There is a parallel between Ralphie’s situation and the medical community. Some (not all) doctors and regulators believe that sharing medical knowledge and treatment information with patients is not in the best interest of the patient. At best, these physicians consider a patient’s personal medical research to be a waste of time. At worst, they think this information will be harmful to patients or reduce the stature of the medical professional.

But that’s where the parallels end. Unlike a BB gun, information and resources in the hands of patients can only help patients. Patients who research information and therapies may be told by their doctors “you’ll shoot your eye out,” but rest assured, the environment that fosters these interactions is slowly evolving.

The benefits of patient empowerment should challenge those in authority who currently do not value the patient role in medical care. Patients value physicians who work together with them in a partnership. The outcomes from these partnerships will eventually tilt the medical conversation so patients’ needs are better met.

And that leads to better outcomes for everyone involved.

From Compass, we wish you warm holiday gatherings, delicious Chinese turkeys, and for all of your holiday wishes to come true. See you in 2012!

Compass Healthcare Marketers will be holding our 5^th Annual Innovation Lab: Translating the Patient Experience into Commercial Success, to answer these essential questions. Join us for one day at San Francisco’s Cavallo Point lodge where rare disease industry professionals will come together to talk about the important role of the patient in their commercial planning, as well as address key topics in the orphan drug space.

This “closed-door” session—no media or regulatory agents—with leaders from several orphan drug companies and expert consultants will provide a safe and intimate environment in which we can have a very honest and productive dialogue about:

• The unique commercialization challenges in the rare disease and orphan drug space
• Pricing, reimbursement, and market access strategies for orphan drugs
• Social media’s unique and significant influence on the patient experience
• How to find, acquire, and inspire patients with rare diseases
• Case studies of orphan brands leveraging the patient experience for commercial success

Vew the complete agenda or register now to attend this exclusive, industry-only, “closed-door” event to learn more about understanding and leveraging the patient experience in the rare disease and orphan drug space.

After the workshop, we will also be hosting a wine tasting event featuring Cavallo Point’s extensive collection of Old World and New World wines.

We look forward to seeing you on the 20^th in San Francisco!

Anyone can say they want to engage the patient and understand their experience, but unless the patient believes it, the brand will never be accepted in the community (community = patients, caregivers, associations, and organizations).  Intent and action, not words, will drive their belief. These patient groups are cynical (who can blame them?), so it really is about actions—not statements or PR programs.  Influence will only happen if you create and deliver actual interactions, programs, and engagements with the various patient groups based on what they actually need and want, in the form they utilize.

What programs really demonstrate true honest engagement? There is no perfect tactic, program, or promotion. The best way to ensure success comes down to intent. Intent can only be accomplished if it is developed with and by the community with whom you are trying to engage.

Last year Novartis showed us how not to build an unbranded education site, and received an FDA letter because of it. It was obvious the intent of GISTalliance.com was not to educate, but to promote Gleevec. The look and feel of the site was “perceptually similar” in terms of color schemes and layout to the Gleevec site. The site only discussed and provided information about aspects of the disease that Gleevec treats, including direct links to the Gleevec product website with little or no discussions about other indications.

For BioMarin and their drug Kuvan, which treats PKU, it not only took intent, but action to connect with the PKU community. BioMarin found itself defending against patient groups who were questioning the cost and benefit of a drug that provided marginal efficacy over strict diet modifications. BioMarin, on the other hand, thought they were providing a much-appreciated solution for parents of children (especially teens) with PKU, who found it almost impossible to adhere to the diets and needed some additional help. So BioMarin engaged the community and discovered that patients with PKU felt isolated and alone, which was exacerbated by the strict diet they had to follow, making them feel further isolated from friends and family. BioMarin continued their community engagement efforts by launching PKU.com, a disease education and community website to support and enhance dialogue among the PKU community. They didn’t just say they were supporting the PKU community—they did it. As a result, the site is the lead destination for PKU patients, garnering 5,500 unique visitors in the first month, as well as 86 registered members and 18 blog posts.

So if you have or are developing a product in the rare disease space focus less on the management of your message and more on your relationship with the patient community. By doing so, together you will identify the support, tools, and information they need to better manage their condition and achieve the best outcome possible.  

“People who are diagnosed with rare diseases can have a hard time finding doctors who know about their illness. They often have to become experts themselves…these ‘super patients’ are helping each other and also helping researchers to find new treatments.”

It told the story of a new patient with LAM (lymphangioleiomyomatosis) and how she found a patient group upon her diagnosis. Members of the group provided her with mentoring, emotional support, disease education, and referrals to experts. The advice she received enabled her to consult with a specialist familiar with the orphan disease, ultimately leading to her canceling a surgery to remove a benign tumor on her kidney—just a half hour beforehand (in favor of effective, less invasive approaches). The group has also provided her and her family much needed education and support.

We are now entering an era where patients are becoming equal partners with their physicians in the management of their healthcare. The rare disease space is on the cutting edge of this paradigm shift, due to sheer necessity. This is because many physicians diagnosing and/or treating rare diseases don’t understand enough about the disease or treatment options. There are thousands of rare diseases—a physician may only encounter a few patients with a particular rare disease in his or her career, so staying current on all of them is virtually impossible. However, a patient or caregiver can focus all of their time and research on the one disease, leveling the playing field of understanding and making the patient/caregiver an important resource and decision-maker. Frank McCormack, director of the pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine division at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, thinks that expert patients make a physician’s job easier: “I welcome it,” he said. “In general the Internet age has enhanced physician-patient relationships.”

Internet being the key word, of course – the patient empowerment movement could not have happened without the radical democratization of information that the Internet has enabled.  According to the NPR story: “The Web has been a game-changer for [patients], connecting them to others in the same boat. They share medical information and support each other on listservs, chat rooms, and now Facebook.”

Finding a connection is so critical for patients and caregivers affected by rare diseases—otherwise, most of those 25 million patients and their families would never speak with or meet another person that shares a similar experience. The connection, the support, and the information shared allows these people to feel less in the dark and less dependent on only the expertise and quality of their particular healthcare team, leading to greater knowledge and sense of control. That’s empowerment! And that’s why this fundamental shift will continue to accelerate. It’s like the spread of democracy in a repressed society—once they have a taste there’s no going back.

What does this mean for industry? Recognize that the patient (and caregiver) experience has profound influence on the commercial potential for your product, all the way from trial design (ie, dosing and relevant endpoints) to product design (how big is the needle?) to patient services and marketing. And don’t forget those Internet communities—they have tremendous power to affect perception, of course, but they also have the ability to support registries, serve as mentors, and influence other stakeholders (ie, managed care).

If you’re interested in learning more about how to leverage a true understanding of patient experience into commercial success, join us at our 2011 Innovation Lab – or give us a call!

Recently the FDA has given a great deal of attention to video, and pharma companies are grappling with the best way to communicate through this medium within regulatory boundaries. DDMAC is focused on identifying videos that overstate benefits and minimize risks, with the most recent letter issued was on a patient video on Premarin.com. According to the letter, the video overstated efficacy of Premarin by suggesting that it would eliminate all hot flashes and other symptoms associated with menopause. Additionally, it minimized side effects – available on the website only in text, under the video player.

Similar circumstances led to warning letters for brands such as Eisai’s Gliadel, which included voiceover of the risk information, but lacked prominence. A video on Herceptin had a different, but no more successful approach. Risks were presented in text only prior to the start of the video, and very little risk information was integrated into the video. Patients noted “mild fatigue” and “joint pain,” hardly a thorough discussion on risk that should accompany a product with a boxed warning.

Where to Go From Here

Benefits of a product discussed in a video should be on-label, of course, when delivered by any spokesperson. Thorough preparation, detailed screening and a highly trained interviewer can go a long way in eliciting responses that are natural, yet appropriate from the FDA’s perspective. Capturing physician footage to accompany the patient story is a best practice, particularly as physicians will cover side effects more comfortably and naturally.

Online videos should follow the same approach as contemporary DTC commercials. Safety/side effects/risk information should be integrated into the content of the video itself. It should be part of the story narrative, not a before or after thought like the videos cited above.

Further, “balance” should be as consumer friendly and natural as the discussion of benefits. Accompanying any contextual balance should be the full ISI, integrated in the video itself as well as on the page. The ISI should not be minimized by distracting visuals and other competing elements.

Planning for Success

Planning for video success begins sooner than the editing suite. With proper planning and expertise the integration of risk information within video is an achievable best practice that will increase credibility, drive understanding/comprehension and share risk information in a digestible format. And make FDA happy.

As a marketing tool, video offers distinct advantages. It demands engagement—consumers would rather “watch” than “read” while they’re online. It’s also easy to digest and understand. And above all, video tells a story. While video has been shown to deliver important advantages across all industries, within the pharmaceutical industry, the medium is actually ranking above the curve in terms of engagement. Why is this?

One reason is that video is used not only to promote but also to educate, which is particularly relevant to pharma. Video can help bring your audience’s awareness to a higher level by providing a different level of understanding. It can also help to humanize your company and engage HCP’s and patients in a more emotional, empathetic, and personal way. Consider a video in which a patient describes his or her experiences living with a serious or rare condition. Patients see themselves in those they’re viewing and thus are able to connect in a personal way with your brand and your message. In this way, video offers a more engaging and intimate understanding of your brand beyond a mere listing of product attributes that might appear elsewhere.

By its power to educate, promote, and engage, video can help move your audience along the continuum from awareness to engagement to acquisition and ultimate loyalty.

Few of you are old enough to remember this Dr. Doolittle, two-headed, camel-like animal, but some may recall a time when there were about 8 TV channels, prime-time TV ruled and there was no Internet. Well times have changed and with them, the entire way we reach our targets and market to them.

At the risk of being too broad, within the past year, we have made the conversion from any type of “push” advertising to almost exclusively a “pull” advertising society.

What does this mean?

“Push” advertising describes the interruptive way we used to “push” our ads at the unsuspecting consumer. This poor sop would be reading an article or watching a show and—blam—he would get hit with an ad. It didn’t matter if the guy watching the news wasn’t in the market for Playtex Living Gloves; he saw it anyway. Inefficient you say? Not exactly. Back then, we marketers identified a single benefit and a single target, wrote our ad, bought a 30-second slot on prime time TV and hit 75% of our audience—easy, efficient.

As we all know, those days are over. With DVR’s, Hulu, iTunes, etc, consumers can now select what they watch as well as when and how much. In fact our children are the first generation since the advent of TV who will watch less of it than the previous generation did.

So the consumer is in control. Therefore we, as marketers, can no longer “push “ our message at them. They will decide what they want to “pull” down and devour.

Good News. Bad News.

The good news? With fragmented yet targeted marketing vehicles–smartphones, the Internet, satellite radio, etc.—we cannot only find, but pinpoint our target consumers.

The bad news? We must deliver content that the target will voluntarily select or pull. Your product not only has to be relevant but consumers have to be interested in what you are saying about it. Crack that code and you win.

Being Internet marketers for the past 7 years, we have always understood and valued great content and tools. Since online has been the lead vehicle people use to proactively search for specific information, our job has always been to put content they value in the right place for them to see and use.

Now it’s time for this type of content to be utilized in all forms of marketing.
If you build it—relevant and valuable content—they will come—and consume it.

This argument can be made for the release of the new iPhone 4 from Apple and the infamous “Antennagate.”  There are people, myself included, which bought Apple products aware that the company knowingly produced phones with a performance flaw- the antenna issue.  I do commend Steve Jobs for addressing the issue, after all, the first step toward forgiveness is admitting and acknowledging there is a problem.  They even do so at Apple.com.  Offering customers a free bumper/case did an effective job of mitigating the deeper backlash that could have ensued, while also saving the company close to $300 million dollars if they were to do a full recall on the phone itself. 

I’m not so sure I agree with their saying the antenna death grip  affects all other smart phones such as the BlackBerry Bold 9700, HTC Droid Eris, Motorola Droid X, etc. It doesn’t necessarily reflect well on Apple for throwing others manufacturers ‘under the bus.’

So why are we so loyal to Apple? I am because I’m a slave for fashion, err design. I think most of us Apple loyalists are so because of the continual flow of cool “stuff” that comes out of Cupertino. This is a true case of form over function. And since Apple continually delivers on the form side of the equation, we tend to give them a pass on the function side. Heck, why else would any of us iPhone users endure the spotty AT&T network?  A July 29 article in the Wall Street Journal expands upon the slave to design theme.

Apple brand loyalty was evident again in the release of the iPhone 4 last month in Hong Kong  in a blog post featured in Wall Street Journal, with Apple loyalists willing to suffer through the summer heat in large lines everywhere that offered the phone for sale. 

“I don’t care if the Wi-Fi has as a good connection or not,” said Max Li, one of the customers in line to collect his new phone. “I just like to play games, and the iPhone is a trendy thing,” which further supports the claim that some brand loyalists don’t care if the product they buy is the best offering or may have potential issues.

 “The antenna problem has unsettled some consumers and the negative publicity has taken a little shine off the iPhone brand,” said Neil Mawston, an analyst at market research firm Strategy Analytics. “Competitors have seen the iPhone 4 is not flawless and this will give smartphone rivals a window of opportunity to step up their competitive attacks against Apple over the coming months.”

So bad antenna or not, Apple loyalists will continue to possess deep emotional ties to the innovative design that puts the iPhone and other Apple products ahead of the curve and into our hands.  We will continue to be loyal to the iPhone, regardless if it remains exclusively with an overloaded AT&T network or has design flaws, as long as they deliver on their end of the innovative design bargain.

At Compass, we believe that a brand is not a benefit, a formula, a name, or a logo. A brand is a contract with your targets.

Our job as marketers is to create and articulate your brand’s identity so that it is interpreted by each of your targets on terms that are relevant to them in their lives. Your brand’s name, logo, and graphics are tangible expressions of this identity while your brand’s promise, personality, and tone, are intangible expressions.

How do you develop your brand so it will grow and become a valuable asset to each of your targets?

The answer to this question is much different today than it was even five years ago. Why? Because of the Internet. The Internet has allowed us to think in and market to multiple targets and segments. Your brand may have to appeal to several very different audiences, each of which has a different set of expectations, perspectives, and reasons why they have come to interact with your brand.

These target audiences are the ones who define the relationship with your brand and what it will and will not mean to them. Another way to think about this is: What do your target audiences say about your brand when you’re not in the room? What do they believe to be true about your brand? Because it’s what they believe, not what you intend, that matters.

Consider these statistics:

• 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content. (Source: Marketing Vox and Nielsen BuzzMetrics SES Magazine June 8 )
• 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands. (Source: Universal McCann’s Social Media Research Wave 3)
• 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations. (Source: July 2009 Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey)

The communication of your brand—or where your targets learn about it these days—gets a bit tricky. This is especially true online, which is generally the first place your audiences will be introduced to your brand. Many aspects of communicating your brand online are not in your control, especially with the advent, growth and strength of social media. So make sure your intended brand identity is consistent among all your targets wherever you mention it. Know that others may take it and redeploy it—possibly into areas that you may not have even considered.

The Internet also allows you to target and reach each of your segments with the exact message you know your audiences will find valuable about your brand. It is the one medium through which you can deliver a direct, unfiltered definition of your brand and the experience your brand represents—the whole story with less interpretation—keeping it as true as possible to each segment that views it.

Here’s how to do it:

Think in multiples: Multiple segments. Multiple audiences. Multiple interpretations (because now you can). The question is no longer: What is the one message I want to convey? It’s: Who are the multiple segments interacting with my brand? Once you determine this, you need to understand how each segment wants to interact with your brand—on the phone, online, in person—and when they need the information.

Because you can now position your brand to multiple customer segments, you should do your segmentation research when you begin your branding research—even as early as Phase III and label design—and not afterward. Use the segmentation research to identify criteria on which your audience clusters (eg, practice areas, specialties, etc). Explore not only what your key message drivers are, but why, which is the most valued, and how will your messaging be delivered to each segment. Different segments respond to specific articulations of your brand’s identity. Emphasize nuances within your brand’s promise, personality, or values while making sure to maintain consistency on the external expressions. They are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that when put together, need to consistently display your brand’s identity. If your pieces are different or disparate, that puzzle will be a mess.

As your message and brand architecture are developed, make sure they are on a flexible platform that can be translated into multiple mediums to different segments—all while ensuring consistency in your brand essence. Next, develop strategies for each segment to receive messages in the form most suitable to them.

None of this is easy and it can’t be learned overnight or performed by older, more traditional agencies. It takes years of living in the segmented marketing world to be able to successfully build and promote a brand in it.

This weekend, the iPad will launch with all of the excitement and more of the original iPhone. The device has many critics who point out that its lack of Adobe Flash, multi-tasking and camera will make it Apple’s next failure, similar to its now infamous Newton PDA. Other’s are more optimistic about the device and see it revolutionizing how we consume media.

As an ex-Apple employee and admitted “fan boy” – I’ve already pre-ordered mine and eagerly await its arrival. While I’m very excited about the new product and the catalyst it’s sure to be for the current “tablet” marketplace, I’m wondering how it fits into the Pharma marketing mix.

Whenever new platforms or technologies come along, we get lots of interest from our clients. The question we have to ask back is if it’s right for their target audience. We are not resistant to innovation and change, but sometimes it’s not the right fit for a demographic even if it’s the coolest thing in our minds. For now, I feel that the iPad has a lot of potential in the Healthcare Professionals (HCP) sphere of promotion. I think that in time, Direct to consumer (DTC) marketing will find its place in mobile advertising and the iPad specifically.

For HCPs, there is no doubt that they are aware and interested in using the iPad. In a recent survey by Epocrates, the medical software company found that almost 60% of doctors are considering the iPad for their work, with a third of those ready to buy.

This presents a great opportunity to reach HCP audiences who already have the device, as well as leverage their existing interest in the device. The iPad or devices like it could become the most valuable tool in a Sales Reps detailing kit.

Only a few months ago Pfizer armed their sales force with $1500 tablet PCs. For half of that, they could have purchased the cheapest 3G model at $629. In addition to the hardware costs, imagine the savings of not having to print and drop ship sales aides when a regulatory or marketing change is needed.

Available for download from the Apple iTunes App Store, AT&T WorkBench helps extend existing enterprise application services to iPhone / iPad through secure web apps hosted in a managed environment. It enables companies to deploy enterprise applications in a highly-secure manner – even on mobile devices purchased by an individual. With this tool, a technician can securely update an online interactive sales aide to all reps within just a few hours.

For the physicians that have an iPad, medical reprints might become a thing of the past. Instead, companies could offer a custom ePub version of a journal article for HCPs to load into their iBooks App.

There are plenty of other ways the iPad can help save time and money while putting a far more interactive marketing platform in an HCP or Reps hands.

A few more ways it could be applied include:

• Medical Meeting Booth Touch Points
• In-Office Patient Medical Device Training
• On-Demand Detailing / CME

For patients, there are a few obstacles ahead before the iPad or any other “smart” devices can be utilized fully. The main concern is the open “review” feature for Apps. It’s a regulatory person’s worst nightmare – an open text field. This means potential Adverse Event reports and potentially negative comments in general from consumers.

To place a patient focused “App” on the iPad, Pharma will need to go the “Web App” route. In place of “Native Apps,” more companies are turning to optimized “Web Apps.” Web Apps offer several advantages over Native Apps. Web Apps remove the open review field, as well as cut out the developer channel step of submitting to Apple. This way you gain the ability to instantly update your Web App, just like you would for a brand website.

I’m very excited to see how the iPad will be used among marketing teams across different brands, both Pharma and Consumer. Whether you think the iPad is just another flawed Apple product or the next great thing, it’s sure to spur innovation and creativity in new ways of reaching physicians and patients.