Listen to your audience, not your gut
June 16, 2010 – 12:51 pm by Steven NilesA recent article in Advertising Age presented the findings of the research company Xyte Technologies, which has been applying behavior-based segmentation modeling to marketing. The modeling uses factors such as learning styles and reliance on thinking versus feeling to classify people into groups defined by four broad buckets: Mind, Body, Hand, and Word.
The premise of the article is that people in the marketing industry tend to fall into the “Word” category – people who prefer to work with words and have a longer-term focus – yet Word people make up just 18.5% of the population. Thus the ads they create that appeal to them may not work as well with the rest of the population.
Xyte is a unit of online-sampling firm StartSampling. The Advertising Age article quotes StartSampling CEO Larry Burns who cautions marketers that when developing ads, “there’s a risk in going with gut instinct because often our gut instinct is hitting only a portion of the market.”
Curious if these findings had any application to the world of pharmaceutical marketing, I turned to Johanna Skilling, executive VP, director of strategic planning, Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness.
Ms. Skilling agrees with the advice not to base decisions on gut instinct.
“Instead of going on your gut, you need to talk to people and really get them involved in the kind of things you’re hoping you can help them experience,” Ms. Skilling says. “We talk to people before the process and during the process.”
Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness has introduced a process with its clients called Co-Creation, where the agency actually gets consumers in a room with its creative staff to solicit opinions on what works and what doesn’t work from the patient perspective.
“We’re very much in tune with the idea that we need to speak to the people in their language in a way that works for them,” Ms. Skilling says.
As far as segmenting the audience by behavior and learning styles, Ms. Skilling agrees that people react to advertising differently depending on whether they are more emotional, more rational, etc. She believes, however, that these groupings are rather big buckets to throw somebody into. In the pharmaceutical space, consumers are bracketed together more specifically by condition or disease state. This shared experience binds the audience more powerfully than geography or personality type.
“We’re very conscious that most of us don’t have a personal experience with the disease states that we cover,” Ms. Skilling says. “Our job is to be as empathetic and truthful and as honest as possible in trying to understand what people go through, whether that means sitting with people in long conversations or whether that means going to patient meetings and conferences. We try to go on the ground as well. We have a client that works with patients who have multiple sclerosis. People from the agency routinely go on the MS walks and mingle with patients and caregivers. We have a different mission than many consumer products, and that mission is to help people take a hard look at something that can help them heal or live with or treat something that is tough.”
Tags: marketing strategy, Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness, segmentation, targeting, Xyte
