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
