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Skills For Success

January/February 2002

Using Marketing Information Management To Integrate

Karen T. Geer
Founding Partner Blue Spoon Consulting Group

The Parlance Of Our Time

As you’re reading this, think of all the other work-related articles, newsletters, emails, newspapers, presentations, reports, memos—all the content competing for your attention. Overwhelming isn’t it? Now imagine what your customer (let’s say a primary care physician) is experiencing. Chances are they’re like you, drowning in an ocean of disease information, product promotion, and sales messages. Whether you call it “info glut” or “data smog,” overload and distraction are the parlance or our time.

Managing an information variable is now key for marketing strategists. Especially for the pharmaceutical industry, accounting for the sheer volume of information and health education readily available for any medical condition or treatment is imperative. Creating the “right” content is only one piece to the puzzle of influencing behavior. It’s more vital to create a marketing system in a well-ordered way, one that connects the information that flows from drug discovery, clinical trials, medical education, product marketing, sales and branding systems. To that end, agency networks are featuring “integrated solutions” from their component services. While many are trying, take it from my experience in the trenches of integration (*Karen and her business partner have spent more than a generation in pharmaceutical marketing and communications. Prior to launching Blue Spoon Consulting Group, they jointly managed integrated business units at Omnicom and Interpublic agencies), getting people with different mental models and financial incentives, who are writing marketing programs with diverse objectives and messages, to operate in unison isn’t easy with traditional marketing techniques and business models. For the past year, Blue Spoon has been working with clients to develop a contemporary marketing vocabulary in a radically different information environment.

Introducing Marketing Information Management

Marketing Information Management is a new way of thinking. It recasts marketing activity to reflect the customer’s perspective in an information-based society. It creates a shared understanding of business strategy. Ultimately, it’s a process to connect advertising, medical education, publicity and sales channels to information architecture and territory management technology. From discovering fresh insights during market research, to developing brand strategy with greater impact and efficiency, Marketing Information Management can help build, manage and evaluate an integrated marketing campaign. To illustrate how this process can be used in day-to-day planning, I’ll spend some time talking about “strategic surges,” an information management model that synchronizes the delivery of marketing information and creates a strong synergistic effect for brand messages.

A strategic surge is an integrated marketing campaign built around a local health event (see the “Health Events” box below), an organized effort that concentrates as much push for the brand as possible. Let’s use a scientific abstract presented at a state medical meeting as an example. Conceptually, a strategic surge could look like the chart shown on the following page. Coordinating the information flow from each channel is the key. For example, ensuring an abstract is accepted for presentation at a state chapter meeting of the American Academy of Family Physicians must account for the deadlines for abstract submission, typically about six months beforehand. This is a planning detail, one that gets folded in to your brand’s publication plan and speaker’s bureau. A DTC media buy also requires lead time; knowing the exact date of the data presentation, however, provides a tangible point in time from which to plan and direct local advertising resources. Publicity around the data presentation has news value for all print and broadcast media in a state; this tactic is also the most flexible, capable of being planned and executed quickly, usually in less than a week. Notifying the sales force that their selling environment will be “enriched for Brand X” provides an opportunity to position the brand as a first or second-line detail around that health event. (Think about the potential if you multiplied the number of abstracts accepted for presentation by 10 or 20!) Here’s the process to bring it all together:

Building Strategic Surges

Begin with an Information Environment Assessment (IEA)
Begin with market research that untangles clutter and deconstructs the information environment. We look at the intensity and orientation of branded content competing for a customer’s attention, the activities of information-producing organizations in a market, health events with high integration value, and potential measurement themes. Insights gained from this stage open new doors to influencing prescribing behavior and making tactical adjustments quickly.

Design An Integrated Communications Plan
Stage two is planning and implementation. By organizing advertising and promotion, detailing, medical education and publicity plans, the flow of marketing information can be synchronized. Coordinating how these functional groups work together creates a strong synergistic effect for each marketing channel. Every medium has a different requirement for success, its ownpersonality that must be accounted for, structured within the communications plan, and managed centrally.

Develop Performance Measures
Stage three is measuring the performance of integration. Beyond capturing the obvious accounting data of more sales, qualitative, unbiased measures are needed to: (i) describe objectives for each marketing channel; (ii)calibrate them to the situation; (iii) diagnose how well they’re working; and (iv) determine each channel’s relationship and contribution to profit. A baseline should be developed before each surge. Potential measurement themes are:

Tactical mix dynamics compared to industry averages/historical results

• Dinner meeting attendance
• Direct mail response rates
• Length of time allowed for detail
• Access granted/denied for detail contact rates)
• Unique visits to a web site

Marketing channel dynamics and impact on behavior patterns

• Advertising: direct and indirect effects, timing and behavior cycles
• Publicity: direct and indirect effects, timing and behavior cycles
• Medical education: direct and indirect effects, timing and behavior cycles
• Direct sales: direct and indirect effects, timing and behavior cycles

Brand and category dynamics

• Compliance rates for the brands/category averages
• Prescription fill rates for the brands/category averages
• Prescription refill rates for the brands/category averages
• Behavior cycles (e.g., awareness to action).

Recasting Marketing Activity

Marketing Information Management is one answer to the challenges of “integration.” There are others. At its core, Marketing Information Management fosters a systematic process for thinking through the complex dynamics of value creation from the marketing mix. Rather than creating new content, Marketing Information Management recasts marketing activity, encouraging a fresh vocabulary and new marketing techniques in the 21st century marketplace.

Blue Spoon Consulting Group is an independent marketing strategy and management consultancy. The firm’s mission is designing and executing integrated marketing systems. Karen Geer and her business partner, John Singer, have previously held positions in pharmaceutical brand management and executive management at advertising, medical education and public relations agencies. Blue Spoon Consulting can be reached at 380 Lexington Avenue, Suite 1700, New York City 10168. Telephone 212.551.7953; Fax 212.551.1054; www.bluespoonconsulting.com.