Case study: branding Cialis

NGP. How did you go about building a brand for Cialis? What were the first steps in the process?

SH. I believe brand building is a fairly consistent process that begins with gaining insights from your customers, physicians and patients. The first step is determining what their unmet needs and wants are. Then you have to match that up with what your brand brings and it is really the intersection of those two things that allows you to craft your marketing messages. The key here is that you have to listen to your customers. Make sure that what they say they need to hear is actually communicated. When you do that it becomes very clear which patients benefit most from your products.

NGP. What were the biggest challenges?

SH. With all brands the biggest challenge is once you have determined your marketing message, remain disciplined and don’t just change it based on a whim. The one thing that was a little bit different with Cialis is really the stigma that is associated with erectile dysfunction (ED). It is a huge barrier for patients to even seek information about the condition. Patients are concerned about the condition, their relationship and the stigma which makes it that much harder for patients to get the treatment that can actually benefit them.

NGP. How important was this initial process?

SH. It was really the foundation of the brand. Understanding your customer and developing a message that matches up with what the brand brings – its benefits and attributes – positions the product in the marketplace. The message says that for this patient there are certain things we provide, and if we position the product according to the message, we build its place in the market.

NGP. How did you come up with the name Cialis? What does it mean?

SH. It is not so much what the name means but more importantly what it represents. Let me walk you through how we traditionally do this. It goes back to the patients. We actually sit down with the patients, do market research and several things come up a lot. One is the focus on our customers – the patients and physicians – and then matching up their needs with what our brand brings. So we do our conceptual research and say here is a group of people with different conditions. We ask men with ED to take a look at a potential product profile, which is what we think the product will be prior to approval. Then we ask them to bring their ideas and concepts to the table and from this approach we get a set of potential names. We then conduct a very vigorous patent and trademark check to make sure that we are not breaking any of those. The next critical step is to make sure that our name is different from other products on the market to ensure that we don’t have medical errors. After we have placed it through all those filters and have a set of viable names, we then go back out and talk to customers and do additional market research to we find which name resonates best with customers. We then, of course, get FDA approval.

NGP. It was reported that you had a $100 million advertising budget. How have you used this? Do you think you needed such a big budget?

SH. We never discussed the specific amount that we were spending on any of our marketing channels. We needed to get some key insights into patients with the condition in order to allow us to brand and market the product correctly and we have gotten these by talking to literally thousands of patients via market research.

NGP. Eli Lilly use the strap line “36 hours.” Why did you decide on this as a way to brand your product? How successful do you think it has been?

SH. Our patients want flexibility. They want flexibility to choose when the moment is right for them and Cialis is proven to work up to 36 hours and as fast as 30 minutes in some men. I think it has been successful and in 2006 worldwide sales increased 30 percent, up to $971 million. In some countries, such as France, Cialis has been the market leader for over a year. I absolutely think the 36-hour effectiveness has been a benefit that lead to the success of Cialis.

NGP. What are the ideas behind the website? What impression do you hope it gives?

SH. This goes back to some of earlier discussions around the stigma of ED. I think the website plays a very, very valuable role in helping to educate about ED and treatment options. The site offers patients tips about how to talk to their doctors and most importantly, patients can do this in the privacy of their own home. This allows them to get information that then will hopefully lead to good discussions with their family care provider.

NGP. You’ve advertised Cialis at the Superbowl, what message is this sending out?

SH. I’m really proud of what we’ve done in our SuperBowl advertising, the consistency of the ad. It’s about mature couples, it’s about relationships and it’s all based on the couple. I think that we have recognized that ED is a sensitive subject and I think one of the keys to dealing with this is to be consistent. I think that the other thing that is important is that more and more research is being done to further explore the link between ED and other serious medical conditions, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure. The Super Bowl was a perfect fit for us as much of the audience was men over 40, and 40 percent of men over 40 have ED. At the end of the day I think it was the right thing to do at the right place.

NGP. In 2005 Lilly launched a campaign called the Promise Program. You are still offering this program in 2007. Why do you think this marketing campaign has been so successful?

SH. The way the Cialis Promise works is that a patient first visits their family physician, gets diagnosed with ED and is given a prescription. The patient then goes to Cialis.com and downloads the voucher for three free tablets of Cialis. After they have used those three free tablets they have a choice to make. They can either stay on Cialis and get another three tablets or, alternatively, Eli Lilly will pay for three of our competitors tablets. The really great thing is that 90 percent of the men choose Cialis.

The program motivates men to see their physician. A lot of the problems that we have with men in their 40’s to 60’s is that they don’t see their physician as much as they need to. What this type of program does it motivate them to go and see their physician and have a discussion about this very sensitive subject and through that discussion they find out that there are solutions. That is why this program is so successful.

NGP. How successful do you think the branding of Cialis has been? What have you got in mind for the future regarding Cialis?

SH. Well I’m a little biased! I started talking about the patients and I think it comes back to that. What I am proudest of is that over 10 million men have been on Cialis and benefited from it. Yes we grew 30 percent in sales last year globally but really what our company is about is about bringing innovation, about bringing answers that matter to patients and physicians and that is incredibly meaningful to me.

“With all brands the biggest challenge is once you have determined your marketing message, remain disciplined and don’t just change it based on a whim.”