AI and Your Customers’ Attention
Is your marketing worth paying attention to?
When I am working on a brand strategy, I often realize that the biggest communications challenge a brand faces is not that it is weaker than a direct competitor, or that it needs to change customer habits, or that its benefits are unclear. The biggest challenge, an increasingly large amount of the time, is that its target audience is unlikely to give the brand and its story adequate attention for it to accomplish any of its goals. If you can't get someone to pay attention, you can't get them to do anything else, unless they were going to do it anyway.
Physicians are some of the most marketed-to people in the world (in addition to being targeted by drug and device companies, they are often high net worth individuals attracting the attention of everyone from car companies to banks), and their attention has always been hard and expensive to get. Many marketers respond by trying to brute force their messages in front of doctors, either by bombarding them in every channel they can reach them with, or by sending sales reps into their offices to gain a few minutes of their time.
I've been skeptical of this strategy for a long time: my belief is that any positive value of saturation marketing is counteracted by the negative impact of annoying your audience. What's worse, the overall same-ness of many of these marketing touchpoints means your brand almost indistinguishable from the many others doing the same thing.
Moreover, it is likely that physicians' attention will be even harder to grab in the near future. You've probably already heard enough about AI that my bringing it up will make you cringe a little, but it will inevitably be a major factor in how we communicate to doctors. The marketers I have spoken to think it will take some time to work out the compliance issues, but eventually AI tools will allow much more individualized and relevant communications to each physician target. There will likely also be AI assistants that quickly inform doctors about relevant guidelines and new studies, giving them unfiltered information that will make them look down on more slanted pharmaceutical industry communications.
Finally, AI experiences might be educational and fun enough that physicians' already limited time gets even scarcer. This article points out that we are not just competing to see if AI can do our jobs better than us, but if AI will win the overall battle for people's attention in a way that makes what we do irrelevant. So maybe AI will create a customized learning plan that helps a physician keep current on the latest data while meeting their CME requirements and reviewing charts to find suboptimally managed patients that can benefit from new treatments. Your target may never open an email or let a rep into her office again. Your elaborately researched omnichannel plan might collapse because all of the potential touchpoints disappear.
If this strikes you as a plausible cause for alarm, it's time to ask yourself a few questions:
How much value do you put on your customers' attention? It is almost certainly too low now, and that number should go up as these AI-driven experiences proliferate.
What do your customers need from you that they can't get anywhere else? Focus on those needs and use them as the starting point to building a relationship based on mutual benefit.
How can your marketing actually make your physician customers happy? There's a reason so many commercials on TV try to make the audience laugh: if we find something funny, it doesn't feel like an imposition or a waste of time. Pharma marketing might not be the best place to role out the comedy, but ask yourself what you can do to create a deeper experience that your customer would actually value. You might spend a little more time and money making your marketing beautiful, useful, or fascinating.
Are you prioritizing quantity over quality? The traditional reach and frequency considerations might not apply when customers are unreachable with boring, familiar content. Our ability to filter is only getting greater. One meaningful interaction is probably going to be greater than twenty forgettable touchpoints.
When I worked at agencies and we did our annual planning, we'd always present a few big ideas in addition to the updates to the "essential" tactics. Those ideas were usually the first thing to be sacrificed to the budget gods. It might be time to start asking yourself if those are the only ideas actually worth investing in.