Power Words Are Pharma Marketers’ New Secret Weapon
By Noah M Pines
ThinkGen
Health Care Customers Demand that We Use Power Words
Pharma’s busy, distracted and burned-out customer and stakeholder audiences are demanding?brevity more than ever. When developing a message, marketing teams need to be exceedingly selective, not just about the construction of a persuasive brand narrative and the messages themselves, but even down to the specific words used in customer-facing communication.
There is a secret weapon that marketing teams can leverage to achieve breakthrough, ignite customers’ emotions, drive behavior, and ultimately make their brand unforgettable. In the world of advertising copywriting, this tool is called “power words.”
Power words are words or short phrases that trigger a strong emotional or psychological response. They are evocative words that impact the customer by prompting a strong underlying meaning or set of associations.
However, and especially in health care, the meaning, connotation and thus impact of words often aren’t universal. In health care, words and the broader language lexicon used in education and promotion are context-dependent and can vary by therapeutic area, medical specialty and customer type. Also, certain words are commonplace and over-used in medical communication, and therefore might be ignored. Certain words might be polarizing. Power words therefore need to be selected and tested carefully.
When wielded correctly based upon the right customer and context, power words can spark emotion and can help activate the behavior the marketer is seeking. Choosing the right power words can help to boost engagement, especially among busy, time-limited and over-worked HCPs who value and demand a journalistic degree of succinctness. A properly chosen and strategically placed power word can even be employed to assist a busy HCP to more clearly telegraph a complex concept to a patient, and/or to convince a patient to start a new medication.
This essay describes how we at ThinkGen go about identifying power words through primary marketing research techniques, especially with the assistance of machine learning algorithms designed to assess customer emotive responses to written stimuli.
Beyond the Bounds of Heuristic Science
Over the past decade, many in the pharma industry have embraced the trend of leveraging behavioral science to enhance the persuasive impact of messages through heuristics. Heuristics are problem-solving strategies that humans naturally use to make decisions or learn new things. Heuristics help people solve complex issues by focusing on the most relevant information or using past experiences – hence they are often thought of as mental short cuts or “rules of thumb.”
Recent methods introduced in the industry aim at understanding heuristics within a specific decision-making context, and then gearing the communication / messaging to help the customer either feed or fight that heuristic. In the context of ThinkGen’s Habit Lens model, heuristics specifically expedite the path between cue and behavior.
For example, the Anchoring Heuristic is among the most common heuristics in decision-making.?This is a situation where you rely on the first piece of information that you encounter when rendering a decision. The Social Proof heuristic is where you see other people doing something, and thus assume a behavior is correct or desired.
There is some evidence that identifying and then leveraging dominant heuristics actually works to boost communication performance. At the same time, with virtually all large companies now embracing language heuristics, one must ask: is there a way to further fortify and distinguish one’s unique message? Is there an opportunity to further elevate messaging aimed at health care decision-makers and consumers so that certain concepts stand out even more strongly, especially where economy and efficiency of language is of the highest premium, such as in non-personal promotion (NPP)?
As Consumers, We See Power Words Everyday
Industries that aren’t subject to the regulatory scrutiny of the FDA barrage us daily with power words. Words like “trending,” “transformative,” “shocking,” “ultimate,” “outperform,” and “must-have” make headlines pop. In verbal communication, we either deliberately or automatically pepper our speech with power words intended to intensify our credibility and persuasiveness: “definitely,” “unquestionably,” and “honestly.”
In politics, there are power words – or phrases – that recently have been incorporated into our civic glossary such as “woke,” “cancel culture,” “weaponization,” “fake news” or “defund.” As a rapidly evolving form of speech, these words used in politics are intended to encapsulate complex concepts, evoke a strong emotion, or to indicate a particular stance on a debate. To some, these words become social media hashtags or even rallying cries.
In identifying and leveraging a power word, the goal is to choose a term or phrase that packs a strong emotional or persuasive punch. Power words are laden with meaning and associations that, when encountered by a health care customer or stakeholder, are designed to activate a particular feeling or action. Some of the key criteria we at ThinkGen use to identify power words include:
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These parameters serve as a checklist with which to gauge the impact of words identified by respondents as power words.
How We Identify Power Words
When we at ThinkGen conduct message testing research, we use several techniques to identify power words and to explore the origin, rationale and nuances of how they impact on customer emotion and psychology. Again, we do not assume that there are universal power words since many of the therapeutic areas we work in are highly specialized and involve a unique set of practices and considerations.
When we are testing a series of messages (or headlines in a core visual aid), we ask respondents to use a highlighter pen – real or virtual – to pinpoint specific words or phrases that stand out to them. We often offer up different color highlighters, with green denoting a word/phrase that elicits strong favorable feelings, red denoting a word/phrase that elicits strong negative feelings, and yellow denoting a word/phrase that leaves the respondent feeling uncertain. After the highlighting exercise, our moderators ask a series of questions designed to dive deeply into why the respondent feels that a word or phrase is standing out to them. A ThinkGen moderator also might proactively ask the respondent to talk about their reaction to a specific word or phrase to see how it is making them feel; or explore specific alternative wording or phraseology.
Using our interactive research platform, we carry forward these words and phrases selected by the respondents so that they can later rate them based upon the criteria enumerated above. The result is an inventory of power words for our client. We also identify which words or phrases might carry a negative connotation, and/or words that might be interpreted as confusing or unclear.
To properly execute this exercise, it is important to advise the respondent that we are looking only for single words and short phrases. This is because oftentimes respondents will highlight an entire sentence – particularly when they are physically holding the highlighter pen in their hands. Sometimes power words can be generated by the customer themselves. In our research platform when we are doing message testing research, we have a space dedicated to respondent ideas as to words, language, or phraseology.?
When striving to better understand how a stimulus, whether a message or a concept, is impacting a respondent emotionally, we often rely on an Emotion Wheel or an Image Board. The Emotion Wheel is useful because it helps respondents to pinpoint more specific, complex and nuanced emotions versus simpler emotions they might naturally voice when asked how they feel. For example, instead of feeling “bad” or “weak,” the emotion wheel might help a respondent more precisely signal a sense of “loneliness,” “vulnerability,” or “fragility.” This technique can be employed to determine the specific emotional impact of power words.
Showing the respondent an Image Board and having them select an image that reflects their emotional mindset also can further elucidate the actual impact a power word is having. Much has been written about the power of metaphor as a way to access respondents' deeper feelings and associations.
In addition to words and phrases that respondents might identify as part of message testing, we also employ machine learning algorithms that can detect when a respondent has an emotional response. This approach can be used when reviewing messages or even headlines and body copy in a core visual aid.
Through this approach, we can show that a respondent’s speech pattern in their response to a word or phrase indicates a positive, negative, or neutral sentiment. Our machine learning algorithms can produce inventories of words and phrases (as well as word clouds) based upon their elicitation of different sentiments. This is done by analyzing respondents’ voice tonality, speech cadence, and verbal inflection.
Conclusion
All of us are innately familiar with power words because we encounter them every day. Power words are strategically chosen to maximize the impact of communication by making a message more likely to resonate and drive action within the target audience.
As we in the pharma industry reside in a world of communications that is more regulated than any other industry, marketers need to be more selective and careful when choosing power words and phrases in external customer communications. It is undoubtedly worth the extra time and effort to identify the most effective power words, particularly in NPP where the messaging needs to stand on its own. Our health care customer audience, which is busy, distracted and over-worked, demands this of us.