Brand planning in a COVID-19 world

As pharma marketing teams turn their attention to this year’s brand plans, effective strategic brand planning remains a big priority for the sector, given the volatile economic climate, continuing disruptions to healthcare provision and rapidly changing consumer behaviours. Life is less predictable than it used to be.

However, despite the importance of brand planning, pharma remains behind the curve compared to other sectors when it comes to harnessing patient insights to make informed decisions on brands and adopting the right technologies to derive those insights. Given the seismic impact of COVID-19 on healthcare systems around the world, pharma now needs to up its game and fast-track digital transformation so it can use actionable patient data more effectively in the annual brand planning cycle.

This wake-up call for pharma won’t come as a shock to many. According to a study on brand planning by PwC, 80% of European pharma company executives did not think that their current approaches, processes and outputs were ‘fit for purpose’. One of the key challenges facing pharma leaders in their brand planning process, according to the research, was the quality and availability of insights.

At the heart of any good brand plan is the customer – for pharma this is healthcare professionals (HCPs) and patients. Until very recently, pharma has relied heavily on deriving patient insights from HCPs. However, with fewer reps on the road meeting face to face with HCPs, there has been an evident forced change in the feedback loop. Fewer patients have been visiting their GPs and more have turned to social media channels to find peer-to-peer support, alongside voicing their experiences about treatment, conditions and medicines.

These developments amount to a significant change in the way that pharma can access intelligence on brand and product performance. However, while these changes are undoubtedly challenging, they have also afforded pharma the opportunity to streamline ways of using technology and data that will make marketing fit for a post-pandemic world.

‘Pharma remains behind the curve compared to other sectors when it comes to harnessing patient insights to make informed decisions on brands and adopting the right technologies to derive those insights’

One of the biggest opportunities available to brand teams now is the availability of patient feedback from multiple online sources in real time. Marketing in the pharmaceutical sector is experiencing a paradigm shift where brand strategies are no longer solely reliant on deriving their insights from field-based focus groups and HCPs and their prescribed decision-making. Instead, marketers are rightly becoming more interested in hearing directly from patients in a way that is compliant with industry regulation.

Understanding and acting upon patient emotions, feelings and attitudes is more important now than it ever has been. Patients have become more active in their diagnosis. The days of simply doing what the doctor says have long gone, with eight in ten internet users searching for health information and 74% of those using social media.
  
While the increased influence of the patient voice has been acknowledged by pharma, the industry has been slow to keep up with the pace of change. The growth of social media in the last ten years has seen a concurrent growth in the volume of people actively participating in online discussions, sharing knowledge and experiences, or expressing feelings and emotions towards different brands across a multitude of sectors (the percentage of US adults who use social media increased from 5% in 2005 to 79% in 2019).

The healthcare sector is no different. There has been a huge growth in the volume of online discussions from patients taking to social media and online forums to share health experiences about medicines, diseases and treatments. This provides a unique opportunity for pharma to understand patient experiences of taking their medicines in a domestic environment. Harvesting this data and translating it into actionable insights will then help drive better decisions on brand and ultimately drive better patient outcomes.

For patient data to be of real use to brand teams, they need to understand what patients are saying in real time, enabling brands to be agile, adapting and evolving in line with feedback. Of course, accessing that real-time feedback has historically been virtually impossible for brands. Regulatory and compliance barriers pretty much removed the direct relationship between pharma marketing professionals and patients. However, data-driven social media tools are now opening up access to patient experience and brand performance in a way that is fully compliant.

The benefit of these tools is that discussions from thousands of patients can be gathered and analysed at once. AI can effectively reduce the ‘noise’ or irrelevant conversations, enabling pharma to derive insights from patients that is close to real time and more importantly, continuously reflects what is happening now. In the brave new digital world for pharma marketeers, brands no longer need to rely only on historic prescribing data about indirect feedback from clinicians, patient advocacy or ad hoc focus groups. Machine learning and natural language processing technologies can filter text at scale, isolate the voice of the patient and, by blending data from a variety of sources, provide vital social intelligence for pharma brands at an approved medicine level.

Measuring patient sentiment towards medicines in a systematic way will help pharma deliver greater return on investment for marketing and allow companies to measure trending patient confidence across medicines. This in turn will provide key insights that will help inform a targeted and effective brand plan.

‘Brand planners must now pay more attention to the voice of the patient, ensuring those insights are at the heart of brand strategies and marketing-led interventions’

Of course, the adoption of new technologies does not come without its own challenges, and pharma must continue to grapple with how the use of AI in gathering and analysing data complies with pharma’s complex regulatory and compliance directives. The development and use of AI within our society is growing and evolving. We are still at the early stages of a long journey. The common element to these challenging areas, and perhaps the headline takeaway, is the value of considering data protection at an early stage.

Mitigation of risks must come at the design stage – retrofitting compliance as an end-of-project bolt-on rarely leads to comfortable compliance or practical products. However, when compared to the significant value which technology can bring to the brand planning process, these are challenges well worth grappling with.

For pharma, it’s now time to listen and to stay engaged with what is happening in real time. It’s no longer enough to have annual or bi-annual focus groups and hope to stay relevant to an increasingly digital savvy audience. By doing things differently, the sector can evolve and adapt in line with changing social and economic dynamics. Brand planners must now pay more attention to the voice of the patient, ensuring those insights are at the heart of brand strategies and marketing-led interventions. Improving the quality of these insights could not only transform brand performance, improving return on investment in marketing, but could ultimately help to optimise the care of patients. Only then will we see brands producing successful patient-centric and multichannel experiences.

Jo Halliday is CEO of Talking Medicines, an AI-driven social intelligence company