Positioning Jibe
Do the professional and patient positionings for your Brand jibe? If you're like most Brand Directors working on a product that develops materials for both audiences…they better.
Whether you're doing DTC or not, prospective patients are exposed to your Brand through a number of vehicles: TV, print, online, and even word of mouth. If what they see or hear peaks their interest and they actually talk to their doctor, can you be sure the physician will know it's your Brand they're talking about?
We recently completed a project for a client who had separate teams developing the consumer and professional positionings for Brand A. The two teams worked in isolation of each other and believed they had crafted the optimal positioning for their respective audiences. You can probably guess the results: the positionings were not synched. But not only did the consumer positioning for Brand A not synch with the professional positioning for Brand A, it actually synched nearly perfectly with the professional positioning for a competitive Brand B. So when patients described the drug they heard about (which is rarely by name), the physicians actually heard them asking for a competitive product! And that's what they gave them—nearly 75% of patient requests intended for Brand A ended up going to Brand B.*
This siloed approach to developing positioning employed by the marketing team of Brand A must be avoided. To ensure a successful dialogue at the point of prescription, the positioning you communicate to professionals and to patients need to be linked by a core benefit, a similarity of focus, etc. Without this synchronicity, your potential scripts might be going to someone else…and that's just not going to jibe with the higher ups.
*NOTE: We were able to remedy this situation in just a few months by applying our proven process to refine the professional positioning and provide the consumer group with solid boundaries to refine the patient positioning within.