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It's time for DTC marketers to understand how patients make treatement decisions

Nov/11/2008 08:53
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Over the course of reviewing DTC marketing materials it's become apparent that either a lot of DTC marketers don't understand how patients make healthcare choices or don't care. They continue to push mass market TV ads and engage in Web 1.5 but when a major pharma company spends $750 million on DTC and only $5 million of that is allocated to the Internet than there is something seriously wrong with the system.

Over the last two months I have sat in on some qualitative research with people of all age groups to determine how and when they get health information. Two things became apparent; first, they only search for health information when they are concerned about a health problem for themselves or family members and that they rarely do any research on "preventive" health conditions or treatments unless there is some type of "trigger" within their lives, usually a family member or close friend getting suddenly ill.

When they do go online they do not just go to one health site they go to several to gather all the information that they can. They also go to BLOGS and to message boards to see what others have done or have experienced in treatment. As for pharma sites, we heard in all age groups that they might go there for an Rx but that the information on pharma product websites is not credible. When we probed about the credibility issue we heard responses such as "you can't trust them to tell you the truth" and "you turn on the news and there is another story about drugs and they're usually bad".

Everywhere a patient/consumer goes while in search for health information is a potential touchpoint for the brand but yet DTC marketers continue to ignore the majority of these touchpoints. Most market research is done to determine messaging to increase Rx volume via new patients but very little is done with existing patients to learn what made them customers. For some reason marketers still feel that they can run ads on TV and magically it's going to generate new Rx's. I'm not even going to go into the recent research that was presented to the FDA that shows that DTC ads may not be effective at all because pharma market research people are great at providing numbers that seemingly show that DTC TV ads work.

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John Mack and I have been talking about pharma being stuck in old advertising models that ignore empowered patients and push messages to a skeptical public. Yes there are some interactive Web sites out there but do marketers really think that people are going to go to that Website without some type of trigger event? Once you start taking a medication what reason is there to go back to the product website that adds value to the brand? Oh yeah, let me track my cholesterol online when I don't have time to go to the bathroom on most days.

A conversation cannot exist between you and your prospects or customers until you learn how to listen. Right now there is no conversation it's more of a lecture of irrelevant information to a skeptical public.
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