A thought-provoking, whirlwind 48 hours

After some hiatus from blogging due to vacation and burnout, I return to writing the blog. The reason: a stimulating, but all too short trip to the PMSA conference in Miami Beach.

Many lessons were learned.

First, I was still in the wake of The CementBloc Agency of The Year Win from Med Ad News. Lesson learned: winning makes the toil and long hours of entrepreneurial agencies turn from bitter to sweet.

Continuing in the entrepreneurial spirit, on the plane ride to Miami, I grabbed a copy of Fast Company Magazine. I had forgotten how good this was; especialy because of the plethora of business growth ideas across all industries: sports, consumer goods, energy, environment, autos, etc. Lesson learned: do not swim in your own bathwater, do not read trade press only from your clones -- get stimulating ideas from elsewhere.

Then the conference itself. Lots of thought provoking talks and meaningful exhanges.

Christian Schuler, Partner and Head of Life Science, of Simon-Kucher & Partners, gave a nice tutorial on pharmaceutical pricing and manged markets contracting. The lessons learned were about value-based pricing, and one of its foundation, the preceptions of innovation. Additionally, a wealth of market research techniques on finding acceptable prices for stakeholders.

The opening pleanry session by Jeffrey C. Bauer, Ph.D., Health Futurist and Medical Economist was thought provoking, touching on technology, personalized medicine and health economics as fundamental waves of the future. Lesson learned: we are in an exciting times for quantiative analytics types in healthcare.

At the vendor fair there was an onsite independent bookseller from Miami called Books and Books, selling technical books for the audience. Including my textbook, and many more pop-culture, yet lower priced. It was fascinating to see people's reactions. Even autographed and sold a few. Plus, Raquel of Books and Books had a wealth of information about the publishing and bookselling industry. Lesson: you can learn from everyone and every situation.

Analysts -- play it straight, tell it true

This is a call out to everyone in analytics functions at media shops, advertising agencies, and markeitng communications consultants.


I have heard too many times from clients, manufacturers, and marketers that they like to measure things "in house" or "independently" because agencies have a vested interest in giving their work a positive score. This is a question of our integrity, and we have to fight this.

How to thwart this resistance in our clients? By being honest and straightforward in our analyses. Set a good example for all of us analytics service providers. Our goal should be to improve our clients brands, and continually optimize. Even if it means our creative, tactics, or implementations were not perfect the first time.

Want to stay competitive? Use insights from innovative data mining software tools at KDNuggets , or use industry benchmarks or techiques you learn at PMSA
or other industry conferences.

SO, in the spirit of continual improvement, tell the complete story and recommend to clients how to get better. You know what? If you take this approach, your clients will respect you for it, and we will all be better off, on both sides of the aisle.

;)

Professional Value and Multi-Channel Marketing.

At this week's PMSA conference in Savannah, new models of professional promotion were featured prominently.

Angela Bakker-Lee of ZS Associates described the success of "Value Based Selling" where representatives listen to physician clinical and practice needs, and helping to achieve these ends up within the rep's goals too. She cited positive examples from technology, airlines, and healthcare.

Richard Greenburg of Inventiv Health gave a thoughtful overview of multi-channel marketing, He noted the challenges of analytics from multiple-channels, requiring data integration, and faster speed of analysis required to be responsive and adapt.

We at The CementBloc had a poster presentation of design and measurement of Professional Relationship Marketing, which really tied the above two concepts together. Physician value can be actually be enhanced and measured through deployment of a PRM system offering a range of services that go with the product information. Furthermore, through online surveys and click stream data from registrants, professional goals can be better assessed, and even brought back to the healthcare company or the sales rep in a feedback loop.

As two examples of this approach to PRM value in the marketplace,
consider Bayer's new Simple Wins Professional as well as J & J Vistakon's Partners in Practice On these company portfolio portals, healthcare professionals can find practice resources as well as product information.

With these portals, healthcare professionals are receiving more value from healthcare firms, who can measure, gather feedback, and be more responsive over time.

PMSA Promotional Workshop - Measurement planning key; digital analytics rare

Three weeks ago I had the pleasure of joining 75 of the industry's deep thinkers at The Pharmaceutical Management Science Association's PMSA's January Symposium on Optimizing Promotional Spend, held in Philadelphia,January 28 - 29, 2010.

Most attendees expected to see extensive mutlivariate regression models for optimizing the media mix. There was some of that. However, far more extensive was discussion of measurement planning: aligning to business goals, and gathering the right information sources. The message, do not save analyses until after the campaign is over - Plan Ahead!

Anoher surprise was a question posed to manufacturers in the audience: how many are actively analyzing performance of your websites? Zero responded affirmatively. As digital channels grow ever more dominant in CRM, we need for digital agencies and manufacturers to more closely collaborate in optimizing digital media and the websites they drive to.