Right now, I’m helping a pharmaceutical company develop a strategy whose value proposition involves a combination of pharmaceutical and information technology. For reasons of confidentiality, I won’t elaborate on that. But, throughout the process, we’ve been having trouble developing a rich picture of how the offer will align with the market’s needs. We get as far as technical features and the conversation gets bogged down. Perhaps you’ve experienced something similar. Then, in one of those little moments that change the direction of a project, one of my clients – an exceptionally bright, original thinker – said ‘our technology will disrupt the market’. This reminded me of something I’d been taught decades ago and that I’ve confirmed many times since in my research. When someone talks about changing the market, they’re usually going to fail. When they talk about working out where the market is going and getting in front, they’re usually right.

Here’s an example. For another project, I’m helping a firm bypass healthcare systems and professionals and go straight to the patient. It involves technology, obviously, but they’re succeeding not because of the technology but because they understand the market. In this case, there is a contextual segment* in which the clinical need is small, the difficulty in accessing professional help is large and the patient is educated, cash rich, time poor and, most of all, values control of their own life. It’s that segment that is so amenable to my client’s technology and since we’re starting with the market segment and working backwards to the technology, we’re making good progress in developing their extended and augmented value proposition around the core of their technology. It’s the opposite situation of the client who said ‘our technology will disrupt the market’. We’re understanding what the market means for the technology.

Let me try to generalise the lesson to be learnt here. It’s natural, that as a group of science-loving-people in a company making science-based products like drugs and devices, to begin with the new toy you’ve got and work out how to fit the market around it. But, relative to your resources, the market is big and it has many powerful forces acting on it. The chances of you being able to move the market significantly are relatively small. As a general rule, it’s better to understand how the market is changing, or has latent change within it, and to capitalise on that. By comparison, your ability to build your technology into something the market wants, rather than fit the market around your technology, is much greater and that gives you a much bigger chance of success.

Now, as some of my more experienced readers will say to themselves, this is not a new idea. I have marketing theory books from the 1950s on my bookshelves. They describe exactly this advantage of the ‘market orientation vs product orientation’, to use the language of that time. So why is it that I still need to introduce it to today’s marketers? Well, two reasons, I think. First, a lot of marketing training, especially today, is focused on digital and especially on digital marketing communications. That frames the marketing problem in a technology-led way. Second, we’re in a period in history when our technologies, both the pharmaceutical and information kinds, are really advanced, exciting and well, just brilliant. In those circumstances, it’s hard not to think technology first. This is especially true if, like me, you have a science background and have a techie inclination. I often have to stop myself drooling over the sheer scientific brilliance of new life sciences technology. But I’ve lived and worked through several hype cycles – today’s app frenzy, the dot com bubble, the relationship-marketing paradigm shift and right back to the direct mail revolution; I am that old – and the old lesson holds true.

It’s not that new technologies are wrong, its just that there’s a reason we call our discipline ‘marketing’ and not ‘producting’ or ‘technologising’. Always and forever, it’s about the customer – not the technology.

* If you’re not clear what I mean by context segment, or extended-augmented value proposition, get in touch and I’ll send you a PDF describing these techniques in life sciences markets.

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