Designing Distinction in Pharma that Transcends Clinical Value

Author: Jonathan Crosby, Director of Strategy

Born from the pandemic, a paradigm shift in how pharma drives differentiation is now underway seeing many companies realizing that simply offering effective medications is no longer enough to thrive in a competitive market. The shift from selling products to delivering exceptional customer experiences, that go beyond clinical value, is the new currency of healthcare.

While the efficacy and safety of pharmaceutical products still remain crucial, healthcare customers want more, desiring holistic experiences that address their physical, emotional, informational, and logistical needs. Those companies that are leading the charge are not only organising their businesses around understanding what their customers want but are rapidly evolving towards becoming health solution providers to effectively meet their customers’ end-to-end needs, spanning across the entire healthcare journey.

Putting customer experience at the heart of brand strategy will see those early adopters foster stronger connections with patients and healthcare professionals, leading to increased trust, loyalty, patient satisfaction… and ultimately and increase in market share. However, companies must go beyond a one-size-fits-all approach to truly understand the unique needs, preferences, and challenges faced by patients and healthcare professionals in order to be effective.

The good news is the shift is an evolution and not a revolution, meaning that providing personalised experiences and tailored solutions can be created, implemented, and iterated at speed. In order for this to be successful, it begins with identifying and interrogating key audiences to target – understanding the human – and fostering empathetic communications to build positive and emotional connections, and ultimately trust. It also requires companies to pivot towards embracing a digital-first approach to ensure seamless access is maintained and a continuous feedback loop is created to advance critical learnings that can not only enhance clinical outcomes but also strengthen the bond between the company and its customers.

Our IDENT model has been designed to rapidly accelerate this process, providing companies with a fast and nimble approach to defining best practices and shaping brand distinctiveness.

IDENT stands for:

• INSIGHTS: Using our proprietary processes and platforms we are able to interrogate the known knowns and explore any identified gaps to gain a deep understanding of the target audiences and the environment around them, unearthing true insights and patterns from thousands of data points that hold tonal resonance and impact that will move the needle. This in turns enables our teams to identify common value clusters to target (deepening the segmentation models).

Also, as part of this process we interrogate customer channel preferences to see where key commonalities lay and ensure these are aligned to the segmentation models to build out robust touchpoint maps.

• DESIRE: We then identify how to move each segment along the customer journey (adoption ladder) by mapping out their current beliefs, behaviours and what interventions and communications are needed at every stage to activate critical change. We actively focus on three key areas that are essential for any behaviour to change to take place: Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation
• EXPERIENCE: This is where the communications, content, and channels come together and are plotted out in detail, identifying each interaction a customer might have with a brand to invoke critical behaviour change and lock them into long-term interaction and engagement.
• NETWORK: As the segmentation touchpoint journeys are being designed, our digital teams are working to assess what technologies are in existence to create seamless data-led engagement, developing a true 360 digital strategy that can be implemented, scaled to evolve, and tailored to key audiences around metrics that matter.
• TRACKING: This then ladders into designing a tracking strategy that enables continuous measurement and optimisation to ensure the customer’s experience is continually improved on. The tracking strategy is critical to ensure brands learn at speed creating a feedback loop to assess performance against predetermined KPIs to refine content and its delivery.

Customer experience is ultimately an agile and iterative process that can be gradually built via testbed learning and does not require such a radical approach to get the ball rolling… but to have a stake in the ground, companies must act fast to ensure they remain competitive and more importantly, relevant. The approach healthcare brands must now take is to ultimately identify and establish meaningful connections with their customers by undertaking new methodologies to understand their specific needs and aligning their value propositions to marry up.

Designing a customer experience strategy and delivering it at scale requires a holistic approach to deliver experiences that matter!

We can help.