Moskowitz, Gladwell, Spaghetti Sauce and Pharmaceutical Promotion

ted.com capture

I was long saying that, after the lately so much blamed pharmaceutical sales model (for its growing ineffectiveness in western markets), the next sales model would rather be… NO MODEL.

If we are to consider that at the base of pharmaceutical sales stays product and disease information (which may or may not always be the case) than we have to admit that over the last decade the way information reaches doctors has changed dramatically. If at the beginnings of pharmaceutical promotion reps were valuable information sources (besides conferences, textbooks and pricey medical journals) now people have many ways to choose. The need for information has been replaced by the need for a capacity to select information (what is really valuable and what is crappy or biased) and information avenues (amongst them internet taking lion’s share).

The question many marketers are trying to answer now is: what is the best way to get their information (messages… whatever) to their target audience? And this may prove to be a wrong question. A much better one may be: What ARE the best ways to get whatever they want to their target audience? Probably, today there is no best way to reach people’s brains or souls. Today people have so many options to choose and therefore they have preferences. And those preferences may lead to clusters of preferred ways to get medical information. Knowing these preferred clusters and acting on them can help getting the right information to the right customers more effectively.

The true challenge rises only now! How do you know those clusters? Asking people may not be just enough because they may not have experienced many of them yet to give a true answer. For example some of them might enjoy getting useful hints on twitter but still do not have a twitter account. Or, they might not have seen yet short newsletters with essential info received regularly from selected companies.

To answer the question what are the best ways to serve info and messages to our audience may require innovation, risk taking, evaluation and design… and innovation again.

To better understand this point you may want to see this beautiful TED presentation of Malcolm Gladwell on how Howard Moskovitz re-invented spaghetti sauce. He offered breakthrough alternatives to people to taste and asked for feedback rather than asking them upfront how would they like spaghetti sauce to be. Results were so unexpected; they reinvented the spaghetti sauce business and added deliciousness to our lives.