One obstacle to increasing sales of the client’s medicines was that some physicians did not conduct frequent diagnostic tests that would lead to prescriptions. For example, the team found that physicians in a specific market did not regularly test patients’ cholesterol levels. The team developed a program to distribute easy-to-use blood testing equipment to these physicians so they could diagnose more patients and, if warranted, prescribe the client’s cholesterol-reducing medication.
Another breakthrough came in focus groups exploring how doctors perceived the client’s brands. The research asked prescribers whether the client’s brands stood out from the competition’s, and compared that with the internal marketing organization’s perception. Sixty to 70 percent of the client’s sales and marketing staff perceived their own brands as distinctive, By contrast, only 5 percent of physicians thought the client’s brands were distinctive. This eye-opening insight led to a larger market research study that, in turn, led to the repositioning of a particular brand.
Marketing managers were used to relying on instinct and experience rather than hard data in their analyses. We helped them see the value of following a proven method of gathering and analyzing data. Our method was based on asking a series of 11 questions designed to identify the appropriate patient population, treatment guidelines, patient flow, influences on patient and prescriber, and so on. The questions yielded facts that helped the client come up with innovative and effective solutions. They also helped different brand teams develop a common understanding of how brand planning should be done.
We also discovered how insights that came from anecdotal information were lost because no one knew how to capture and present them. For instance, the client’s leadership wanted the sales force to understand how their work affected the marketing budget. The connection was difficult to illustrate because the salespeople were visiting different types of physicians and using different tactics. We created a simple Excel spreadsheet that showed how spending in one area would require reallocating the marketing mix. That tool made something quite complex actually seem simple and useful to the sales force.