Archive for the ‘Brand building’ Category
Medtech Using Social Media #4: The Power of the Question
Yes--what is your question?
A question changes everything. A question mark sets a thought on a pedestal in the street and invites comment. It says, “I don’t know the answer—do you?” When I teach, a question is one of my most powerful tools. With a question I ask for input while simultaneously implying “You’ve got something valuable to say and I want to hear it.” The best, most fruitful discussions happen when I present what I know and then invite students to contribute from their experience and thinking. Something alive often happens, something I could not plan for or even predict. Something that moves us all forward.
For marketers, the question is equally powerful. If we’re lucky, we’re in a team where we can ask questions openly rather than pretending to own all the answers. Our usual path to outward communication is to ask our questions in the (relatively) protected environs of conference rooms and among colleagues. Then we polish and hone the messages into one-way barbs to shoot out through our media channels. But what if the questions themselves were our communication points? What if we started with questions to our growing community of similarly-interested people, long before we ever started polishing messages for public consumption?
Once upon a time my team worked on promoting a new heart failure device. We identified a single main message that incorporated three strong benefits (based on market research) which became the core of our campaign. We tested our messages informally, received anecdotal feedback and pushed forward. Today, with the help of social media, that scenario might look like this: take the received market research, our questions and immediately begin dialogue. Proceed with message polishing and honing even as the community dialogue continues. At some point the internal and external dialogues blend and the end result is something beyond what we could conceive on our own. Best of all, this new something already his mind-share in a community of interested people. And if you have a sales force, you know that mindshare is a key gear for turning sales.
Next Up: What would dialogue success look like?
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Photo credit: Colt Elementary PTO & JustHost.com
Medical Device Firms using Social Media, Step #1: Have You Defined Yourself Out of Conversation Success?
Who are you talking with?
Launch plans have always been about sharpening one-way messages and sending them out through as many channels as may get noticed (and as many as you can afford). But what if your next product launch changed up the usual one-way messaging mix of brochures, ads, comparison sheets, case studies and article reprints with a few simple tools that help you get traction where it counts—in engaged discussion?
In the next few blogs I’ll offer suggestions about how regulated industries can begin to build communities using social media. One thought to start: Who are you talking with?
As a medical copywriter and communication consultant, I’ve spent years working with marketing colleagues to stay focused on target audiences. You see, we had these sharp and polished messages we wanted to shoot—and we needed to know who to shoot them at. Getting these messages ready for communication battle was tough work because each message had to zip through all the natural barriers every human erects around their will. It surprises me now that some messages actually did get through.
But there’s this new thing going on: technology plus market proactivity plus searchability are turning the tables so that the person with the moneybag to spend on communication no longer owns the medium. Of course, it was mere mirage that such a person actually did own it—since the brand conversation has always been in the hands of customers.
One first penetrating question as you develop launch plans: Who are we talking with? It is right and proper to continue to develop and hone benefit messages for new products. New devices must be born with clear benefit statements and positioning otherwise they never even get seen in the market. But the exercise of teams crafting marketing messages usually results in one-way messages toward target audiences.
“Who am I talking with?” is a different question than “Who are you aiming at?” Aim is one-way focused, so the message gets there. Or not. Talking is a two-way conversation. But conversation is not a delivery vehicle for one-way messages. Talking to a person who delivers only one-way messages is like listening to a monologue: at best it is only mildly interesting. Usually we do our best to politely hang on. But conversation is a give and take where both parties remain interested, both parties have a stake in continuing, both parties get something from the conversation.
Going beyond the question of aim to the question of conversation brings another level of discussion to your marketing meetings. Questions like, what would a genuine conversation look like? And who would we be talking with? Physician? Clinicians? Patients. Possibly yes to all three. And what could a conversation accomplish? Just to ask this question is to begin to see things differently. And it is also to begin to prepare for a future where one-way messages have an even more limited power and where conversation is a vital element of any launch.
So: are you conversing with interested partners or are you delivering a monologue alone in the middle of the room?
Next-up: Building Community among Frenemies
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Steal Our Ideas: Ok.
I’m designing a college writing course for aspiring copywriters. This site looks like a promising resource.
Read about “Building a Generous Brand”
Check out John King’s article about Building a Generous Brand in Ad Age. This is a positive step, when an agency as forward-thinking as Fallon starts considering how brands can “give back.” This is also an excellent way of thinking about the dialogue that consumers really want to have—versus the dialogue marketers wish consumers wanted to have. Is this more evidence that the days of one-way messaging are going away? The danger is that the generous brand becomes just another manipulative gimmick. But in this new dialogical age, such chicanery will be found out, posted and soundly dressed down.
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To Fear What You Might Hear
Lars Bastholm, recently co-chief creative officer at ad agency AKQA moved to oversee digital creative for Ogilvy North America. In a Q&A posted on AdAge, he talked about wanting a larger platform for messaging:
“You’ve heard me pontificate about what I call social storytelling, where you have a much more open-ended dialogue with consumers. It’s not about pushing a message but inviting people in and it requires you monitor the conversation more thoroughly and to be more responsive.”
There will always be one-way message development. Assembling these messages remains valuable to an organization and serves to hone communication. The mistake is to think tomorrow’s audiences will simply absorb those one-way messages. Tomorrow’s effective message-makers will include points of contact that invite the target audience into conversation.
After sending out messages through a growing number of channels, “monitoring the conversation more thoroughly and being more responsive” is the next movement of corporate conversations. But monitoring and responding are movements many of us are not prepared for, or at least inadequately prepared for. Those activities require a kind of deep listening followed by creative synthesis to piece together anecdotes into a sensible patchwork that accurately portrays our brand’s successes and flaws. It’s a whole-brain activity.
It’s much easier to deliver a monologue than it is to remain engaged in conversation—it’s also far less satisfying for all participants. Maybe we hang back from dialogue because we fear what we might hear.
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A Telephone Is Not A Commitment To Communicate
The other day a friend painted a picture of marketing and sales at his company: it looks like a telephone. His firm had not spent on outward-facing communications for a couple years. Instead, they picked up the phone and called people. This company targets a very tight niche of companies needing specialized fabrication services.
We talked about the state of their communication, and how brochures and the usual assortment of tools seemed like a waste of money—given that his industry has very few players and most are well-known to each other. I wondered aloud whether he could position his employees as expert problem solvers—which exactly is what they are—as walking, talking brochures. Is it possible that the very thing they do on the telephone could have a broader reach and work for them all the time? This is the promise of entering into dialogue.
But before moving that direction, set aside tactics for a moment. Before freeing employees to be public experts, any company—and especially my friend’s company—must make an extraordinary commitment. They must commit to communicate. If my friend’s company uses today’s conversational tools like he previously used advertising or brochures—tossing one-way benefit messages out in the marketplace every once in a while—he will fail. Instead, he and his company need to cultivate an attitude of sharing what they know in a way that draws out interest and conversation. And that is an on-going commitment. That’s how experts become experts.
Interestingly, putting experts into conversation is also a route to increased employee satisfaction. Good employees love to use their expertise to help real people solve real problems.
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Our Strange World: Bankers Give Money Back
Yesterday’s StarTribune included an article about TCF returning TARP funding (“TCF rejects rescue money,” 3/3/2009, p. D1). Chris Serres quoted TCF chief executive Bill Cooper as saying it was a no-win situation. If they don’t accept TARP money, people would think they couldn’t get it and they were in trouble. If they did receive TARP money, Cooper said, “you’re stigmatized as evil people stealing from taxpayers.” An article in today’s StarTribune reports on two more banks receiving TARP funding.
Turns out TCF didn’t need it and would write a check for the $361.2 million.
Is it possible we’ve turned some corner in this country where the big money-makers are starting to worry about their appearance to the working folks? TCF has always seemed like a bank for anybody—perhaps the PR department thought they could win points with their target audience by returning money they didn’t need. Did they feel just stigmatized—or maybe even a bit guilty? Or did they just tire of the public peeking into their expensive meetings. Whatever the motive, giving money back seems like a positive sign. Kudos to TCF and Bill Cooper.
It’s a tribute to the power of opinion that $360 million (and change) is being returned by a bank that didn’t need it in the first place. This act seems to elevate the actions that could result from public knowledge: people might bank elsewhere. And dialogue among the working folk could begin an exodus from a stigmatized TCF.
It could happen.
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Let’s Start with “Manipulation-Free Zones”
My friend is a corporate philosopher who lives out his work life in a tall glass tower thinking about, among other things, how to adapt his corporate culture to create more honest dialogue. My primary concern with dialogue in this blog has been how to engage customers honestly. But yesterday’s conversation with this friend I realized that honest dialogue (and if not honest, is it really dialogue?) requires truth-telling. And truth-telling starts inside corporations, even inside individuals. As Mrs. Kirkistan put it, “It seems sort of obvious, doesn’t it, that people should tell the truth?”
Indeed.
But what is obvious to us on a personal level gets twisted in a corporate setting, and processed and stuffed into an animal bladder and offered as a truth-sausage at the other end. Such manipulations are standard procedure for any organization to present their product or service in the best light. That’s where the one-way messages have always come from, the ones that fall flat with potential clients because they stink of the processing plant and are exactly similar to all the other one-way message that land on their mental doorstep hundreds of times each day. My friend suggested I read the Cluetrain Manifesto, which I’ve ordered. The cluetrain website offers to dig much deeper into the notion of conversation between companies and customers, and also promises that customers will—and are already—finding the relevant information they need to make a decision. And they are finding it independently of (and likely contrary to) the one-way messages thrown at them. The website is dated at 1999, so these are not new thoughts, but seem to be gathering force in 2009.
Which brings me to another conversation with an FDA-regulated firm wanting to engage in dialogue but knowing the limits of what their regulators and lawyers would allow to be said in the corporate space. As we kicked around the idea of blogging and just how much truth-telling (in the raw, personal form the blogosphere rewards) could really happen, we stumbled on the peer-review model and wondered if more truth-telling must necessarily happen outside the corporate site, where dialogue could be engaged with experts offering unfiltered opinions. Naturally, such a web site must offer hearty benefits to any dialoguer. I hereby declare these site “Manipulation-Free Zones,” though I recognize that manipulation is part of the human condition. It is the rare human who does not present himself/herself and his/her interests in the best light. But can we aim high?
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Write On Through To The Other Side
Two recent conversations with marketing friends illustrate a common issue I face when writing copy for a communication tool. The financial marketer needed to reach through the independent financial counselor to the individual investor. The medical device marketer needed to reach through the rep organization to a new-ish target audience—an audience the reps were not so eager to talk with. Both marketers understood that the communication tool we were preparing must help establish a relationship between the counselor/rep and the final audience.
In both cases we worked through a set of messages, set priorities and discussed the tone. The copy and entire piece must engage the first audience (I’ll call them the “gate” audience), but in a slightly different way than it must engage the final audience. The gate audience must quickly understand the primary benefit to the final audience and then be prepared to verbally go over the communication piece with the final audience, pointing out benefits and finally leaving the piece with them. The gate audience must also quickly feel very comfortable with the messages, tone and presentation—so much so that they can speak intelligently and with passion. After all, that is what these folks do for a living.
The final audience may (or may not) take the piece and read it. More likely they will engage in a conversation with the communication tool as something of a prop, and then take their cues from the relationship they already have with the presenter. That is, after all, how we understand and take action on lots of things in this life. Most everything is about relationships.
Effective copy must make the gate audience comfortable, then impassioned, then empowered. That same copy must duplicate the passion for the final audience and go on to provide detail as necessary. And that means communication tools like your common brochure are really instruments for relationship-building.
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Will a marketer really dialogue—or always just sell?
My medical marketing friend asked about a project where we are stimulating dialogue between a group of research/practicing cardiologists and a growing referral base of primary care physicians. The dialogue is designed to help the cardiology group retain mind-share with busy primary care physicians. This dialogue is helped by the fact that many in the cardiology group are recognized as national thought-leaders and regularly publish their findings in top-tier medical journals. It also helps that the dialogue is based around their expert reviews of current cardiology research and practices. These two facts help the dialogue take place and will make it believable.
But say you are marketing a product instead of a group of experts. Say your point for stimulating a dialogue is to learn what you can about practice patterns, referral patterns, purchasing patterns and the like. What steps can you take to ensure dialogue really happens, versus more of the usual one-way selling messages deposited largely unread in the target audience’s laptop?
1. Don’t think of dialogue marketing as a drive-by tactic. No shooting from the low rider as you reach for the next marketing tactic. Dialogue marketing will truly be about, well, dialogue, which is honest give and take. Commit to continuing the conversation, which is the same as committing to relationship building with your dialogue partners. The bigger rewards are longer-term, just as they are in any relationship.
2. Be honest. Physicians know you are selling something. In fact, every reader of any words today knows the writer is selling something, if only some subjective way of looking at the world. And we’re largely OK with that—until the writer claims objectivity. That’s when the hackles rise and the mouse clicks on the X. Be persuasive (Melcrum has good comments on persuasive language here), but not over the top—especially with the selling message.
3. Offer something useful. You may not be a set of top experts in cardiology, but you know your product well. And you know the context of your product. You don’t advise on interventional cardiology or cardiac surgery, but you do advise on how the product is used. Dialogue has to have a reason to exist—a reason that both parties continue to engage. Selling messages won’t provide that glue, so don’t organize a dialogue around them. You must uncover the benefit/reason that speaks into the lives of your target audience.
Marjorie Teresa R. Perez writes in the BusinessMirror about ad agency Leo Burnett increasingly finding their “purpose” in marketing as the evolve into a “HumandKind of company.” Starting with a purpose is essential for dialogue—just as it is essential for life on this planet.
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conversation is an engine 
