I second (guess) that emotion

To the annoyance of many, no pharmaceutical product has ever had an ’emotional’ positioning*. They may have had, indeed?should?have had, some emotional component to their communications. But positioning is different. Positioning needs some differentiation if it isn’t to be pointless. When you pick a place in the mind of your customer, you may also pick a place in their heart. But if you start with the heart, and forget the mind, you don’t have a positioning, you have a vapid tagline.

There are?lots?of emotions. (There are even lists of them, dozens of constructs and hundreds of emotions:?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emotions). The problem is that there are fewer emotions than there are products. In choosing an ’emotional’ positioning, the less experienced / misled marketer is, by design, choosing a generic positioning. There are even fewer positive emotions, and in restricting the choice to?positive?emotions, the marketer is choosing from a pretty limited pool – unsurprisingly one that has been fished thousands of times before. Agencies and these marketers are made for each other. Agencies (especially the brandname agencies) would never dream of ‘positioning’ on anything other than ‘optimism’, ‘trust’ or ‘joy’… Genericism by design… It is hugely frustrating to see positioning statement after positioning statement take the unique features of a great product and turn it into ‘makes the doctor feel like a hero/ guardian/ partner.’ Of course, if you have Coke’s marketing budget and its reach, feel free to take a tilt at making doctors feel like heroes when they use your brand.

Photo by?Tengyart?on?Unsplash

Something well understood outside of pharma is positioning based on negative emotions: anxiety, desire for peer respect, fear of doing wrong. And in fact, many of the best pharma brands have had this as part of their effective positioning. Lipitor’s positioning as the most effective statin understood that while doctors talked outcomes and saving lives, they acted on proximal markers – LDL coming down reliably and rapidly was much more of a concern in day-to-day practice, and that was how Lipitor was positioned (essentially ‘the most effective LDL lowerer’). Products that promise to stop your patients coming back have traditionally done better than those that promised partnership, unless there is a financial incentive to keep them coming back (the drivers of behaviour often seem contradictory to the professed goals of the physician – witness the way that payments for IV infusions change practice country to country).

Emotions are great places to go looking for insights. But they are not a landscape against which to position a drug – they are a paint-by-numbers picture rather than a Monet. Brands do have emotional connections with their audiences, but they are/ should be positioned rationally.

The opposite of rational is not ’emotional’, it is irrational.?

When people say that positioning ‘must be’ emotional, it is a clear sign that they are conflating both consumer and pharmaceutical positioning, and communication/ messaging with positioning. A rational positioning can easily inform an emotional message (‘if I can lower your LDL faster in 30 days on this one drug than any other, a) I’ll look like a better doctor, and b) you might live longer and see your grandchildren graduate…’), whereas an emotional positioning (‘for those who want to see their grandchildren graduate’) has to tie back to something rational in the product. Even if you were able to drive an emotional connection between grandchildren and your drug in the minds of patients via DTC, they’d then come up against the prescriber choice, the payer choice and a whole lot more. Hard enough if your drug is the one that?hasthose outcomes, but imagine if it isn’t. Imagine if you’re trying to position on emotion while someone else has gone uber-rational. You don’t have to imagine - those case studies exist everywhere (Pravachol vs Lipitor, where all Pravachol marketing drove Lipitor scrips). People will always work their way mentally down the ‘benefit ladder’ to how your drug might possibly do the things you claim, so you’d better be ready with that supporting evidence.

Too often, a desire for an emotional positioning corrupts the process. It often ends in ‘stigma’, ‘confidence’ or ‘hope’, with nothing at the core. Features become benefits too easily in that approach, and claims then become fragile, ephemeral and hollow. It might be nice that your drug helps patients face a new day, but someone somewhere will want to know how, and how your drug does that better than the one they have.

The next great pharmaceutical positioning?may?be emotional. The best rule of positioning is to know all the rules, to see which one you can break. But you’d have to be brave or foolish to start there, and the risk is that no-one will know which you are until the product fails to make it to market or flatlines when it does.

*A lot of brands have an emotional positioning statement, of course. That is not the same.