How Next Generation Technology Enables us to Think Differently About Life Science Communication
Morten Hjelmsoe discusses technological evolution within healthcare, what this means for marketeers and offers some advice on how the industry can keep up with the dizzying pace of digital progress.
A dizzying pace of change
The dizzying pace of digital communication development doesn’t appear to be slowing. In fact, I would argue, it is speeding up. Now electronic ‘bits’ have replaced paper as the principle medium of communication. The last five years saw everything go mobile with content on various ‘iDevices’ changing the way that sales reps communicate with healthcare professionals.
The next phase is about to begin; one that promises a more radical change to how we engage with healthcare professionals. If you like, the last 10 years were the warm up – now that continual change is really going to pick up the pace. A number of factors and trends are driving this process, which are worth considering in turn:
1. Going beyond the pill
The first is a switch from products to services. This ‘beyond the pill’ world is rapidly coming into being, driven partly by the increased focus on patient outcomes. Consequently companies have to now consider total treatment – ensuring not only effective medication but also compliance and lifestyle changes among many other factors. It’s also often a necessity, as medical professionals have to deal with increasingly complex treatments and need additional support. This move to services means that companies have to work ever more closely with healthcare professionals, seeking increased partnership and co-operation.
2. Decreasing customer engagement
There is, unfortunately, a parallel trend that is the decreasing effectiveness of traditional customer engagement. Counter-intuitively, increasing advertising spends and scaling up sales forces appear to result in less time to communicate and less engaged customers. So while companies need to engage more closely with their customers, they are finding that the more that they try to reach out, the farther away customers seem to get!
3. The rising price of brain real estate
This brings us to the next trend, one that I call the rising price of brain real estate. We all see thousands of marketing messages and have media streaming, beaming and blasting information at us 24/7. As our minds fill up, we’re increasingly choosy about what we decide to put in there. For healthcare professionals the situation is no different – perhaps even more extreme. Increasing demands on their time, challenges to their authority, and a feeling that they are already over-marketed to, means that they actively closing themselves off from the industry.
4. Increased expectations of personal communications
Linked to the brain real estate price boom, we have a general demand for better quality, more personal communications. The introduction of digital technology in our everyday media landscape means that we expect things to be ‘on demand’, ‘available everywhere’, and ‘just for us’. We expect companies to remember our preference whether we’re ordering a pizza, checking into a hotel, or choosing an online film. Our customers, the healthcare professionals, experience this level of everywhere and everyday. Now they increasingly expect it of the communications from life science companies.
A dilemma
These trends all add up to an interesting dilemma:
• Physicians do need the knowledge that the life science industry has but are increasingly resistant to traditional communication approaches
• Life science companies need to be more involved in patient treatment but are finding it ever harder to connect.
What to do?
A question of relevance
To respond to these trends, I believe that we need to rethink our approach to communication. With traditional marketing there is an underlying problem: relevance. Because industry communication doesn’t address healthcare professional’s specific circumstances and needs, it doesn’t receive much attention. Consequently companies feel that they now have to communicate more and shout louder. This increases the frustration from customers who, understandably, make themselves harder to reach. And so it continues, resulting in the industry and its customers drawing ever further apart.
Up to now, technology wasn’t able to solve this problem. In fact it can be argued that it made it worse. Rather than make communication more relevant for our customers, it actually made it easier for us. Technology gave us efficiency, so we could communicate more – not better.
The next generation of digital communication
If the first generation technology was about efficiency – about making what we did before easier – then the next generation is about enabling us to do something entirely new. This is the switch from ‘push’ to ‘pull’ communication:
• A push communication is what I want you to know
• A pull communication is understanding what you need to know and then providing that
So rather than working to get attention (more reps, more advertisements, bigger conferences), next generation technology enables us to be relevant on an individual customer level. In effect, we can stop shouting and start whispering exactly what each customer needs to know. And soon they will able to experience this knowledge in whatever format suits them best. As true multichannel technologies become available, it will become normal for healthcare professionals to move at will through different media; whether a ‘live’ presentation, personalized website or remote interaction with an expert.
New technology, new strategy
As the new wave of digital communication technology becomes available, it important that we ally it with the right strategy. Technology will do what we tell it to, so it’s vital that we take advantage of the opportunity by switching our natural inclinations to ‘push out’ our communications and start to engage our customers more deeply through a pull approach. How we do this is the topic that we’ll turn to in the next article.