Personalization: New Norm for the "New Normal"

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article, “A Decade of Digital in Pharma around my journey from being a Pharma Marketer to Marketer in the Digital Age. Having worked with different organizations in transformation roles, I shared my experience of building capabilities and experimenting with non-conventional models to engage digital native customers. Back then, we were building some use cases on how Digital could act as a growth lever for the organizations and remain a sustainable future model.

Covid’19 just shook the system and accelerated the digital journey across the sectors. Each day of the pandemic bringing dramatic changes in customer needs and behaviors. Industry reports and predictions from just a month ago are already stale. The race to understand digital among Pharma marketers was right at the center during the initial months of the pandemic last year. I spoke on several forums around remote engagement, and some great learning platforms were introduced by thought leaders & service providers in this space. Indeed, all pharma marketers scored high on agility, finding better ways to get product messages to their target audiences, and embracing new ways of working. While many aspects of in-person execution were disrupted, which pharma is highly dependent upon, most organizations just digitized all these interactions. Rep-visits were replaced with Phone Calls, Instant Messaging, Mass Emails or Rep-triggered emails, etc., and all knowledge dissemination forums like Congresses or Doctor Meetings were quickly replaced by Virtual one-to-one or one-to-many Meetings.

In the last year, pharma leveraged technology and data to engage physicians like never, and these initiatives helped most brands maintain access during these unprecedented times. However, physicians have now started voicing concerns with some of the channels that pharma banked upon. The ad-hoc engagement started threatening the relationships brands worked so hard to secure over the years. While many of the leaders are attributing this threat to the effectiveness of digital channels, I believe it’s not about the effectiveness of the channels but siloed use of the channels. Random acts of digital, siloed execution or haphazard efforts at omnichannel can destroy brand engagement value.?Therefore, it’s essential to let the strategic ambition and aspirational experience determine the omnichannel strategy. With so many organizations aim to engage Physicians digitally, it’s an overwhelming experience for the Physician; thus, the new environment, so to say “new normal,” calls for a smarter messaging and personalization approach.

Pharma cannot continue with “one-size-fits-all” approach; if brands must break the clutter, they need to understand what customer wants and when, and build a personalized experience for the physicians. However, “Personalization” is one of the most overused words in the digital advertising world and off-late in digital native pharma companies. Considering personalization in advertising has made giant leaps, keeping up has proved challenging across sectors. In other industries, the savviest brands drive personalization well and have moved closer to one-on-one engagement powered by analytics and machine learning. With the amount of data we collect, there’s no limit to what we can achieve with that data. To win the engagement battle in today’s digital age, brands need to start making sense of customer data we have been collecting for ages. Smart targeting starts with data. For eCommerce giants like Amazon or Flipkart, it’s like browsing history. When Amazon visitors view an item, they are targeted with suggestions for other purchases. The experience is powered by user data fed into an algorithm, which promptly surfaces the “relevant” products. In every organization’s digital roadmap, Data-Driven Marketing is one of the key priorities to deliver a personalized experience to our customers. But It’s easier said than done.

Perhaps let’s take a step back and define “What is Personalization?” In the advertising world, personalization refers to the hyper-targeted, individualized, One-to-One messaging made possible by collecting and applying data. When I think of Pharma Selling Model, we have the most personalized channel available on the ground, yet we haven’t successfully delivered exceptional experiences to our customers. Our aim should be to deliver consistently tailored interactions across channels (including face-to-face and digital) and do so continuously and at scale. Achieving personalization takes significantly enhanced data-management capabilities and process integration. While many pharma companies have taken some steps however basis on my experience, here are some of the areas we need to plug to drive personalization at scale:

• First thing first, I believe everyone in the organization and not just commercial must understand the Omnichannel philosophy, i.e., “We need to be there, where our customers are.” Don’t just focus on one or two channels; understand customer’s day in the life, and leverage channels accordingly. Pharma predominantly depends upon one channel only, i.e., Face to Face. Sales Teams can add tremendous value to the Personalization journey. They can source on-ground information and demystify customer needs, define or validate personas, therefore, helping marketers to define what parts of omnichannel to prioritize. Today most of the Sales team’s focus is just push messaging and meeting customers day-in-day-out.
• Build a Constant Stream of Content. With the proliferation of digital channels, you must evolve your content development capabilities. In order to achieve personalization, there’s a need to bring agility to the content creation process, and I believe the only way to keep up with the high content demand is to adapt the modular approach to content creation. As you move forward, creating more personalized content would require more resources; therefore, keep content automation one of your personalization roadmap priorities.?
• 360 View of the Customer is Vital. Make sure you have everything in one place with everything about that customer and what is driving them. Simple demographics data is no longer enough. The more you know about your customer, the better you will craft the ideal interventions for their journey. Many organizations know their target physician’s focused specialties, patient base, hospital or pharmacy associations, etc. however, we must pay attention to metrics that speak to that physician’s history with our brand like behavioral data, what kind of content they consume, where they spend time, what topics they are interested in, who influences them, etc. Since most organizations have more than one rep meeting the same physician, unify data of multiple brands across business units, multiple indications for different brands targeted, engagement data from your sales rep’s interactions, digital engagement, congresses participation, etc. A comprehensive target view can enhance your ability to personalize the journey at each physician level.
• Build Multichannel Capability of Sales Teams. The new consumer behaviors span all areas of life, from how a physician interacts with patients, how they interact with brands, to how they update themselves. These rapid shifts have major implications for the existing go-to-market model, and we all know Reps are losing access to doctors, which forces them to make the most of the limited time at their disposal. There is a need to rethink the Rep-driven in-person engagement model. While Digital is not a threat to the Reps and never going to replace in-person interactions, sales teams need to be trained on how to leverage multiple channels to provide Physicians the content or tools needed to help them treat their patients effectively.
• Nurture Data-Driven Culture and Empower Customer Facing resources. Give a single view of customer’s access to all your customer-facing teams, be it Reps, Commercial Leaders, MSLs, or Medical teams, and encourage decision making based on the insights from the data. Build connected and smarter marketing campaigns with simplified journeys, where customer-facing teams know exactly what role they must play, and they are working in conjunction with other channels. Closely monitor what is working and not create clarity on the next best opportunities and actions.
• Embed Test and Optimize experiences mindset among all stakeholders. With customer behavior changing rapidly, you will never get everything right. Often Leaders hold on to the failures and stall the next campaigns or projects. Therefore you should consider positioning Test & Optimize strategies in your personalization roadmap. Make sure you establish and clearly detail test vs. control experiments for your personalization choices and evolve experiences basis what resonates best among your audiences.
• Get the Right Capability for the job. I have witnessed that organizations are often swayed by new technologies that sound promising but too often don’t work. Many generalists within the organizations or partners also have a murky understanding of how omnichannel creates value. Though every pitch I’ve heard so far from the partners or service provider is done right, keeping their solution at the center, organizations must get the right capability to know the domain, ecosystem and understand the omnichannel landscape well.

As personalization becomes the cornerstone of digital strategy, marketing leaders need to revisit team structures and operational workflows. Tailoring experiences at an individual level involves a lot of moving parts and implementations, which are beyond technology or channels. Personalization thrives on getting the little things right. I often use the phrase “Personalization is an Art, driven by Science,” To get it right, you need to get into an endless loop of the test, measure, refine, and then measure again. Digital reinvention will help pharma deliver a high-quality and personalized experience to the customers and improve business performance and build resilience against future disruptions.