Pharma Marketers: What Job Does Your Brand Do?
The traditional approach to positioning is letting pharmaceutical brands down. This is in part due to poor execution: too many positioning statements built around words like "confidence", "balance", "hope", and "transformative". But there's a deeper problem than a lack of originality: positioning is based on the idea that we want to stand for something in the minds of our customers. This tends to be translated into the question, "What do I want my brand to be known for?" And this is the wrong question for pharmaceutical brands to be asking.
A better question, and one that Clayton Christiansen asks in his book Competing Against Luck, is, "What job do my customers need my brand to do?" I've been building brand strategies with this question at the center of the process, and have found that it provides a transformative clarity to positioning exercises.
Christiansen, in his book, discusses a project he and his team did to understand why so many McDonalds milkshakes are sold at breakfast time. It turns out that many customers bought them before long commutes because they lasted a while and gave them something easy to hold and filling for the journey. By understanding that milkshakes were being hired for that job, McDonalds could speak to their customers more effectively, identify who their real competitors were, and even develop new products that could do that job better.
As I mentioned in my recent “Strategy on a Sailboat” video, this approach can yield similar results in pharma. We frequently struggle to understand or explain why a brand that doesn't demonstrate indication-leading efficacy is used in a large number of patients. Often, this is because there is a unique "job to be done" for a certain group of patients, or a certain type of physician. In general terms, imagine a cancer brand with 90% of the efficacy of its chief rival. This drug is infused monthly while its competitor is oral. Why would it be used at all? Well, there's a good chance that the job it is doing is actually ensuring adherence while providing a chance for the practice to check in regularly with a patient and stay ahead of any issues. This type of insight not only helps marketers promote their drug more effectively, but can suggest new ways to build competitive advantage: maybe that brand should develop real world evidence that by delivering superior adherence and patient interaction it actually outperforms its results in randomized clinical trials? They might also develop patient materials that help use the infusion time to ask key questions about their care.
The bottom line is that healthcare brands that know why their physician customers are "hiring" them will find innovative ways to win against those that simply want to stand for something.