Brains, Brands and Sushi: Why Pharma need to focus on the emotive sell.

 

I read a startling statistic the other day that 95% of Brands launched actually fail.

Even more startling was the statistic that two thirds of drugs launched by the pharmaceutical industry fail to meet market impact expectations. Considering there are set to be 400 new drugs released in the next three years this is slightly worrying. Do the math. That’s around 266 potentially lifesaving drugs that will just fade into market obscurity…

So what on earth is going wrong?

Well, to answer that I guess we need to understand why those 5% of Brands that don’t fail, succeed.

It’s so easy to assume people will buy your product simply because you created it and it’s available.

It is also easy for the pharmaceutical industry to assume that customers will select their product for first line use because it happens to have the best clinical data out there. Wrong again. Let’s consider a scenario in the rheumatoid arthritis market where there is a clear market leader despite the fact that competitors also have comparable and in some cases, superior efficacy data. If we can’t explain a product’s use on rational reasons alone then there must be a less rational component.

And we often tell our pharmaceutical clients not to sell a product.

A product is functional. No-one loves toothpaste. They do, however, love Colgate because it promises to give them whiter teeth and fresher breath. And who wouldn’t want both of these things? This is the power of branding.

To understand why this love for Colgate over toothpaste is happening, let’s examine the brain. Because I don’t know if you are aware of this, but the brain controls everything we do. It’s the source of the majority of our behaviour and even though we are light years away from understanding exactly how it works, we have good enough technology at the moment to hazard a guess as to what might be going on.

You’re obviously objecting to my outlandish claim that you “love” Colgate.

But how outlandish is it really?

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we can study the correlation between behaviour and increased activity in brain areas. By increased activity, I mean the assumption that more activity requires more energy therefore more oxygen is needed. It’s an indirect measure and requires extensive statistical analysis to make any sort of assumption. But for all intents and purposes, it’s a good place to start brain gazing.

So what’s happening when people view their favourite brands?

A study by Esch et al (2012) showed that the palladium (the part of the brain involved in emotional cognition) was positively correlated with viewing familiar brands. Translation: when we view brands we are familiar with, the emotional processing parts of our brain are activated. Moreover, when we view unfamiliar brands, the areas associated with linguistic encoding are comparably more active. Translation: whilst we use emotions to store and retrieve brand perceptions, we use our rational minds to evaluate novel brands.

 

What’s the relevance of this for the pharmaceutical industry?

Well, quite simply, customers are not solely evaluating brands on a rational basis. They aren’t weighing up the pros and cons every time they consider Colgate. The same way doctors aren’t weighing up the efficacy data every single time they prescribe treatments for an RA patient. Through positive experiences with the market leader they have developed a strong emotional attachment to the brand. So when it comes to writing a brand on that prescription letter, it is nearly always their favourite, and more importantly, it is rarely thought about.

What does storing brand perceptions in this way offer the individual?

There has long been a theory that brands might actually function as reward stimuli (Schaefer & Rotte, 2006). And when we do look at brand logos, studies have shown that brain activity increases in the essential component of the brain’s Reward Pathway: The striatum. It receives input from the Cerebral cortex and its outputs get fed into the basal ganglia system that is responsible for a variety of behaviours such as routine behaviours or ‘habits’ and cognition and emotions. Therefore, brand logos are enough to elicit a reward response that feeds into our perception of what we feel the brand offers us.

Furthermore, there is less activity in the brain areas associated with rational choice.

So if you are still with me after all this brain talk, then you’ll be starting to realise that perhaps there’s more to branding than simply conveying the overall benefits of a product.

And that engaging customers might be about more than just describing those benefits.

As our associate director, Anthony Rowbottom, likes to say: “If pharma tried to sell sushi they would describe it as cold, dead fish. That’s exactly what it is. But no-one is going to respond positively to that message.”

Pharma must stop thinking about their customers as cold, clinical doctors and stop selling their products as molecules and impersonal data. They need to appeal to the human in the white coat through the real life patient sat in their surgery opposite them, by describing how their product is providing a practical and emotional benefit for them both.

Think about this next time you are brushing your teeth…

This article was written by Sofia Fionda, Research Executive at Branding Science
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http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11002-012-9176-3#page-1
http://www.upol.cz/fileadmin/user_upload/FF-katedry/kae/2007_Schaefer_Favorite_Brands_as_Cultural_Objects_Modulate_Reward_Circuit.pdf?origin=publicationDetail

 

 

Implicit or Explicit Brand Choice?

How do we really get to the root of barriers and drivers to physician prescribing? Are our brand preferences rational or emotional? And does bias in the line of prejudice play any role in product selection?

We often look to social psychology research for tools when compiling our market research methodologies. Where social psychology meets cognitive psychology we see a series of fascinating (and sometimes controversial) cognitive tasks aiming to uncover the true biases influencing our decision-making.

One such task is the IAT (implicit association test). This computer-based test has been validated in a range of scientific research settings, and more recently, in the consumer setting. Basically, the IAT aims to uncover uncontrollable behavioural responses, demonstrating an association between a brand/group/person and pleasant attributes and another brand/group/person and unpleasant attributes. Typically, the IAT scores are interpreted in terms of association strengths (socially learned or developed associations) by assuming that participants respond more rapidly when the concept and attribute that map on to the same response are strongly associated (e.g. Coca Cola and pleasant) than when they are weakly associated (e.g. Pepsi and pleasant).

What does this all mean for pharmaceutical market research? Well, implicit bias may indeed influence our explicit decision-making. Self-reported experience and anxiety have both been seen to correlate with implicit associations as measured by the IAT. When it comes to Rx or OTC brand selection, this type of implicit information is a critical step to unlocking prescription barriers and drivers amongst physicians.

Stepping outside of our research comfort zones into more experimental methodologies may seem daunting at first, but this leap can potentially offer quantifiable insight difficult to uncover with more traditional techniques. The concept of including a computer-based cognitive task in a qualitative research paradigm sees the fusion of quant and qual methodologies. But isn’t it always the meeting of two great minds that offers the greatest insight?

The author: Dr Pamela Walker is Research Director at Branding Science. After a PhD from the University of Oxford in Neuroscience and Psychology, she gained strategic consulting experience in the pharmaceutical industry. She is now leading the neuroscience taskforce at Branding Science.