Should we play the race card in Canadian pharma marketing?

Upon hearing the word race, I am sure you recoiled a little.?We were all taught to be sensitive to other ethnic groups.?The word race was usually mentioned in negative contexts.?I am not going to dive into a full-blown debate about racism in Canada and how to address that in pharma marketing, that is a rather deep ethical discussion.?I do want to talk about the missed opportunity to more effectively market pharma products in Canada given the multi-racial/multi-cultural nature of this country.?

There is a trend in the marketing of pharma products to activate the patient population to drive a choice between similar products.?Especially in a competitive category filled with similar products with similar efficacy. We, as marketers hope that patients would resonate with the messages we deliver.?Whether it is to stay compliant with their treatment, or discuss circumstances with their HCPs to upgrade to a next-gen treatment, or coupling their treatment with necessary life-style changes so they achieve best possible therapeutic outcomes.?We spend days, weeks, months agonizing over words, tones, and sentence structures to ensure they are perfected to deliver and to influence. We include stock photos of people of ethnic groups to make sure they can all see themselves being on the particular treatment for a long time. But what if a proportion of your patient population simply doesn’t understand the language??

Based on the 2016 Stats Canada Census results, a total of 648,970 persons in the country speak neither official languages. This number represents people who actually don’t understand and/or speak any English and French.?There’s the other much larger population who understands basic English and/or French but may not be fully literate in either languages.?

Take my cousin for an example, she came to Canada quite a long time ago; she’s fluent in daily English conversations; she goes about her life like any other Canadians would, having a job, taking the public transit, going grocery shopping etc. However, when she goes to a doctor, she makes sure to go to one that speaks Hindi.?Because for her, it is very difficult to describe or understand the nuance between “tingling pain”, “shooting pain” or?“numbing pain” in English.?She has had diabetes for a few years now, and her medication has been upgraded from first line to combination therapy. Throughout her treatment journey, I am certain quite a few of the drugs she was on, there were associated patient materials or patient support programs. I am sure she understands some, but certainly not enough to “resonate” with the messages.?And she is not alone.?

Thinking through this from another perspective, have you learnt another language as a second language? Have you tried to say something or used an expression that completely made sense in your native language but that no one understands in the second language??Are there times when people use an expression in this second language that makes no sense in your first language? As a person who learnt English as a second language and then French as a third language, I can tell you from experience it happens,?A LOT.??

In the 2016 census, 7.3 million respondents said their mother-tongue was neither English nor French.?A proportion of this population was likely fluent in one of the official languages by attending the school system.?That still leaves us with a rather large portion of the population, to whom, the messages we try to deliver may have gotten lost in translation.??

By this point, you are probably thinking “yea yea, everything you said makes sense, but to develop materials for every single language Canadians speak will just be crazy expensive.”.?I completely agree!?But that thought should not stop you from running a business case on whether it’s worth it to develop materials for certain visible minorities.?If the “profit/unit * number of patient-gain if they understood your message” is much larger than the translation and production costs,?then maybe it is worth to go that extra mile.?

Another aspect of the race card is the distribution channel.?Typically, we distribute patient materials through the physician office; sometimes we mail/email to them. If we want to go even more DTC, we have a radio or TV ad.?Just when you are buying the placement for the radio/TV ad, have you thought that maybe a proportion of your target population tunes into mostly ethnic specific channels? I have been in taxis quite a lot lately for work purposes, and if your target population includes taxi drivers, then your major network radio ads are probably not reaching some of your target population.?

All that to say, as pharma marketers, there maybe an opportunity for us to further segment our patient population by ethnicity, reach them and provide support to them the way they best understand, which in turn help us achieve the goal of activating and engaging them to achieve the maximum therapeutic effect.?