Well-managed communities key to building brand loyalty
November 17, 2009 – 9:41 am by Steven NilesOur November issue has gone online and should be hitting desks right about now. This month features our annual report on generics, and the big story this year is the massive patent cliff facing some of the major pharmaceutical brands. While this should prove to be a boon for the generics industry, the branded industry is scrambling to protect its bottom line.
I recently had an opportunity to speak with brand strategy consultant Rob Frankel, and he offered an interesting perspective on the pharma industry’s approach to branding and how a different mindset could help protect brands even after generic competition hits the market. The key is to create well-managed online communities to build loyalty, trust, and investment in the pharmaceutical brand.
You may have seen Mr. Frankel on the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, Neil Cavuto on FOX, CNN, FOX Business Channel, or CNBC. He’s also the author of The Revenge of Brand X: How to Build a Big Time Brand on the Web or Anywhere Else and the founder of i-legions a division that takes businesses’ user bases and monetizes them into revenue-generating “Branded Communities.”
According to Mr. Frankel, the pharma industry’s approach to branding is all wrong. From the minute a drug hits the market, companies are playing beat the clock before the product’s patent expires. Little thought is put into building brand loyalty with the consumer.
“The whole brand discipline thing doesn’t even occur to them,” Mr. Frankel says. “Once it’s tested, once it’s FDA approved, screw it. Pay the check, give the millions to the ad agency. Just get them to sell it. Get the sales force out there. Let’s go back to research and see what else we can stick in the pipeline. It’s a very short-term strategy. And a lot of this stuff has reverberations all the way down to Wall Street.”
If patients can be made to become invested in the brand, fall off due to generic competition will continue, but not at nearly the rate that happens now.
The question is, how do you motivate people? How do you mobilize them? And then how do you get them to be brand loyal and eventually drive brand revenue as a result of that? But according to Mr. Frankel, these questions are completely outside the perspective of pharmaceutical marketers.
“Pharma companies are probably the most fortressed, least brand conscious, and certainly the least sophisticated when it comes to brand strategy of most of the sectors out there,” Mr. Frankel says. “When you couple that with a not-invented-here mentality, you get a real fortress type of entity that simply wants to churn out whatever they can as quickly as they can before their patents expire.”
The first thing that the pharma companies would have to do is be open to and accept the validity of brand strategy into their model. Branding is about more than identity and loyalty. Marketers need to position each brand so that it is perceived as the only solution to the prospect’s problem.
“When you brand like that from the outside in, now instead of saying, here, recommend this drug, it works, now you’re saying here’s a couple reasons why you’re not going to want to go anywhere else,” Mr. Frankel told Med Ad News. “You start engaging in a lot of two-way dialogue with what I like to call a support mechanism called ‘brand community.’”
Two types of communities are needed. One would be a closed community, for doctors. And one would be an open community, for the public.
“They would be able to say to doctors, look, all these people are having trouble with diabetes; we’re hearing them,” Mr. Frankel says. “We have an open forum for them. We have a brand community so that these people can talk to each other. These people are asking for what we’re giving them.”
This action will take the pharmaceutical marketer from being not just an authority on the product and disease state, to possessing the credibility and clarity needed to earn physicians’ trust. “The authority they have as the drug company that manufactures and researches [the product],” Mr. Frankel says. “But the credibility comes from their actions.”
Many marketers are taking forays into creating online patient communities. But Mr. Frankel doesn’t put much stock in the efforts to date. “Everybody who is attempting to do community is doing it wrong; I mean seriously wrong,” he says. “A branded community is not at all about technology. It’s about management. It’s authority, credibility, and clarity. A community has to have authority. There has to be an agenda. Somebody has to be there actively managing it. Visually managing it. And then once they have that person, that person has to know the right things to do and the wrong things to do because you’re managing a group of people. Every other community out there basically is a glorified bulletin board. Put your comment in here and then have it tracked or repeated on Twitter or Digg or whatever. That doesn’t do squat. And the reason it doesn’t is it’s not driven by a brand strategy.”
What’s the brand strategy? Eventually, it’s to bring people into the fold and drive revenue. But people don’t do that on their own, Mr. Frankel cautions. They have to be brought in, told what’s expected of them, managed, encouraged to interact, and instructed how to stay within regulatory boundaries and on topic.
“You’re going to say, look, here’s the deal, if you guys start posting stuff or having exchanges about what your dosage should be, it’s not going to get through,” Mr. Frankel says. “That’s part of that management thing, and you have to be on that. That’s what people don’t understand about branded community. Every other community is just hands free, let the servers take care of it. Totally different thing here. The difference is, as soon as you put out a branded community, all of a sudden the pharma companies get what they never had before, and that is a human heart. People start to see, wow, they’re not just pushing drugs on us, they really do care about people, and that’s why they’re putting people in touch with other people.”
The ultimate goal of a branded community is getting people investing their own human interest, their non-rational interest, their loyalties into the brand because the brand is supporting things that matter to them.
“Think about what would happen if you have patients with a chronic condition, who over those four or five years are now invested through the auspices of the pharma company with its branded product,” Mr. Frankel says. “What happens when all of a sudden the patent expires and generics start becoming available? You see a huge drop off. But not if they’ve invested time, effort, money, and their loyalties into the brand.”
Tags: branding, generics, online communities, Rob Frankel
