Managing e-mail madness

AwayFind liberates you from the never-ending burden of checking your e-mail.  When an important message arrives, you are alerted with an SMS on your mobile device or a digital voice call.  You can create filters and customized auto-responders to let contacts know that you will get back to them sooner, later, or perhaps much later.  Basic service is free, and paid options range from $4.99 to $49 a month.  A low-tech alternative to avoid constant interruptions is to only open your e-mail program a few times a day.

Your to-do list — on steroids

Trello picks up where the banal Day-Timer^®* leaves off.  This collaboration tool organizes all of your projects onto editable cards that can be dragged and dropped onto project boards on your computer screen.  Trello lets you see:

• What’s being worked on
• Who’s working on what
• Project status updates

It’s easy to add priorities, checklists, notes, activities, videos, and links.  About setting priorities: on crazy days I ask myself, “Is this action or expense directly tied to my business mission?  Will it help me achieve my goals for the year?”

On the money

Mint is a free tool that brings all of your financial accounts together in one place online or on your mobile device, including your savings, checking, investments, auto payments, and mortgage.  It automatically categorizes transactions, lets you see your budgets, and offers ways to save.  It even tracks your spending with color-coded pie charts that you don’t have to waste time creating in Excel^®*.

Save big, save often

• You never have to clip newspaper coupons again to save on hundreds of items and services with printable coupons and savings cards at Coupons.com
• ZingSale is a free price alert service that notifies you when that item you’ve been coveting goes on sale
• You no longer have to drive around to find inexpensive gas prices in your city, thanks to GasBuddy
• BarkingDeals works just like Groupon, so go ahead and spoil Rover

While other healthcare communications marketing firms are having difficulty adjusting to doing more with less, adding value while saving clients money has always been status quo for The Core Nation companies.  Contact Me anytime to hear how we can work more efficiently for you in 2012.

While this is still a moving target, here are some guideposts to consider:

Start establishing value-based metrics, such as how well HCPs understand patient types and optimal therapies. IMS Health reports that this is a better driver of market share than frequency of use of materials. Improving performance on this metric alone was worth 3.5 TRx share points to one company. It involves measuring how well (and how helpful), the sales rep has been in achieving the desired outcome, which is educating HCPs.

Assess built-up equity in physician relationships. This will need to be measured over time rather than simply gathering perceptions from the most recent sales calls. Some areas that can be measured include increased accessibility to hard-to-see physicians, identification of key business drivers, and establishment of advocates. Another important metric is whether sales reps are successfully influencing HCPs to make a long-term commitment to your brand. It’s not just about getting new customers; it’s about keeping them — and keeping them happy.

Remember to consider patient satisfaction. Times have changed, and HCPs have come to expect that they will be seeing more knowledgeable and more informed patients. Sales reps can provide HCPs with tips on answering patients’ questions, and they can be measured on how well they are adding to the patient experience.

Know the impact of training on your business. It is important to identify areas where your efforts are succeeding or where they need improvement. This includes qualitative assessment of potential SFE, as well as traditional quantitative measures, such as the amount of sales. Another important, but often over-looked, metric is whether your training is inspiring the confidence, trust, and motivation of your sales force.

See how peer-to-peer influence can help. Being a team player may not be measurable, but sharing results of sales calls with peers is. You should be able to track whether increased communication is positively influencing SFE.

Once value-based metrics are in place, the next challenge is how you evaluate them beyond the traditional measurement of increased sales. One approach is by using a multi-rater survey. This allows you to get feedback not just from HCPs, but also from other stakeholders, including sales managers, sales peers, and even sales reps’ self-assessments.

The biggest challenge with any survey is getting HCPs to participate. An appealing incentive may help, but you will only succeed if you can convince HCPs that their input will result in greater value for them.

But that’s really a win-win because what’s good for them is also good for us.

We will see more of an account management approach to sales. What healthcare professionals (HCPs) really want is help to better manage health outcomes, while ensuring maximum profitability for their practice. This means that sales strategy needs to be redefined and realigned to meet specific needs of HCPs, payers, and patients. Sales reps must understand a customer’s whole business and be able to help them see how their products can be used together to improve health outcomes and increase value for patients. Placing a greater emphasis on portfolio-based selling is one of the many ways to start making this transition.

We will need to clarify what a “trusted partner” can offer. I think this goes beyond just adding more medical science liaisons who can talk peer-to-peer with HCPs. The ability to create value for HCPs requires defining their business value. To achieve a competitive advantage, sales reps should be able to translate a thorough understanding of their customers’ competitive pressures. They also need to be able to propose contingency plans and counter-competitive tactics.

Sales forces will have to be even more agile and probably more regional. The traditional paradigm of managing from the top down may need to shift to allow regional business units to have more control so they can quickly address individual customer needs. I think we will also see more pharmaceutical companies working to provide 24/7 access to both product information and their account specialists through remote media (such as customer interaction centers and websites offering live-chat functions) to provide timely practice management support.

Sales rep competencies must increase rapidly. Job descriptions will be rewritten, methods of recruiting sales reps will be revamped, and training curricula will shift toward developing a more customer-centric approach to selling. Competencies determine the ability of sales reps to perform their jobs most effectively, but incentives will be needed to help them follow required processes or motivation and productivity will ultimately suffer. I will talk more about that in my next post, as well as tackle the question of how we will measure ROI.

The set-up: NIH stopped a large study with Abbott Laboratories’ cholesterol-fighting drug 18 months early after results showed that taking Niaspan in conjunction with a statin failed to prevent heart attacks and may also have boosted stroke risk (despite raising HDL levels and lowering triglycerides).

The sum-up: The playing field is clearly changing and comparative effectiveness will raise the ante even higher. The onus will be upon drug manufacturers to demonstrate positive clinical outcomes early, not just changes in lab values or biomarkers.

The takeaway: Medical affairs and marketing typically work in separate silos. Communication between these two groups is critical when clinical trials are in the planning stage to ensure that clinical endpoints are properly aligned with future marketing goals.

At the end of the day, we may remember the Niaspan clinical trial more for its role in changing the way pharma marketers do business than for its disappointing results.

This is an approach that behavioral guru BJ Fogg calls elegant persuasion (see his book: Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do). Smart persuaders, says Fogg, motivate people to simple action, which then opens the door for them to engage in more difficult behaviors.

Every behavior starts with a trigger

Triggers prompt, cue, and call people to action. It’s a formula that social network giant Facebook has mastered. When you don’t log into Facebook for a while, you receive a message alerting you to a new notification. I fall for it every time. But if they said, “Hey Ken, connect with your friends,” I’d never click on the link.

But we’re talking pharma here

Getting someone to try a pharma brand isn’t always easy. Here are 7 crucial steps to aid the process:

1. Figure out what’s preventing a desired behavior (I agree with Fogg that it usually comes down to lack of motivation, lack of ability, or lack of a trigger).
2. Instead of trying to stop old behaviors, create new ones.
3. Make new behaviors simple and attainable.
4. Work to manage perceptions, particularly associating cost with value.
5. Communicate through channels your target audiences are already using.
6. Get your targets to repeat their new behaviors until they become routine.
7. Continue to remind (and reward) them.

When decisions are made naturally, there’s no need for excessive nudging or nagging. You also avoid naysayers this way.

And that’s nirvana.

Specifically, a recent Newsweek article confirms what I’ve always believed about changing behavior: providing too much information can actually prevent people from making desired decisions.

Over-analysis causes paralysis

Researchers have found that we all have an unconscious system that guides our decisions. When people are faced with too much information, or a multitude of choices, their brain struggles to determine what should be accepted or discarded. As a result, they often make poor decisions — or no decision at all.

Our decision-making center also places greater emphasis on the latest information (eg, an e-mail on your smart phone or a new post on your favorite social media site). The danger of focusing solely on “recency” messaging, however, is that information may never reach the desirable unconscious level where change can start to occur.

Once more with a little feeling

When emotions are not part of the decision-making process, people tend to over-think their decisions, and that can be detrimental when you are promoting a competitive healthcare brand.

Scientifically speaking, the prefrontal cortex of the brain connects emotional feelings about choices with the output of the rational brain. Making positive emotional connections with target audiences has always been our approach to changing behavior at The Core Nation. This new scientific evidence strongly affirms our position that to change the brain, you’ve got to start with the heart.

You may experience push back — or complete dismissal — from a physician who has been using the same drug successfully for many years if he or she sees no reason to change. This can also occur when physicians have low interest in a condition (for example, market research has shown us that urologists are not always receptive to hearing about overactive bladder medications).

You also run the risk of alienating patients if they are in denial about having a life-threatening disease like cancer, or a problem with symptoms they cannot see, such as hypercholesterolemia or hypertension.

Take the path of least resistance

Instead of telling people what to do, or challenging their beliefs, think about showing them the reasons why taking a drug or making a behavior change will benefit them. The best approach is to engage them in a way that helps them come to their own behavior-changing conclusions.

For decades, physicians, health organizations, and family members have been trying to convince smokers that they need to quit. But 48 million Americans still light up. So when the American Cancer Society (ACS) asked us to create a motivating campaign for their annual Great American Smokeout initiative, we knew that lecturing or scare tactics would not work.

With our “I Will Quit Because ______” campaign, we asked smokers to fill in the blank with their own reason to kick the habit — quite literally, on the microsite iwillquit.org. By filling in the blank and opting in, aspiring quitters received personalized e-mails reminding them of their reason and offering them tips to help them succeed.

We understood that when you talked with 100 ex-smokers, you’d hear 100 different reasons for why they quit. It’s always highly personal. Using this to our advantage, we successfully convinced people to commit to quit without ever telling them to stop smoking.

The key to engaging any target audience is knowing how they think — both emotionally and rationally — and convincing them without feeling like they have been convinced. The key is to avoid triggering their automatic defense mechanisms or resistance patterns. Framing your messaging so that they can identify with your brand — and feel that they are part of your brand story — can certainly help.

This isn’t always easy. But it works.

And, as I’ve mentioned previously, telling people what to do can result in push-back, or worse, cause them to do the exact opposite.

Our approach has always been to bring our target audiences on a journey with a brand. We build a brand story that not only resonates, but also engages our audiences in a way that makes them feel they are part of the story; so it’s relatable to them.

A recent study by Moyer-Gusé and Nabi,¹ about how making emotional connections through television programs can create awareness and change across health and social issues, confirms that we’re on the right track.

Tuning in emotionally

College students watched either a non-narrative video from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy (NCPTP) or an episode from the TV series The OC, when Ryan discovers that his teenage girlfriend Theresa is pregnant. The program was narrated through Theresa’s perspective.

After watching the NCPTP video, both male and female students said they would not increase their safe-sex intentions. Interestingly, while males were reactant (resistant) to The OC episode, females dramatically increased their safe-sex intentions. Identifying with Theresa, female viewers vicariously adopted her perspectives, thoughts, and feelings¹ — exactly what we strive to achieve when we’re building a brand story.

It all boils down to how we engage target audiences and the way we talk to them. This is important not only when we’re selling a brand, but also when we’re trying to influence desired behavior changes, such as patients following instructions and being adherent.

In addition to how you construct an emotional bridge to target audiences, marketers may need to relook at how they close a sale with physicians and their “call to action” to try to motivate patients to respond or change their behavior. I’ll be focusing on that next.

Reference: 1. Moyer-Gusé E, Nabi RL. Explaining the effects of narrative in an entertainment television program: overcoming resistance to persuasion. Human Comm Res. 2010;36(1):26-52.

For years I’ve been saying that people are averse to change. Recently I came across several studies that provide more proof.

There is compelling evidence that people will be resistant to strong persuasion or advice that conflicts with their opinions. This is actually a proven psychological response called reactance, a term that was first coined by psychologist Jack Brehm back in 1966. Reactance is a motivational state that is directed at re-attaining a freedom that has been restricted through elimination of (or threat of elimination of) a behavior.¹

In a nutshell, the theory of reactance is that people will do the exact opposite of what you tell them to do.

Keep your expert opinion to yourself

In their study, Fitzsimons and Lehmann¹ demonstrated that when participants read a negative review about a product they liked in a health and fitness magazine, they were 30% more likely to want it.

They concluded that when experts dole out unsolicited advice that contradicts a person’s opinion, it can lead to strong feelings of hostility or behavioral backlash. People will hold onto their convictions even tighter and intentionally contradict your recommendations.

A perfect example is a recent New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene TV ad that warns men about the dangers of H.I.V.-related problems and promotes condom use (“When you get H.I.V., it’s never just H.I.V.”). Several mainstream gay organizations have been reactant to the perception that gay and bisexual men dispense diseases and have lobbied the city to pull the ad.

This supports my continued conviction that it is more about the way we engage our target audiences than what we say, or how we say it, which is what I’ll be talking about next time.

Reference: 1. Fitzsimons GJ, Lehmann DR. Reactance to recommendations: when unsolicited advice yields contrary responses. Market Sci. 2004;23(1):82-94.

#1: We resolve to keep pushing the envelope when promoting brands, despite increasing regulatory restrictions.

2010 was a “bah, humbug” year for DDMAC. At last count, the FDA’s promotional enforcers issued 102 cease and desist letters to pharma and device companies. From footnote font sizes to Important Safety Information placement to the correct order of warnings, precautions, and contraindications; you’d better comply, or risk having your letter posted on the Internet. Being aggressive in our promotional endeavors is vital to our shared success, and if our clients don’t know the new rules, it’s our job to educate them. But pharmaceutical branding must not lower its standards to the “sea of sameness” we’re beginning to see in response to constraints imposed by the FDA. We believe in differentiating brands by giving healthcare professionals something they can relate to and by making an emotional connection between your brand and your target audience. Identify a problem that’s vexing them and offer a viable solution. Moving forward in 2011, it’s all about positive engagement and building relationships. And that means finding even more creative ways to engage healthcare professionals in two-way conversations and providing information that compels, adds value, and benefits them. Game on!

#2: We resolve to leverage comparative effectiveness research as a way to change physician behavior.

Raise your eggnog and toast that data from prospective comparative effectiveness trials are now beginning to be released. As hoped, these endpoints provide decision makers with higher resolution data to support patient management. Very shortly, we’ll be saying “sayonara” to the days of comparing effective to non- or less-effective medications. Now physicians must choose between two or three therapies, which at first glance (when using primary endpoints) could be seen as equally effective. Which one wins? Which one will be best for patients? Comparative effectiveness trials will tell us, and third-party insurers will rely on them when making future formulary decisions. It’s time to get on the train or get out of its way.

#3: We resolve to commit to more proactive patient education programs because patients have the power to drive scripts.

Ho, ho, hum alert: Unidirectional conversations between doctors and patients are passé. In 2011, more patients will arrive at physician appointments armed with knowledge, will initiate discussions, and make more demands. These patients want better disease management education, according to a recent survey of more than 7,000 patients. There’s currently a deep disconnect between the information doctors provide and the information their patients desire (95% of respondents wanted more comprehensive information on how to better manage their illness). In addition to spending time developing educational materials to try to change patient behavior, we need to spend more time thinking about how we can turn informed patients into more powerful advocates for our brands.

#4: We resolve to work smarter to help our clients maximize their digital communications.

Even Santa knows that the digital communications landscape is evolving by the minute (see three of his many sites at http://www.claus.com, http://www.northpole.com, and http://www.santaclaus.net). Before you get caught up in all the hype, take a deep breath and consider that digital technology is just a tool and should never be substituted for strategic thinking. Keep in mind for 2011 that it’s no longer about multi-channel marketing, but cross-channel marketing. We need to coordinate our efforts across channels to drive consistent messaging within an engaging marketing campaign. And because digital channels often overlap, the key is determining how they can best be integrated. Remember that targeting audiences is multifaceted and includes considering their search behaviors, the content they read, the keywords they type in, where they live, and what gets them jazzed when they click on your website. Finally, digital can be an exciting addition to your marketing plan in 2011, but don’t make the mistake of throwing traditional media out with the bathwater just yet.

#5: We resolve to prepare ourselves for the reality that the Hippocratic Oath also pertains to drugs: first do no harm.

Oh, go ahead and eat the whole gingerbread house this year. It took a while, but an FDA advisory committee finally approved a new drug primarily indicated to treat obesity. Three drugs were evaluated in the past 12 months, but only Contrave (Orexigen) was green-lighted. Qnexa (Vivus) and Lorqess (Arena) tanked due to unimpressive efficacy and unacceptable safety risks. Contrave’s efficacy was even less impressive than the others, but apparently patients can “live with” its safety issues. The real lesson here? In the future, “safer drugs” will be approved to fill unmet medical needs, even if they are less effective than potential competitors. This will cause a ripple effect that will affect all aspects of a drug’s development, from early clinical trials to sales promotion. It will also change the paradigm of how we currently promote drugs. Without head-to-head comparative trials, our challenge will be to come up with brand platforms that will be compelling for physicians, because “less effective but possibly safer” just isn’t going to cut it.