Brand Rants

The Kindle story offers lessons for all marketers

Kindle: an elegant union of strategy, tech and environment

A couple of weeks ago I was in Boston on my way to have lunch with a marketing strategist who's blog I read on occasion. As I was on my way out the door my business partner phoned. I told him my lunch plans and he asked if I had read the strategist's book. "I didn't know he had a book" was my reply. Three minutes later I had the book in my Kindle and was able to skim enough of it in a 20-minute cab ride to extract a few discussion points. And that's just one of the reason's I am in awe of the Kindle.

In fact, Amazon's Kindle gets my vote for the most ingenious marketing innovation of the decade (the operative word being "marketing" innovation not "technical" innovation). It is not technology for technology's sake, it is technology for marketing's sake. Rarely do customer, company and environmental benefits meet so elegantly under one marketing strategy as in this wireless reading device.

Kindle is truly a win-win-win product. A win for readers because it makes it possible to carry hundreds of books and periodicals with you and easily search them, add notes, etc. It also makes it infinitely easier to purchase a book. This is great for the consumer but an even bigger win for Amazon. With Kindle in hand, books now become an impulse purchase. And at $9.99 or less per book, the price is right. The third "win" is for the environment. Books delivered digitally thorough Kindle Whispernet require no paper or printing and no CO2 for transport. I got my Kindle2 last Christmas and it is still my favorite work tool.

Amazon is posturing Kindle to be for writing what the iPod is for music. But just as Amazon started in books and then expanded beyond, the Kindle seems poised to offer readers more than the latest John Grisham novel. The main menu includes an "Experimental" section which includes basic web surfing capabilities, MP3 player and the legally debated text-to-speech feature. I believe these beta-functions are foreshadowing the future direction of the device which I bet will include full-color touch screen, web browsing all in addition to books and periodicals via Whispernet.

One recent development is the ability to subscribe to blogs, including Brand Rants, for $0.99 a month. Why pay for something that's free online? I don't know, but I suppose the answer has something to do with the convenience (and coolness) of having it effortlessly delivered to your Kindle. Convinced? Sign up here.

I think we all have a lot to learn form Jeff Bezos when it comes to using technology to enhance our marketing. I would advise any marketer to study the Kindle case as an example of how a smart marketing strategy can best put technology to work. We've only seen the first few chapters of the Kindle story, so far its a real page-turner.

See Also:
Amazon Puts Any Blog on the Kindle, for a Price

Will Digital Books Turn Paper Books to Kindle-ing?

This post has been search-optimized with condron.us

Pharma, heal thyself

I received the following questions from a student at the University of Oregon. She is looking into the history of pharmaceutical marketing and the tactics they use to reach their customers. Thanks to Emilee for the questions. My history with pharma only dates back to 1993 and is based solely my first-hand observations working with them. I hope these answers help.

Have the drug companies taken over the Internet yet?  
Not at all. They are cautiously dipping their toes in the water. Pharma companies are risk-aversive when it comes to marketing in  general. They need to be. Their marketing activities are highly regulated by government bodies like the FDA in the US. Their collective reticence also stems from the fact that pharma has no real marketing tradition. Their traditional approach is based on a door-to-door B-to-B sales model. In recent years I have noticed some real pockets of marketing excellence inside big pharma, however, on average most pharma companies still have stronger sales forces than marketing departments. 

What have they done online so far?
Their list of achievements with regard to social media and Web 2.0 is meager but they are eager to catch up and are making progress. Most of the highlights can be found in this AdAge article: Big Pharma Finally Taking Big Steps to Reach Patients With Digital Media (note: AdAge moves articles to their members only area after about a week). Also check of the Dose of Digital Pharma Social Media Wiki. Companies like GSK and J&J seem to be leading the way and creating precedent for others to follow. The fact that pharma companies around the world seem to be cutting back the number sales reps they employ can only place more focus on the web.

What are you doing for them?
My company provides both consulting and creative services to pharma. We have helped several pharma and medical companies transition from sales-oriented to market-oriented organizations (admittedly with varying degrees of success). That means helping them understand what brands are, how they are developed and how they can profit from them. It also means helping them transition their operational routines from a sales-only mentality to a more market-oriented mind set.

We are helping several pharma and medical companies create a social media presence in Europe, the Americas and beyond. This usually involves developing a web-based marketing strategy and tactical plan and then creating web assets for them. We aim to help companies not only optimize their web sites but to optimize their presence across the web as a whole. We call this web presence optimization or WebPOP™ for short.

Right now we are also conducting a survey of social media activity among pharma companies and certain indications across Europe. We find that what little activity exists in Europe is usually being instigated by pharma employees and patients acting on their own. European regulations concerning pharma marketing are far more restrictive than the FDA’s regulations in the States.

Since we also work in traditional media we encourage our pharma clients to develop integrated campaigns. Next week I’ll be posting a newsletter which features a case study for an OTC product we promoted for GSK that leveraged both social and traditional media to produce a great outcome. 

And what is the future looking like for pharmaceutical marketing?  
Bright, particularly in contrast to it's lackluster past. As I said pharma has been poor at marketing communication for decades. They took for granted that if they produced a pill they could push it out into the market through their sales force. 

As a result of their dependence on sales tactics, their marketing muscles never developed. It has made more sense for them to walk away from marketing challenges than to compete. For instance, when the patent on a drug runs out historically they abandon the product and let the “generics” take their business. Unless they have a guaranteed monopoly with inflated margins - they won’t play. Its a wasteful approach to business but it has worked for them. In recent years pharma has started to understand the power of brands. For example I don’t think Pfizer will walk away from Viagra when the patent expires. 

 Since its inception, big pharma has made a lot of money using their door-to-door salesman model to push their drugs into the market. Historically, they have done this without employing the strategic marketing or brand development tactics one would typically employ to generate pull from professionals or good will from the public. While this has done wonders for their balance sheet it has has the opposite effect on public sentiment. Today, the pharma industry is mistrusted by most and despised by many. It ranks near oil and tobacco with regard to consumer trust. And they can only blame themselves.

I never got the feeling that pharma execs worried much about consumer sentiment. That isn’t to say they were up to no good or had anything to hide. To the contrary, they do a lot of good. I've found our pharma clients to be among the most ethical professionals I have worked with. But cultivating public sentiment hasn't been a priority. The only sentiments they focused on were those of investors and financial analysts. Several months ago we did a survey of big pharma web sites. Of the top ten pharma companies, nine (J&J was the exception) featured their stock market performance as the main feature of their landing page. What does this say to patients? ““Love to help you ... but first let’s talk about me and how much money I make”.  Thankfully, I believe that too is changing - albeit slowly.

We see a trend for pharma to become better at marketing and brand development. A central part of that will be developing a mastery of web marketing and social media.  My personal goal is to encourage more pharma companies to develop sustainable brands based on transparency, facilitation and participation (see my post Ethics, honesty and advertising ). Deep down inside most pharma companies are good and have nothing to hide, they just have to realize that they can profit from letting people see that.

Brand Rants blog now available on Kindle

Kindle now offers its users the opportunity to subscribe to their favorite blogs via their Kindle. New posts are automatically delivered to the hand-held device for a subscription fee of $0.99 per month. Learn more here.

Why pharma needs social media

The following is a reply posted in Ad Age in response to the article Big Pharma Finally Taking Big Steps to Reach Patients With Digital Media

I've always found it ironic that an industry that saves millions of lives each year is among the most mistrusted and despised by the public. But the pharma industry has only itself to blame.

In the past silence was the preferred strategy for pharma. It generated massive amounts of resentment towards the pharma industry, but heck, they still sold their pills. Today pharma is realizing that there is also profit in having strong brands (corporate and product) and silence is no longer a viable strategy. One reason is because if they do not tell their story there is a resentful public who is more than willing to tell it for them.

Most pharma companies do a lot of good and would benefit from more transparency. As jbernoff points out fear factor is one of the biggest obstacles pharma is dealing with. A tradition of silence, and in many cases corporate arrogance, is hard to break. I agree with Loreen Babcock. Pharma needs social media and those companies who embrace it will benefit as will their shareholders.

Back to Basics

OPENING REMARKS TO THE TAAN 2009 GLOBAL SUMMIT IN COPENHAGEN

I’d like to thank you all for being here for the 2009 TAAN Global summit. I know most of you traveled great distances to join us here in Copenhagen.  You represent agencies and perspectives from five continents, so I’m sure the exchange over the next three days will be fruitful.  

We began planing the program for this meeting last June at the Cannes Lions.  Many of the talks at last year’s ad festival focused on all the changes happening around Web 2.0 and social media. Chuck Porter (Crispin Porter + Bogusky) brilliantly summed up 7 days of lectures in one sentence "Everything is changing and you are so screwed." And this was before the global financial crisis kicked in.

Cannes got us thinking. Is everything really changing? And are we really screwed? 

To the first point, yes, things are changing. The way ad agencies are organized, the skill sets required to service clients, the way we are paid, the media landscape, the number of channels we have to deliver our message, the technology surrounding those channels, the competitors we face and the demands placed upon us by the economy, employees and our clients - all these things are certainly in a state of flux.

No doubt, these issues are important and need to be resolved. But in developing a theme for this meeting we wondered if all this financial crisis and change might not be distracting us from our core business as ad agencies — the reason many of us got involved in advertising and marketing in the first place.

Do you believe new revenue models and web 2.0 alone will save our agencies? Moreover will these factors build the next great ad agency? We don’t think so. In that sense, maybe we are screwed.

At the center of this whirlwind of change we see two constants. They are the core competencies around which all great agencies are built:

• The ability to discover a consumer insight
• The ability to tell a compelling story around it

These are the basics and without them all the Twitter followers, Facebook friends and Google juice in cyberspace won’t be enough to help your agency or the brands you represent.

So we decided that this still point, the basic skills of our craft, would be an apt theme for this meeting. I propose that over the next three days we collectively get back to basics and address these 3 questions:

• How can the basics create a competitive advantage for your agency?
• How can you use the basics in combination with new media, new agency models and new technology to do it?
• How can we as a network use all of the above to increase TAAN’s profile?

As part of that we have instigated the first ever TAAN creative awards called the Titan Awards. We first proposed this four years ago and were met with a lukewarm response. Given that and the short notice we figured we would get about 50 entrees.  We got 420.  And if you look around the room at the short-listed entrees, I think you will be pleasantly surprised at the quality of work your network is producing. So thanks to everyone who participated.  We’ll be having our first ever Titan Award Gala on Saturday evening. And if you haven’t been there yet, I’d encourage you to visit the Titan Award web site. You can link off the www.taan.org site.

So again, on behalf of everyone at The Duffy Agency, thanks for being here and for helping the group get get back to basics over the next three days and beyond.

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