Huge DTC budgets are not needed if you can innovate

May/06/2007 07:23 Filed in: Current DTC
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Starbucks is one of the best known brands i the world yet this marketer spends less than 2% of its annual budget on advertising. They probably realize that spending $100 million, primarily on TV, to reach certain awareness levels is old school marketing that provides little ROI for the brand. There are a lot of innovative ways to reach your target audience and raise awareness of the brand but most pharma marketers would rather continue to spend millions of TV or Golf because they are stuck in the past where marketers told consumers what to buy.


Imagine if you will an open house event where top chefs from your city prepare great meals for you to sample. There's just one catch...all these meals are heart healthy and have low cholesterol and the event is sponsored by Lipitor. Then there could be a weekend park or beach cleanup sponsored by Boniva because a little exercise can help maintain strong and healthy bones. These are the kind of grassroots efforts that some marketers are doing to enhance their brands. What is the pharmaceutical industry doing? Hosting a golf tournament because God knows men with ED play golf (or one of the executives wants to play a round with Tiger Woods).

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We all have to learn to be able to do more with less but in the pharmaceutical industry DTC marketers don't yet understand that. If the budget is too small to allow a successful campaign that will meet reach and frequency numbers they still will spend the money just to be able to say " we did it" or add the campaign to their resumes. DTC marketers very rarely think outside the box when it comes to the development and strategy of campaigns. They'll spend millions of dollars to develop and refine messages but they won't allow agencies to become strategic partners. Pharmaceutical companies are also great at promoting people, with no marketing background, into senior executive positions where they can be "dazzled" my marketers manipulation of data to show that current DTC campaigns are successful. I saw this happen a lot at Lilly.

There are marketers who continually innovate (Apple, Starbucks, BMW) and then there are pharmaceutical marketers who only look at barriers not opportunities. The pharma industry has been hiring consumer marketing people for DTC roles the problem is that old marketing methods are s dead as analog technology. Until the budgets get tighter and tighter marketers may continue to have that google eyed look of a kid in a candy-store with a $20 bill.

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