Awareness does not equal new Rx's

Jun/03/2008 06:25 Filed in: Current DTC
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One of the key objectives and measurements of DTC campaigns is awareness. For some reason a lot of DTC marketers believe that awareness equals new Rx’s but that is not necessarily true. In the era of information at everyones fingertips, via the Web, awareness may increase your brands share of mind but it will also do a lot co increase your competitors share of mind as well.



I used to marvel at the market research people who would spend hours preparing graphs and charts showing a correlation between awareness and new Rx’s. Forget that a nice uptake is usually the result of a new product introduction cycle these master manipulators would do a great job confusing executives who didn’t have marketing smarts, or common sense for that matter.


As my friend John Mack points out this morning on his BLOG, Evista has a black box warning but that doesn’t stop Lilly from promoting the product for breast cancer rather than osteoporosis. Yes the buzz is increasing around Evista but as more and more people connect on social media the truth is coming out about the black box warning and the increased risks. In addition this author has seen a lot of post of people pointing out other treatment options and brands rather than Evista.


One has to wonder WHY Lilly would conduct a DTC campaign on a product with a black box warning anyway? If they wanted incremental sales they could have spent a hell of a lot less money and done a campaign online where women are looking for health information but no. Someone at Lilly probably believes that the benefits far outweigh the risks of the product but if that is the case why didn’t they go the extra step to clearly communicate the risks in real language that people can understand so that they can make an educated decision?


Marketing is an art not a science: I really believe that. When you get people who take a scientific approach to focus groups and flood management with quantitative and qualitative numbers common sense goes out the window. Rather than look at DTC campaigns from the outside in they prefer to look from the inside out to push messages to people who are becoming smarter about healthcare choices. Too bad. Lilly had a chance here to show that they “understood” the power of generation “i” but I guess they still listen to their market research people who don’t go to the bathroom without conducting research first.
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