels--these consulting services will need to continue to evolve and mature to keep up with client needs.
Those companies and industries like pharmaceuticals-- that are less experienced "listening to their consumers"-- will be best off identifying vendors that provide the strongest consulting services.
And for highly regulated industries like pharma, "listening" is by far the easiest and most productive first step into the world of social media...
Any additional thoughts or suggestions?
...Here's to good listening....
Posted by Ellen Hoenig Carlson on Wed, Jan 14, 2009 @ 10:08 AM
No one doubts that Consumers' deep feelings and emotions-what they really want -will impact the way they think about your company, brand and category. Nor that those wants keep changing in response to a tumultuous world.
How can marketers keep nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, and mind both open to change and focused on the deep insights we need to stay relevant?
click on image for larger view
A rigorous use of research techniques can help go beyond what Consumers typically say--to what they deeply feel and think in their hearts and minds. It's there - in their often unspoken emotions - that new "aha's" or insights are hidden that might drive action and reveal how your brand can uniquely respond.
Let the competition give in to impatience and costly temptations of believing that they already know, that their brand today is that same as last year, or that segments are just like them. Mining for treasure takes a bit of time upfront, paying off by enabling an elegant solution.
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Ethnographers know how to live, observe and listen right in the consumers' natural environment - whether this be at the ‘moment of truth' at retail point of purchase, the doctor's office where the doctor and patient/caregiver are communicating or not, or the home or work place where they may be using your product or not.
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Consumers can keep diaries that reveal unmet needs and concerns in new ways, and often provide concrete feedback about compelling visual imagery and language. Insight from diaries of targets' days or a week of a particular daily routine can be enriched with video, written stories or visual collages.
- Further insight can be generated by bringing collages/diaries into qualitative settings to discuss. Much can be learned by directly listening and observing which pictures are part of their story, which ones are not, and striving to uncover the higher order emotions driving the greatest unmet needs that also best fit with your brand promise. More can be revealed by exposing them to further visuals and insights to encourage them to build a new brand story that is meaningful and unique.
- The internet enables customers' to think about your questions in the privacy of their homes and at a time that works for them. When they're more comfortable and relaxed, you're more likely to uncover deep emotions, and hints about what may be holding them back.
Their responses - generated solo or within community ad boards - can be analyzed and interpreted by psychologists, sociologists or anthropologists to help pull out the deepest meaning, consistencies and insights, to discover what might be motivating above and beyond the current brand profile or story.
- Learning from a full spectrum of targets is often cost effective to further mine new and relevant insights, and help prioritize brand targeting efforts. Identifying who to speak to in research is often not fully appreciated and approached with enough rigor - it's a great opportunity. Segments beyond your traditional target can have significant impact on your business, for example:
- If you market to caregivers/parents, have you also spoken to the actual end user or child? Often a missed opportunity in Pharmaceutical DTC Marketing...
- Juicy learning can come from current franchise or loyalists; they have a lot to tell that can help insure that your brand promise is spot on or not...
What are you doing to keep your brand up to date? Feel like sharing?