RTCRM

The evolving practice of relationship marketing (RM) was the center of debate at the EXL RM and Sales Summit Thursday in Princeton, NJ. The summit had a broad attendance by many RM stakeholders – strategic planners, product managers from both the consumer and HCP sides, hospital managers, PR professionals and patient community leaders. As Chairman of Day 1, I posed a central question: “How do we optimize trust in brand relationships while improving health outcomes?” Three key themes emerged:

1. There are numerous definitions of RM that generally aim at achieving business results through ongoing dialogue and mutual value exchange. What matters, though, is “how you trust” – and this depends on your vantage point and the value you perceive. While RM depends on the building of mutual value through a planned series of marketing interactions, the majority of tactics discussed still remain within the realm of “direct.”

Direct marketing is an initial outbound marketing activity that seeks to capture customer data, deliver a choreographed communications stream, and drive a conversion or retention objective. But it has proved hard for pharma to generate cycle times fast enough to truly provide a second or third follow-up marketing contact of increasing and customized value. Are we showing the customer we know them? Not as much. In other words, marketers are in the operating mode of short-term direct pilots that seek to maximize reach and frequency with plenty of “acceptable” spillover.

I believe the jury is still out on whether outbound direct marketing goes far enough in showing we have heard the customer, and likewise have earned greater trust points through ongoing dialogue.

2. Furthermore, on the subject of short-term marketing, the conference group discussed how larger-portfolio companies are known for fast rotations of key marketing managers (1.3 years’ tenure on average). How does this impact a team or organization’s true commitment to long-term community relationship building? Short-term marketers, held to short-term results, are compelled to expect an immediate return. So what are the implications for staying “direct” and not closing the relationship loop? These marketers might overlook investments in relationships for the longer term. Smaller, more condition-specific companies (Novo Nordisk and diabetes, UCB and epilepsy, to name two) seem to have a better alignment, with a top-down mission to truly partner with the specific disease community for the long term – therefore, their corporate and brand reputation-building activities, even social networking, take on a special passion – as everyone in the organization becomes intensely passionate about their condition holders.

While the link of protecting authentic community building and sales/marketing is a tenuous line, the truly passionate teams that bring real patients closer in to the process seem to have a better chance at finding that trust and not overlooking long-term category development activities.

3. For big and little pharma to truly place the customer at the center of their planning process, healthy pipelines, including franchises with multiple medicines in the same category, can help strengthen the commitment to communities of condition holders, and nurture the passion, empathy, and trust that are required for true relationship building with condition holders. This will require brand teams to look up, look beyond, and see how their particular brand fits within their own pipelines and line extension life-cycle strategies. A broad view of brand architecture modeling is a new key step that shouldn’t be overlooked going forward.

It’s the duty of all RM planners to help their clients see the forest and the trees – and build in the right marketing process steps for both category and brand development. After all, isn’t this just code for elevating an own-able brand attribute and investing in it, and defending a unique, differentiated positioning? Now that the social media playbook is maturing and gaining adoption, greater alignment is essential to achieving the next level in patient value creation.

These are exciting times, and looking up and around frequently will be key as our health landscape changes over the next few years. If pharma wants to aim at new measurements (like “trust” or health outcomes), looking beyond short-term revenue and ROI maximization is essential for finding new value propositions that will keep R&D manufacturers relevant within the changing health system landscape.