Setting out – why omnichannel success is about orchestration

Once upon a time, we communicated to one audience – healthcare professionals (HCPs) – with one message (the hallowed ‘single minded proposition’) through two, barely connected channels: sales and press media. Today, we must communicate multiple nuanced meanings to a constellation of HCPs, payers and patients. Those audiences listen simultaneously to multiple channels, from social media to digital detailing, which leak into each other like a commuter’s headphones on a crowded train.

One of my research interviewees complained that: “We used to be a garage band, with a couple of guitars and a drummer. Today, we’re a full symphony orchestra and I’ve got the baton.” It was a great metaphor and if you’ve every sat through an under-rehearsed school orchestra, you will appreciate the dissonant cacophony he was afraid of creating.

‘The best omnichannel conductors build an orchestra of as many musicians as needed, but no more than that’

To avoid that and engage their audiences, today’s omnichannel marketers must orchestrate complexity into coherence. And as I talked to others, some lessons emerged from the way they do that.

Like a symphony set in a musical key, well-defined marketing objectives anchor the components of an omnichannel campaign, enabling the various players to harmonise. When I ask marketers to contrast those campaigns that succeeded with those that failed, the most fundamental difference is the marketing objectives they set. I described these differences in detail in the first article of this series. ‘Wombat’ campaigns (a waste of money, brains and time) are built on imprecise objectives to ‘raise awareness’ or overly-simplified quantitative goals for brand recognition. Neither provide the anchoring an omnichannel campaign needs because they don’t answer the big question: which decision-making contexts are we trying to change and how do we want them to change?

In the first article, I give examples of strong marketing objectives that answer these questions. They flow from insightful understanding of the market’s heterogeneity, described not in demographics and disease categories but in segment-specific needs, motivations and behaviours. In turn, well-defined objectives create the foundations for each section of the omnichannel orchestra – sales, marketing, medical affairs, market access and others – to set their departmental objectives. This insight-led approach contrasts sharply with the channel-led approach of many omnichannel marketers, whose focus is on what the medium is capable of, not what the market wants. To quote another research respondent: “The campaign is not the aggregate of the channel activities, the channel activities are the expression of strategic objectives.”

Just as an elegant musical arrangement balances instrumentation, harmony, dynamics and timing to ensure that strings, winds, brass and percussion complement rather than compete, an omnichannel campaign must be designed for consistency, sequencing, synergy and role congruency. Each of these four requirements is much easier to get wrong than right. For example, medical affairs and marketing often avoid the difficulty of message consistency by creating their own messages. But omnichannel excellence is about each conveying the same message, adapted for context. Equally, it is hard to synchronise, for example, medical science liaison, key account management and online messaging, so functional silos have the habit of dis-integrating channels, the exact opposite of what is needed.

When timing and sequencing is achieved, it amplifies the interaction between channels, such as when targeted, personalised emails prime HCPs’ interest in advance of sales calls. In practice, message consistency, sequencing and integration all depend on the fourth essential element of omnichannel integration: role congruency. Simply put, this means each player knowing and making the contribution they are responsible for.

This role congruency is made more difficult than it should be because of the low-level, chronic, intraorganisational conflict that plagues many life science companies. I’ve written extensively on how to overcome this, but a salient characteristic of better functioning cross-functional teams is so-called T-shaped skills. That is, every specialist is an expert in their discipline but also has a good working knowledge of their colleagues’ specialisms.

‘An omnichannel campaign must be designed for consistency, sequencing, synergy and role congruency’

In the best omnichannel campaigns, for example, marketers, medical affairs, market access and sales know enough to play each other’s instruments, so to speak – not fluently, but well enough to know how their own work can help or hinder their colleagues. At worst, they stubbornly disdain skills and capabilities other than their own.

Ultimately, the integration of omnichannel campaigns depends on the arrangement of their parts, but it would be a mistake to conflate it with homogeneity. In the words of another respondent: “Integration isn’t about sameness, it’s about coherence.”

For an orchestra leader, writing and arranging must eventually lead to playing the piece for the audience. The same is true for those who must manage the execution of an omnichannel campaign, but it is a performance made more difficult by the necessary involvement of the agencies needed to support campaigns. These externals are the equivalent of session musicians who play a vital part in the omnichannel orchestra.

Unsurprisingly, then, omnichannel excellence requires the capabilities to select and brief agencies well. I covered these two topics in the second and third articles of this series respectively. The second article revealed the lessons of my research about agency selection. It’s essential that agency and client share fundamental assumptions about how the market works. Equally, the capabilities of each must complement the other and mitigate their weaknesses. And, since nothing ever runs smoothly, they must have an effective way of solving their disagreements and misalignments.