Know Fibro.com: When the budget drives (limits) the strategy

Oct/29/2008 01:44

If you're going to do something that is a touchpoint for consumers and patients then do it right or don't do it all. Lilly's new website, Know Fibro.com, is a joint venture between Lilly and the National Fibromyalgia Association and is a push a brochure on the Web as you can get. It is a Web 1.0 site with little information for patients and ,since it is unbranded, could have been a great way to engage people together to talk about fibromyalgia. This is what happens when the budget drives the strategy.

There is an art and great process which I have detailed here for creating a great Website and there often aren't any shortcuts that one can try to implement. It consists of research and usability studies along with an integration to business objectives. The challenge for the eMarketing person is to ensure that everyone knows that the Web is all about users and marketing in the new age which means engagement with your audience and acting as aggregators of the brand. Now of course this is an unbranded site meant to get people to think about Cymbalta as a treatment option but this site is so shallow that one has to wonder why in the hell they would even want to do such a project. I mean an unbranded site offers a hell of a lot of opportunities to interact with Web visitors and turn them into influencers. It's obvious that when developing this site the team had limited dollars to do what was needed and right and thus has taken valuable dollars and thrown it out the window. One day pharma may learn how to develop world class unbranded sites but only when palm trees grow in the Antarctic.