Setting your sights –
the marketing objectives that guide everything that follows

Strong brands need clear objectives – the four steps to avoiding wombat marketing

By Brian D Smith

Your marketing is more expensive than you think. There are the direct costs of your marketing team and the money you spend to buy services like design, copy and channel space. But there are also the opportunity costs you incur when unsuccessful marketing means forgoing the sales and profits you might have achieved.

Like all costs, direct and opportunity costs eat into your brand’s profit margins, but your CEO authorises these only if it is thought they are an investment that will bring a return.

But ineffective marketing is, in the words of one CEO I interviewed, a ‘wombat’; a waste of money, brains and time that clients won’t pay for and that reflects badly on you. In this series of articles, I’ll share what my research has taught me about the four steps to avoiding wombat marketing, beginning with the first, setting the marketing objectives that guide everything else that follows.

Ask many brand managers what their marketing objectives are and you will get a vague answer such as ‘to raise awareness’ or ‘communicate brand values’. More quantitively minded marketers might give you ‘SMART’ targets for brand recognition or leads generated. But neither form does what marketing objectives are supposed to do, which is to provide unambiguous guidance for future marketing and marketing-related activity. Instead, these imprecise marketing objectives make it much harder to select agencies, brief them and execute compelling campaigns. Worse still, vague objectives make it harder for medical affairs, market access and other teams to develop programmes that complement marketing team activities. By contrast, strong marketing objectives guide the marketers and their agencies and enable cross-functional complementarity. To achieve that, they must include two essential components: the ‘where’ and the ‘what’.

Box 1: Example marketing objectives

The ‘where’ of a marketing objective must describe the situations on which marketing efforts will be focused. In today’s multi-stakeholder markets, that definition begins with the type of patient, but must also include the type of healthcare professional and the payer context. I described this ‘contextual segmentation’ approach and how it replaces less sophisticated segmentation methods, in an earlier PME article. Effective marketing objectives include a rich description of one or more market situations in terms of the needs, motivations and behaviours of each stakeholder.

The ‘what’ of the marketing objective must describe the changes the marketing effort intends to bring about in each of the defined contextual segments. Importantly, these are not the same as commercial objectives (eg, for sales or market share), but reflect what must be true for the commercial objectives to be achievable. Effective marketing objectives make clear how the needs, motivations and behaviours of each segment must be altered by the marketing activity in order to achieve the commercial goals.

No brand team should begin spending its budget without a detailed description of its marketing objectives’ ‘where’ and ‘what’. The anonymised real-world example (box 1) shows the format marketing objectives take in the best companies I’ve studied. If this isn’t what yours looks like, the next two sections explain what makes this format so effective and how exemplary firms develop strong marketing objectives.

Like a great piece of art, architecture or literature, looking at examples of good marketing objectives only takes you so far when attempting to imitate them.

‘Strong marketing objectives identify the specific needs, motivations or behaviours that must be changed or sustained to achieve preference for our brand’

To create them for your brand, in the unique context of your market and your business, requires an understanding of what differentiates the good from the bad. Fortunately, and unlike art, architecture and literature, it’s possible to identify three objective criteria that separate exemplary marketing objectives from their mediocre comparators.

First, the ‘where’ must show insight into the heterogeneity of the market. Markets are a collection of many decisions made in different contexts. Typically, these decisions aggregate into a few contextual segments that are internally homogenous (ie, every decision in the segment is driven by similar needs, motivations and behaviours) but distinct (ie, each segment is driven by a different set of needs, motivations and behaviours). Strong marketing objectives are built on a deep, insightful understanding of the market’s contextual segments. By contrast, weak marketing objectives either address the heterogeneous market as if it were homogenous or use proxies that have only weak correlations to the market’s heterogeneity, such as patient’s disease category or prescribers’ attitudes to innovation.

Second, the ‘what’ must be relevant and specific to each contextual segment. Each has a brand preference, and our goal is to either change or maintain that preference. Strong marketing objectives identify, for each contextual segment, the specific needs, motivations or behaviours that must be changed or sustained to achieve preference for our brand. By contrast, weak marketing objectives either aim for changes that are not strongly correlated to brand preference (such as brand awareness) or they aim to change the whole market in the same way, ignoring the heterogeneity of its preferences and the needs, motivations and behaviours that shape those preferences.

Third, the ‘where and the what’ of the marketing objectives must meet the commercial objectives. Each contextual segment differs in the potential it offers our brand, and the marketing objectives must target those contextual segments and change their brand preferences that, collectively, achieve the commercial objectives. Strong marketing objectives consider both the attractiveness (ie, size and growth) of each contextual segment and the brand’s competitive strength in each segment. By contrast, weak marketing objectives are set without due diligence to the commercial objectives and are, inevitably, inconsistent with those higher goals.

CEOs know that marketing objectives are only effective when they meet these three criteria. They use the three questions shown in box 2 to judge how well a brand team has done its job.

In the example in box 1, the ‘where’ described by the contextual segments accurately reflects the heterogeneity of the market. The ‘what’ described by the intended changes in needs, motivations and behaviours would cause the necessary change in that segment’s brand preference. And, although it is not obvious in this anonymised example, the marketing objectives are, collectively, consistent with the brand’s commercial objectives. If your brand’s marketing objectives don’t meet these three criteria and you risk failing the CEO’s inspection, the next section describes how exemplary firms achieve this excellence in objective setting.

How do exemplary firms develop strong marketing objectives that meet all three criteria? The short answer is that the marketing objectives are the output of the brand planning process. But all pharma, medtech and life sciences companies have ostensibly similar brand planning processes, so the question is ‘what do exemplary brand teams do differently from their less effective colleagues and rivals?’ The answer to this question is in two parts: the ‘when’ and the ‘how’ of writing strong, effective marketing objectives.

Box 2: Three challenges

In exemplary companies, marketing objectives emerge, in outline form, very early in the brand planning process. They are initiated by the commercial objectives, which set the quantitative parameters for what the marketing activity must achieve. For example, challenging commercial objectives, such as significant revenue growth, focus the ‘where’ onto larger, faster growing segments, but less ambitious commercial goals direct attention on easier-to-win segments. That segment focus, in turn, guides the ‘what’ decisions to the needs, motivations and behaviours of the targeted segments. So, although they develop and are tightened during the brand planning process, the marketing objectives take their initial shape very soon after the brand team has set its commercial objectives. By contrast, less effective brand teams set their marketing objectives as an afterthought to their ideas about marketing activity. Focusing first on their favourite or fashionable choices about audiences, messages and channels, less effective brand teams devise marketing objectives towards the end of the brand planning process, as metrics for the campaigns they want to execute. This back-to-front approach always fails to meet the three criteria of heterogeneity, relevance and consistency summarised in box 2.

Marketing objectives are initiated by commercial objectives, but the process for setting them involves creating market insight of three distinct kinds: casual; declarative and procedural. Exemplary brand teams begin with creating causal insight into what leads to the preferences of patients, professionals, payers and other stakeholders. Then they uncover the declarative insight into how these preferences combine to create the market’s structure of contextual segmentation.

Finally, they map out how each segment makes its decisions, thereby creating procedural insight. Three-dimensional insight creation of this kind is laborious, highly skilled and characteristic of only the best brand teams. By contrast, many marketers take the expedient but less effective approach of buying their insight from external agencies. This rarely uncovers the depth of insight needed to set strong marketing objectives and, since rivals in the same market often buy the same insight from the same agencies, almost never forms the basis of differentiated, brand-specific marketing objectives.

Setting good marketing objectives, ones that effectively guide marketing activity and enable complementary cross-functional activities, is very difficult. That difficulty explains why so many brand teams set ineffective marketing objectives that lead to wombat marketing. It also explains the differentiation between exemplary and mediocre brand teams because difficulty separates the best from the rest. But, of course, setting marketing objectives is just the beginning of how brand teams create value. It enables the next steps of selecting and briefing agencies and developing marketing programmes. I’ll cover those in the next three articles in this series, beginning with how agency selection should reflect your brand’s challenges.

References are available on request.

Professor Brian D Smith is a world-recognised authority on the evolution of the life sciences industry. He welcomes questions at brian.smith@pragmedic.com. This and earlier articles are available as video and podcast at www.pragmedic.com