Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me
Why We Need to Re-Humanize Digital DTC
As pharma marketers contend with historically low brand growth, declining sales rep and media effectiveness
and many post-ACA unknowns, there is growing pressure on DTC to drive high sustainable impact at
lower cost and with lower risk. Where then, is the untapped opportunity in digital DTC? It is in more
human ideas that move consumers to seek real, meaningful, emotional connections with our brands.
by
Reid Connolly
R
emember discussing whether digital will replace human
interactions or supplement them?
While the digital vs. human debate is so five years
ago, it is unarguable that digital has changed everything we do,
how we think and how fast we react, to the point where we
are – as users, consumers, patients and business people – much
more efficient, a little more mechanical, and somewhat less
soft.
Even digital DTC has been peppered with this residue.
Despite the layering of feelings patients experience with regard
to their health, our digital campaigns are not exempt from
being unemotional, sterile and flat. Do you have chronic pain?
Click here for questions to ask your doctor. Do you have questions
about vaccines? Click here. Action-inducing copy these are, but
they don’t make you feel, cry, commit.
Start at the objective
What do we want DTC consumers to do? To respond to
our campaigns or to remember us forever?
Well, the Direct Response vs. Branding question is really a
worthless one, because as marketers, everything we do today
is direct response. Every piece of marketing we release is
designed to get a response. An ad drives a site visit. A site visit
drives a registration. A registration drives an email view. An
email view drives a video forward. A forward drives several
likes.
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But even though communication should be, by definition
per Seth Godin, the transfer of emotion, not everything is
designed to drive an emotion, especially in digital DTC today.
Why the premium on emotion?
a)Simple findability: In a medium that is even more billboarded than Las Vegas on a good night, truly remarkable purple cow-like executions help your brand break
through the clutter. Think about your own web searches,
inboxes, phone apps, social activity: there is so much you
want to do that it takes something truly personal, anticipated, and relevant to sway you away.
b)Staying power: Communications that evoke emotion
go beyond eliciting a single response. They have the
power to engage, to stimulate discussion and interaction,
to deeply persuade and to be remembered, ad infinitum.
The American Express Shop Small campaign is a powerful example of a campaign that struck a primal chord and
drove a real public sentiment, rallying consumers, retailers, and public officials to not just change the way they
act but also the way they feel. Amortize that over a person’s lifetime and you get a fat, hefty ROI.
c)Because the alternative could destroy us: There is a
more subtle and deeper aspect to the importance of the
human in health. Celebrity author and Stanford physician
R E - H U M A N I Z I N G D I G I TA L
Dr. Abraham Verghese has grappled publicly with our
growing dependence on technology in the healthcare setting, and has widely advocated what he calls the “powerful, old-fashioned tool of human touch.” Describing the
deficit of a human dimension during his own stay at a
hospital, he writes, “the computer records what I call an
‘iPatient’ – and this iPatient threatens to become the real
focus of our attention, while the real patient in the bed
often feels neglected, a mere placeholder for the virtual
record.”1
Has digital marketing, with its relentless focus on consumer direct response, driven our consumers to become mere
placeholders for clicks, registrations, and downloads?
Four digital handicaps
In the era of social connections and Facebook, how can we
accuse digital of being anti-human?
Thanks to digital communications, many more consumers than ever before will encounter our ads, interact with our
content, review user feedback, and talk to their doctor about
our brands. Consumer access to health information is at an
all time high of 80% of all adult Internet users, while access
to other people’s commentary or experience about health or
medical issues is up to 34% of all adult Internet users.2 So yes,
with social media, the digital channel has enabled more human
interaction and fostered more touch points than could be possible with a TV or direct mail campaign.
But the digital communications we do control (display,
search, email, mobile, pharma-sponsored social), are handicapped by four issues that are keeping our efforts from reaching their full potential:
1)Content-heavy medium: Digital has always been
considered a content-heavy medium. For pharma products with complicated messaging, this has been a safe
haven, where we can hold patients’ hands and lead them
through to a decision. The tradeoff though is that we
lead with functional benefits at the cost of the emotional.
2)Micro-targeting: As we get more sophisticated with
targeting and “thin slicing,” our collective focus is turning to “big data,” segmentation, operations, and analytics,
with consumer insights and the “big idea” commanding
less and less of a role in marketing decision-making.
3)Technology blindness: We’re enamored with the
technology. Our management is enamored with the
technology. At least 70% of product directors we have
talked to have received a call from management asking
for their Pinterest/Twitter/Foursquare/Tumblr/Instagram strategy. Digital marketing is becoming about the
utility, not the user.
4)Regulatory limitations: We can’t avoid the elephant
in the room – regulatory. Every DTC marketer has had
at least one instance of being told they needed to pull
back on an execution due to limited space, dynamic
experience, or two-way interactions. Marketers now
assume that much of the dimensionality of the digital
experience has been taken off the table, leaving very
little room for magic. It is common practice now, too
often, to use regulatory as a reason to rationalize mediocre work.
Has digital marketing, with its relentless
focus on consumer direct response, driven our
consumers to become mere placeholders for
clicks, registrations, and downloads?
The changing face of “human”
The reason re-humanizing digital DTC is a provocative
idea is not only because we marketers are falling short of
paying off on the emotional, but because what is emotionally-resonant has dramatically changed. I was watching the
Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting celebration last
November (on TV). Mariah Carey was up on stage singing in
all her resplendent resplendence. The camera panned across
the audience: one out of every two people was watching Mimi
through the screen of his camera phone. Not interacting with
the queen of R&B, not experiencing the bulk of her vocal
presence in the here and now, but recording it for later, for
posting, for likes. There is a new human face of digital, and
really, a new digital face of human. The role brands play in
peoples’ lives will change. Digital marketers need to notice.
Playing to digital’s strengths
Following are three approaches to make digital communications more present, and more real.
1)Content: Tie educational content closer to the inperson experience
According to multiple studies done by Millward Brown
and Manhattan Research, the in-person and very human
doctor-patient conversation is still the most influential
source of information relating to drug brands. And per
HealthTalker’s Andrew Levitt, in his article on Word of
Mouth Marketing in the last issue of this very publication3, in person, offline conversations between consumers
constitute 90% of conversations about brands.
The closer we can integrate consumer content on our
educational websites and our digital/social/mobile efforts
to the in-person experience, the more alive and therefore
more influential our content. Borrow credibility from
physicians. Help simulate the doctor conversation. Facilitate in-person advocacy or educational meetings. Help
with documenting patient histories. Help with transport
DTC Perspectives • Winter 2013 |
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to or m-connectivity with a doctor. The space is vast and
the needs are many.
lenge your creatives to really think through what this
consumer viscerally wants, needs and will spark to.
2)Customization: Targeted messages that actually
make a difference
• Don’t assume you know. If you assume you know
what your consumers want, chances are you’re wrong.
Take the time to work with real people. A few relationships now will yield millions post program launch.
With growing investments in talent, systems and infrastructure, today’s marketers have, according to a study by
IBM, more consumer data at their disposal than they can
cope with, yet the vast majority of it goes unanalyzed and
unused. In other words, we’re expending our resources
on data gathering, at the expense of other aspects of marketing, but we’re not using it. Double whammy.
Most, if not all, DTC marketers have segmented their
DTC population and are delivering tailored communications to target segments. But, for ease of MLR approval,
we create boilerplate templates, and selectively swap out
chunks of copy, imagery, or calls to action under the
banner of tailoring.
We understand, for the most part, what makes our consumers tick, but because of the cost of design, burden of
approval and complexity of operations, we don’t necessarily carry this comprehension through to communications development. Here’s the truth though: being more
attuned to consumers’ emotional interplay is not more
expensive, not harder to approve, and just as complex an
operation. All it takes is thinking about it differently.
3)User Experience
As I said earlier, digital communications need to be about
the user, not the utility. Our industry has fine-tuned
interface design, usability, and even persona development; but in this multi-channel world of three-eight
screens, we need to raise the bar on user experience.
Here’s my doctrine on user experience:
• User experience is not user interface. It is more
than aesthetics and call-to-action placement. It is a
holistic discipline, with a heavy strategic component,
and multi-disciplinary responsibility.
• Technology is the means not the end. To quote a
brand marketer from Coke, “Digital is the experience,
not the venue.” Location-based services are great only
if consumers really need retail-specific promotions or
doctor office specific information. “What’s our Pinterest strategy?” is not a legitimate question. “How are we
relevant to our advocates’ advocates?” is.
• Less ‘user,’ more ‘experience.’ I may have said
that communications need to be about the user. But a
big mistake many of us user-centric marketers make is
that we over-emphasize the user and forget about the
experience – resulting in a static understanding of the
consumer and point-in-time program design. Chal-
22 | DTC Perspectives • Winter 2013
The reason re-humanizing digital DTC is
a provocative idea is not only because we
marketers are falling short of paying off on the
emotional, but because what is emotionallyresonant has dramatically changed.
What you can’t say, sing!
I’m enamored with these lyrics:
Hold me, hold me
Never let me go
Until you’ve told me, told me
What I want to know
And then just hold me, hold me
Make me tell you I’m in love with you
I’ve spent a lot of time with health consumers. This is
exactly what I hear them saying they want from us marketers
(sans the poetry and 50’s sentiment).
Other industries do this. Soap. Hotels. Phone Services.
Phones. But health is as human as it gets. The stakes are simply
higher for us. DTC marketers need to, to borrow from Apple,
“think different.” We need to re-think human and re-think
digital. If we think about digital DTC in a different way, we
will do it differently. Let’s use technology to hold and thrill
our consumers. It is well within our reach. DTC
References
1Abraham Verghese, Treat the Patient, Not the CT Scan, The New York Times,
Published: February 26, 2011
2The Social Life of Health Information, 2011, Pew Internet & American Life
Project
3The Surprising Science Behind Word of Mouth Marketing, Andrew Levitt,
DTC Perspectives, Fall 2012
Reid Connolly brings more than 15 years of experience in the integrated healthcare marketing field. As CEO, he is responsible for driving evoke’s strategic vision and partnering with clients to develop rich,
insight-driven strategies that shift brand business. Prior to founding
evoke, Reid has held numerous senior and executive leadership roles
with agencies such as Digitas Health, imc2, and Saatchi & Saatchi
Healthcare. He can be contacted via reid.connolly@evokeinteraction.
com.