Getting close to your customers (are you listening pharma marketers?)

Mar/25/2008 05:33 Filed in: Web 2.0 ?
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Chrysler will begin recruiting U.S. residents in the next few weeks to participate in closed, online dialogues to gather insights for the automaker's marketing, product development, vehicle features and engineering. What a great idea and a fantastic way to get close to your customers. Of course pharma marketers don't care what current customers say they are only interested in new Rx's, but you can learn a hell of a lot from current customers if you listen.


An online consumer advisory panel, what a great idea ! DTC marketers spend millions of dollars on qualitative research and listen to maybe half a dozen groups of 5 people and then make decisions but an online advisory panel can give you great insights into your marketing and more important the way that your customers are filtering your messages.


The path that consumers take before deciding on any treatment has a lot of forks and is extremely complex. DTC markers prefer to lump opinions together and use a shotgun approach to try and reach as many as they can within the bulls-eye. This is marketing 101 from 1965 and most pharma organizations have not moved beyond this antiquated approach. Imagine if marketers listened to an online advisory panel of a couple of hundred patients or consumers and learned from their input? I'm talking about listening to current patients and consumers and engaging them in an ongoing dialogue, I'm talking about reaching out to influencers who are more than willing to share their opinions with you and your marketing.


This is marketing 2.0 with a heavy integration on the Web; this is listening to your current customers about your marketing and being graded on the effectiveness of your campaign with insights that cannot be interrupted on a weekly or monthly market research report. Perhaps more importantly this is a way to get close to your customers but then pharma doesn't want to get close they just want to them to statistics that show up in the new Rx reports.
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