Brainstorming: food for thought

Ever get a group of cross-functional people in a room for a CRM or PRM tactical planning session? Perhaps to plan media placement or other promotional ideas? Better ask them to do some self-study ahead of time.

A recent article in The Washington Post by Jena McGregor comments on a research study about brainstorming. The study was done in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology by Nicholas Kohn and Steven Smith, two researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington and Texas A&M University.

The researchers asked undergraduate students to contribute ideas, both individually and in collective groups. They shared the ideas on a computer, either in small chat groups or alone, but combined together after the fact. As expected, those made up of individual ideas that were later pulled together, outperformed the real chat groups, both with the number of ideas and the diversity of them.

Thus, think about asking teammates to make a short list before hand, to avoid the herd mentality.

Invest a Bit to Measure

When investing millions in a new major promotional campaign, or a new selling technology, think about this: how will you be accountable for that investment? How will you know if that investment in advertising, communications, and technology is actually paying off? In today's corporate environment, answering those questions is paramount.

The Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853-1926) cleverly remarked in rhyme: "Door Meten tot Weten:" Through Measurement is Knoweldge.

Yet I often see clients, and agencies, omit the small proportion of the budget required to measure, which insures understanding of success, and the ability to optimize and improve. I would say 8% to 10% is a good minimal requirement benchmark for a measurement budget -- others would go much higher -- see this ClickZ point of view.

What does measurement look like? Especially with new technologies like multichannel, closed loop marketing, RM, iPads, QR codes, etc?

Ultimately, you want linkage between your promotional investments and incremental sales.

However, there are other critical evaluations that should be performed, on how the marketplace is behaving and how perceptions are being changed. Some call this "engagement." I like to think of it as: "are my stakeholders behaving the way I intended?"

Measurement is in large part the comparison of actual behaviors to what you expected when you set up your mutli-channel program, or your sales force automation system. Are the sales reps detailing as you intended? Are the physicians or consumers interacting with the media you have placed? Is navigation on websites achieving to goals that move your brand?

Therefore, when investing in promotional platforms, give some thought as to the expected marketplace experiences. And save some funds for measurment to confirm or optimize your plans.

Healthcare is Digital and Pervasive

This Tuesday our firm The CementBloc hosted an event during New York's Internet Week demonstrating multi-channel solutions in the Health and Wellness Sector. We received an impressive response of over 100 registrants, and we showed four waves of attendees through our offices. The context was a patient journey for a prospective traveler to the Far East, and how that consumer learned about all of the required vaccinations from web, mobile, office materials, EMail, and so on. Furthermore, healthcare professionals, be they primary care physicians or travel clinic specialists, hear about vaccine updates via professional portals, Epocrates, and ipad tablets from their pharmaceutical sales representatives.

For some first hand accounts of this exhibit, please see Yahoo and also Mediapost. For an impact on how this affected TheBloc and beyond, see My Life as a Focus Group.

Communications in healthcare can only be impactful when they can reach the target audiences where they gathering informations and making decisions. By necessity, that means placing portable information assets at various places: online, within communities, in office, (E)mail, out of doors, and in various media: print, digital, and video. The days of building monolithic websites with many bells and whistles is drawing to a close. Instead, one must design an interconnected distributed system that collectively accomplishes CRM or PRM.

Furthermore, that means working in medical communications is an exciting place to be.

Convergent branding: hitting the spot.

When I was studying for my math major at MIT, I learned over and over theorems about convergence: how a sequence of numbers gets arbitrarily ever closer to a target. The same concept holds in multi-dimensional space, like in the figure to the left: from all directions, follow the trend and get to the same point.

At The CementBloc, we also talk about convergent branding. From whatever channel a consumer, healthcare professional, or payer comes from, they experience the brand in the same consistent way. Ironically, this does not mean that all of your marketing is located at one point in space. Quite the contrary, the convergence is to the customer, wherever the customer goes, in whatever channel, that is where you place the consistent message.

This has implications for promotional planning. Say you have an audience of healthcare specialists, or consumer caregivers, with a high-volume central portal or community. Then make that favored location part of your convergent messaging plan. But in a subtle way. If you seem promotional, you steer the sequence off course; rather, continue the pattern, and let your true message flow within the direction of that active customer destination.

Heavy stuff? Want to find out more? Make a comment or send an email.

Youtube: unbranded health video channels on demand

The increased usage of healthcare videos on Youtube is rampant, it is taking on many forms, official and non, and is as complex a network as the whole Internet itself. The YouTube growth is surprisingly prevalent among both among consumersand heathcare professionals.

A 2010 study of Manhattan Research study reported in Med Ad News notes that "the majority of physicians visit YouTube ... nearly 2 in 3 physicians are using this website for personal or professional reasons."

Youtube healthcare videos include the polished, consumer unbranded health content from the Johnson & Johnson health channel. I get my leads for this channel from promotion by a Twitter feed from Robert Halper

Both consumer and professionals benefit from YouTube channels of major medical institutions like the Mayo Clinic Youtube channel.

More purely professionally oriented videos covering the latest studies and medical conventions are found on the Insider Medicine Channel
and The MD Conference Channel. What is most striking among these are the high volumes of views yet low number of memberships. The metrics are about viewing and downloading.

While there are channels for professional associations like American Society of Plastic Surgeons and American College of Rheumatology, content streams are by no means standardized. There can be:

* association announcements
* clinical cases
* training videos
* career advice
* information for pateints.

Then, aside from all of these "official" channels are thousands of independent healthcare professionals and interest groups generating content they deem valuable for others. Any Youtube search will show you that. For example, many professional journals are not quite on YouTube, but a search for "New England Journal of Medicine" will demonstrate the wide variety of posters.

What is the implication of all this?

* Professionals are on YouTube, posting and downloading videos, but in non-predictable ways.
* Search here is as important as elsewhere on the web.
* The situation will continue to evolve, perhaps consoliating, or remaining de-centralized.
* Advertising models still seem to be forming; some of these links have ads or sponsored links, others not.


Stay tuned.

New Book and Special Discount

Very exciting! After over a year of researching, writing, editing, proofreading, and the patient support of so many, we are just one month away until the new book is available. Printed books to be out early March; E-books in April.

Whether you are a practitioner of CRM or PRM, a healthcare marketer, or a university instructor, there should be something in this book for you. It is intended as both a course and a reference that pulls it all together in Healthcare RM.

Come talk to me with any questions or interest. This author would be happy to give a guest lecture as well.

Pre-orders can be made now, and below is a special 35% off discount offer valid through March 31st:


Discount 35% off new book Healthcare Relationship Marketing at Gower Press website Enter code G1DLT35 at checkout

Book description below:

Healthcare Relationship Marketing: Strategy, Design and Measurement


Ira J. Haimowitz, Ph.D


In recent years there have been dramatic changes in the pharmaceutical promotional landscape, affecting both consumers and healthcare professionals. One consequence of these dynamics is the need for pharmaceutical companies to plan new kinds of dialogue and relationships with their stakeholders. The evolution has been from mass-channel "push" marketing to two-way, multi-channel relationship marketing. Targeted Emails, webinars, mobile messages, and social networks are expanding in usage.

This book is a practical overview and resource guide for the design and measurement of pharmaceutical relationship marketing (RM) programs. There are descriptions of each aspect of pharmaceutical RM design and measurement, including a running case study with follow-up exercises. The author has also conducted interviews from several pharmaceutical marketing industry experts, each having 15 years or more of working healthcare RM knowledge, and each speaking on their specific specialities.

For newcomers to healthcare marketing, this book can serve as a foundation and introduction that provides framework, details, and examples of both relationship marketing designs and associated measurement disciplines. Healthcare Relationship Marketing will also be valuable to readers currently working in pharmaceutical marketing or sales who may not have exposure to the particular disciplines of relationship marketing and direct response measurement and optimization. Even for the experienced practitioner this will serve as a convenient reference that pulls together all of the program components and measurement frameworks within a single book. This book may also serve as a textbook within a university course in marketing, or a pharmaceutical business program.


Contents: Preface; Healthcare trends and relationship marketing's role; Foundations of relationship marketing; Discovery: situation assessment; Strategy: planning the relationship marketing program; Analytics planning for relationship marketing; Execution: placing in the marketplace; Measurement of healthcare relationship marketing programs; Optimization and the new cycle; Conclusions and the future; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.

Managing expectations on RM

In her blog "My life as a focus group," Elizabeth Elfenbein commented on managing expectations so that your clients are not disappointed. This is especially true in a consulting role, and with relationship marketing programs. Individuals want some kind of comfort if they are getting a positive ROI. Yet the systems being deployed are sometimes innovative and have uncertain response rates. Furthermore, crowded markets and channels create clutter and reduce response.

So, what to do to make sure expectations are met as you field innovative marketing programs liek CRM and PRM?

A few questions to ask to manage expectations:

- What is the current status quo of Rx, conversion, and adherence. Can you exceed it?

- Can you use low and high estimates of response rates, and conversion and adherence rates to put a range on the expected return

- Rather than stay fixated on a single number like ROI, what are leading indicators that also show progress?

Also, encourage a mindset of a phased approach and continual improvement, not just a one shot measurement. For some thoughts on implementing continual marketing optimization in the digital world, see this issue of the "Business 2 Community" blog.

Automated speech processing: commercial state of the art

I have always been fascinated by progress in the area of automated speech processing, since my days as a Master's student at the University of Cambridge in Computer Speech and Language Processing and I spent time with Professor Steve Young at the Cambridge University Machine Intelligence Laboratory.

Thus it was with great interest and pleasure that I read this review of the state of the art of commercial speech processing systems within Scientific American earlier this month. Like many high tech fields, there have been mergers and convergence in the suppliers, to the leader Nuance Communications. Extensive pre-training is no longer required. General listening is now possible in structured sub-languages and categories. Plus, the commercial applications have become widespread, especially related to phone interfaces.

Why is this relevant for healthcare relationship marketing. Possible applications include:

* Acquisition and registration into programs via mobile smartphones, for either patients or professionals.

* Automated dictation transcription processing of the highly structured clinical reports that physicians issue after seeing patients.

* speech to text social network inputs as a convenience, or for the visually impaired.

* processing call center transcripts for marketing intelligence.

* insert your brainstorm here.

Final checking to make sure

How am I spending some of the last hours of 2010? Doing final proofreading and editing of my upcoming book: Healthcare Relationship Marketing, Gower Press. This book is
available for pre-order from Amazon and other booksellers, and discounts are available. One last look to create the index at the back, do final proofreading. To make sure that before thousands (hopefully) see this text and use it for education and professional reference, that it ties together with one voice.

Call me if interested! I will blog again on this book as publication approaches end of February


But more generally, here is good advice for 2011: before sending external communications, take one last look, one last proofread. You are what you portray yourself as, your words are part of your appearance. Be ready and rehearse before a big presentation or even a conference call. You'll be glad you did.

Teamwork Triad and the Digital Campaign Launch

What is the benefit of working in a small, focused agency without walls? Multi-disciplinary teamwork and relentless focus on high performance.

My department has three components: analytics, campaign management operations, and media services. All of these are both consumer and professional. In larger agencies, these functions are in different departments, even different divisions or buildings. For The CementBloc, all these functions sit together, literally in the same workspace on the same floor.

The benefit of this has become really apparent to me this year as we launch our series of digital campaigns, complete with media promotion and operations.
Take a look at a few of them:



* Professional diabetes
* Consumer cosmetic dermatology
* Consumer social community for breast cancer

As campaigns like these are prepared, the disciplines work together to prepare promotional planning, insure smooth operations, and design for measurability. Once we are up in market, the energy is palpable. Folks literally running to each other's computers, hovering around the same screen as the hourly results come in. How did the email blast go? What are the search click throughs? Which banners are getting highest response rates? Most importantly: how can we keep optimizing!?!

Nothing like it.

No see and appointment physicians fairly stable

The latest update of the SK&A physician access survey,as reported by MM&M, , shows some stability of statistics over the past few years. 20 sales rep calles per week for physicians on average (4 a day, is this alot?)

The latest results show 23% of physicians said they wouldn't see reps at all, in June of 2010, not much change from 23.6% in 2008.

The rise has really been in terms of physicians requiring an appointment: roughly half the physicians surveyed said they prefer or require an appointment to see a rep (up from 38.5% preferring or requiring an appointment in 2008),

There are some access differences by practice demographics: smaller practices, Southern offices, and certain specialties (including allergists and orthopedic specialists) are more accessible. Practices owned by hospitals or health systems are tougher to get into than private practices. See the article, or contact SK&A for more details.

What does this mean? While overall access trends may have stabilized, depending on your product specialty, non-personal promotion and PRM should still be a critical part of your healthcare professional mix.

Analyzing iKyp professional data

I always love analyzing and visualizing innovative data streams, and this past week got to look at the output of an IKyp webkey deployment within a pharmaceutical professional setting.


This webkey is an acquisition device for relationship marketing programs, consumer or profesional. It is a USB drive attached to a packet of educational literature, describing the drug, medical device, or professional services. When the drive is inserted into a computer, it calls up a website, that can be a landing page for a CRM or PRM program. In a professional setting, often sales representatives are delivering them to group practices, encouraging the healthcare professionals to sign up for a value added PRM program.

Interestingly, ikyp webkeys all have unique serial numbers, and they can also be programmed to carry a categorical or cohort code, like a sales territory or a metro area. Furthermore, each insertion is date stamped and recorded as a unique transaction in the analytical datamart.

What this means is alot of great analytic potential:

* One can do basic subtotals of how many devices used per day, or per week, and even subtotals by sales territory.

* One can use these for funnel analyses, from manufacturing, to distribution, to usage, to website landing page visits, to registrations.

* Also, the data enables path analysis that can reveal insights. Like how devices are passed around to different professionals, different computers, and used repeatedly over time.

In summary, this mutli-coded physical acquisition device can help a pharmaceutical company understand the effectiveness of its PRM program in ways not seen before.

Measuring Marketing Promotions? -- Have a Plan

If you are about to launch a major marketing initiative, whether local or national, awareness or direct response, you probably are being asked to "measure the impact." or to "calculate ROI." Be aware that planning your measurement is part of planning the project itself.

One has to translate the business objectives of the promotion, or the RM program into measurable quantities that can assess whether those objectives are filled. Think in terms of the RM continuum. What are you trying to achieve?

* spread awareness: better have surveys to measure if they are aware, before and after

* get people to respond? Better have response mechanisms with data streams, and coded by source

* convert patients to drug? Getting doctors to write Rx? How is this data coming in?

* encourage advocacy? Make sure your advocacy tactics has a tracking breadcrumbs.


This sounds obvious as written, or in hindsight, but really this sort of planning requires a half day workshop of a cross-functional team.

At least.

Journal of Case Reports -- Halfway to Social?

Much publicity about Elsevier creating a purely online International Journal of Surgical Case Reports, where physicains pay $400 to have their written case reviewed. Here is an example published case study, with figures. A recent Medical Marketing and Media article discusses this, including the motivation to build a case database for searching valuable cases.

Online advertising may be under consideration by Elsevier, though not currently implemented.


Author fee aside, this new journal is an advance in user generated content in the typically slow moving world of publications. In addition, this seems to only move halfway to achieve a more full potential of professional social media. Why not allow surgeons to post and have discussion threads about the cases, to learn from each other, and accelerate knowledge?

Tablets - An ever more crowded market

There is a near explosion of the number of electonics manufacturers delivering tablets to market. This Wall St Journal article and table points out how the market for tablet hardware is getting ever more crowded.

What does this mean for pharmaceuticals and healthcare. We have spoken about sales forces delivering messages on tablets, and there will be more options. Lenovo is present for multiple pharma companies. Screen size is an important factor when showing sales visual aids and KOL videos to a physician. But ultimately the winner of the sales presentation race may be based on software adptation -- the SFA contact managment systems, as well as the presentation software, and the feedback loop systems. Which platform allows for the development of these sales force utilizities with continual enhancements and intelligence?

From a consumer standpoint, patients are acquiring tablets like IPads and health related apps are incrasingly coming to market.

From a physician practice managmenet standpoint, if electronic medical records and billing systems can become tablet compatible, then we may have convergence. Patients and doctors can share "apps" and clinical results as their health dialogues become more quantitative and more meaningful.

These developments will be rapid over the next several years.

Cookies and all the front page news

At one job, we used to say to each other, "Don't end up on the cover of the NY Times or the Wall St Journal." Yet, the WSJ has been running an series on online website behavioral tracking, especially picking on usage of cookies.

The publicity of how cookies and tracking works helps create an informed marketplace. As the WSJ notes, cookies have been legal since 2001 and 2003 court rulings. It is especially the newer "Flash Cookies" that seem to be problematic, as they cannot effectively be deleted by website users wishing to do so, and they appear to replicate.

Let's just not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Cookies do have positive benefits for the user experience in CRM and PRM. They enable automated login, on return visits. Cookies can enable a continuity of experience upon subsequent visits, and well as customization of website content based on what has been viewed before.

Of course, if a user wishes to remove cookies, they sacrifice some of those benefits, but may also prevent other, more frivolous websites from tracking their scent. Caveat emptor: strictest privacy, unfortunately, comes at a sacrifice of quality of digital RM experience.

Professional Portals: What Behind the Curtain?

Healthcare professional portals are gaining prominence and sophistication among pharmaceutical companies. Some examples are
When designing a healthcare professional portal Pfizer Pro, Merck Services, and Bayer Diabetes' Simple Wins Pro. Increasingly, these portals represent a portfolio of products from the same manufacturer, in addition to other practice management services being provided.

One decision to make when designing and implementing such a portal, is what content to display open to all visitors, and what information is "behind the curtain," requiring the HCP to register, or login.

While there is no hard and fast rule, it depends on the business objectives. Usually a primary goal of professional protals is to expand reach beyond the sales force, and to get product information "details" out to a broader range of professionals, such as remote physicians and "no see" doctors. For this reason, basic product information is usually in front of the curtain.

What goes behind are special value added services that a healthcare professional will find especially worthwhile as a "value exchange" for logging in. These may include electronic samples, information about speaker programs or grants, training programs, or requesting a sales representative visit.

Some items could go either in front or behind the curtain. Patient eductaion materials and key opinion leader videos can help provide valuable information about product benefits. which all may want to see. But they can also be a draw to encourage professionals to sign in and join the communications database.

In summary, plan your professional web portal carefully. The more valuable features behind the curtain, the more incentive to log in. However, that may take away from visit rates, search engine placement, and reach expansion. Even if those visitors are anaonymous, at least they are getting your product messaging.

Interactive dashboards for RM programs

Want to track your relationship marketing programs periodically, and make the results insightful and impactful? Do not just count responses in some tired tables or bar charts.

Here are some tips:

* Have a monthly (or weekly) forecast of estimated responses, broken out by sub-segment and promotional source as well. Track results versus the forecast.

* Use a visual, interactive dashboard to show results, not only high level vs. forecast, but drill down by segment, or by promotional source. Try to use drill down to explain why your campaign is ahead of or behind forecast.

* Show insights, interesting trends, and outliers right on the dahboard, and hyperlink them. Focus your attention on highlighting the insights, not a methodical stack of reports.

Putting this all together, here is an example, implemented in the Spotfire thin-client web player environment. Click around, interact, try the bookmarked insight, and let me know your thoughts.

Busy time of year...

At our agency, The CementBloc , it is a busy time of year! Which is a good thing. A terrific confluence of 2010 projects coming to a crescendo, new business ideas getting funded for the rest of the year, and 2011 marketing and promotional planning.

This is an optimistic time in terms of healthcare technology, analytics, and relationship marketing.

Physician Social Media Grow for Specialists

A recent article in Medical Marketing and Media summarizes the rise of healthcare professional social media and points out the increase in specialty specific networks. Specialists interviewed point out that general purpose communities like Sermo may not get into the depth of investigation they need. Requirements like patient case studies, medical conference reports, key opinion leader discussions, and video vignettes related to those patients.

These networks may grow out of health networks, they may be pharmaceutical industry sponsored, or be affiliated with an association like the American Academy of Opthalmology, 7,000 strong. Also intriguing is the surgical video sharing site Vumedi.com for surgeons. A real professional twist on Youtube.

Specialists love to confer with their peers at conventions, and now it is just expanded to the personal space. This can be a real acquisition or awareness opportunity for pharmaceutical marketers, particularly in an unbranded way.