Developing an Emotionally Intelligent Approach to Positioning Your Product

By Charlene Prounis, Managing Partner, FlashPoint Medica

One of the most challenging paradoxes that pharmaceutical brand managers confront in their professional lives is the need to take reams of information and distill it into marketing messages that are clear, concise, compelling, and true. Clinical data about efficacy, safety, tolerability, as well as individual case studies and competitive analyses must all be taken into consideration by the marketing team during the positioning process. But beyond all of this data, in order to come up with a positioning strategy that is both relevant and differentiating, you need solid and innovative market research that can help your marketing team gain emotional insight into your brand.

The market research process has evolved dramatically within the last 15 years. Prior to the widespread acceptance of various types of qualitative research, such as personification technique and ethnographic behavioral analysis, marketers relied mainly on quantitative research and feedback from straightforward multiple-choice types of questions. For example: Would you rather treat your patients’ osteoporosis with brand A, B, or C? If the physician responded that he preferred brand C, the market researcher might have asked, “Why?” And the physician might respond that he preferred brand C because it’s easier to take than brands A and B. Certainly these types of answers are very informative and can help a brand team understand their product’s strengths and weaknesses as they develop their marketing campaign. However, the cacophony of voices in the marketplace trying to gain share grows louder each day. Surviving in a competitive marketplace is difficult, and the only way to stand out is to truly understand what drives the emotional connection to a particular brand.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

When psychologists John Mayer and Peter Salovey first introduced the term “emotional intelligence” to the academic community in 1990, they were widely criticized for daring to link emotions and intelligence together. Detractors argued that people with happy dispositions who get along well with others are not necessarily intelligent. But as Salovey and Mayer pointed out, emotional intelligence is much more complex than simply feeling good or smiling a lot. Emotional intelligence is a type of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and other people’s emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use the information to guide one’s thinking and actions.1 By 1995, when an article about emotional intelligence appeared in Time magazine, it had become an important buzzword and was already widely accepted in academia and in the corporate world as well.

The pharmaceutical industry has long understood that patients often take medications for emotional reasons. Even if they do not understand all of the clinical data discussed in a broadcast or journal advertisement, they can connect to the notion of being more independent, being able to move without pain, or being calm enough to leave the house. Physicians, for their part, almost always take clinical data into consideration, but like patients, they also tend to develop emotional connections to individual brands, and these emotional connections can influence their prescribing habits.

The Art and the Science of Market Research

Market research is one area that allows for unbridled creativity and almost infinite variety. You can vary your research methods, the balance of quantitative versus qualitative research, and the logistics—where, when, and how the interviews are conducted. Although logistically, it’s important to gather a sufficient cross-section of doctors to interview--- ideally around 30 from three different metropolitan areas. Otherwise, the options are endless. Usually, various methods and formats are combined as you move from one stage of the research process to the next. For example, initially you may want to find out how physicians treat a specific condition without focusing on a specific brand. This type of work can easily be done on-line or by phone. Then as you gather more information and start to test your positioning strategies, you can focus on doing more one-on-one research or gathering groups of physicians for in-person discussions.

One of the most evocative types of market research used to gain emotional insight into various products is personification, a technique in which a product is discussed as if it were a person. When researchers use this technique, they ask doctors to consider a product’s personality, its personal history, its likes and dislikes, and its habits and quirks. Some questions that a researcher might ask a respondent are: “What is Product A’s marital status? What is Product A’s favorite color…favorite food…pet peeve? What type of car does Product A drive?

Physicians tend to enjoy the personification technique, and they are ideally suited to participate in this type of research, because they have experience and insight from treating patients with a broad range of therapeutic agents. Marketing teams like personification, because it gives them access to physicians’ innermost thoughts about various drugs. Depending on the physicians’ responses, certain perceptions are revealed. By relying on market knowledge, scientific insight, and intuition, researchers can then piece together the various responses to determine how a drug is perceived versus its competitors. Is it sophisticated, elegant, well-designed, poorly designed…? Later on, you can make the leap from figuring out how products are perceived and the emotions surrounding these perceptions to actually translating all of this information into positioning strategies. Then you start to discover where your brand fits into the competitive landscape. Is your product going to be positioned as a workhorse agent that can do all of the heavy lifting, or as a slightly more sophisticated agent that addresses very subtle clinical needs, or a state-of-the-art, one-of-a-kind drug that delivers some completely brand new benefits to patients? Market research can help you answer these types of questions.

Who Should Be Asking the Questions?

Watching a market researcher in action, it immediately becomes apparent whether that person has the emotional intelligence to get the very best responses from participants. Sometimes people who are qualified in every way by virtue of education and years of experience are not able to evoke the best responses, because they lack emotional intelligence. A savvy, emotionally intelligent market researcher will look for clues---changes in body language, a subtle upward shifting of the eyebrows, changes in vocal inflection, laughter that signals discomfort, or someone averting their eyes or looking downward. Those clues can help a researcher ask follow-up questions that lead to a better understanding of how the drug is perceived. If Dr. Brown rolls his eyes when a list of attributes about Drug X is discussed during a physicians’ market research session, a tuned-in market researcher will ask, “Dr. Brown does this list of attributes for Drug X seem unrealistic to you?” Dr. Brown may respond that he thinks describing Drug X as having immediate onset-of-action is somewhat misleading, because based on his experience Drug X takes 7 to 10 minutes to work.

While certain types of quantitative research may simply hinge on simple yes/no answers from a pre-specified number of respondents, qualitative research should be open-ended. During market research sessions, if a respondent answers a question and a long period of silence ensues before the interviewer follows up or responds, this is a sure giveaway that the person should not be running market research sessions. Every single detail and response should be considered important and must be recorded. No response is too trivial.

Personification is only one type of qualitative research that can be used to gain emotional insights into a brand. Another useful type of qualitative research uses art and imagery to uncover perceptions of a given product. Market researchers give physicians magazines or art books and ask them to find an image that reminds them of Product X. This type of market research requires the ability to not only ask why a certain image is evocative of a particular drug, but to creatively probe for details. Using art as a vehicle to express certain emotional connections to specific products makes perfect sense. Based on Mayer’s and Salovey’s observations, “When individuals express a mood, they experience more than pure feeling.” Apparently feelings and thoughts are commingled so that experience and knowledge are factored into the mood.

Personification and other techniques seem easy enough to use, but not all market research firms and individual researchers are equally qualified. Market researchers, especially those who interact with physicians and patients, must have high emotional intelligence. This means that they should have the innate potential to feel, communicate, recognize, remember, learn from, manage, respond to, and understand emotions. Market research is a dynamic interactive process, and because it can become costly, opportunities to talk to qualified physicians and patients should be maximized.

Why It Matters

Once again, it all comes down to communication. Effective market research depends entirely on finely honed communication skills. This includes the ability to ask meaningful questions, manage pacing, and engage in dialogue with market research respondents in a way that encourages them to be forthcoming and responsive. Finally, after the research is complete, members of the marketing team must have the ability to interpret responses from market research sessions. All of this requires an understanding of the therapeutic area being discussed, as well as an understanding of the broader market, including competitor agents.

When you think about it, initiating the market research process assumes that you have already been successful---your product has been approved or is in the final stages of clinical study and is presumed to be approvable. Getting to this point is no small feat. In 2005, Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers America (PhRMA) member companies invested almost $40 billion in research and development. The drug development process is expensive and protracted: Only 1 in 5,000 preclinical compounds is ever approved, and the process of getting from the preclinical stage to final approval costs approximately $18 billion and takes, on average, 15 years.

You do not need market research to understand why the industry continues to develop new medications. There are many, many unmet needs. The thing that keeps the process going is the desire to develop drugs to undermine pernicious diseases, ease human suffering, and improve quality of life. It is a large-scale, never-ending production. By the time a product is in Phase III development, marketing efforts, including preliminary market research to determine where exactly this promising new agent fits in, are well underway. The sum total of these efforts is a lot of money, a lot of time, and a lot of physical and emotional energy. But, when it’s all said and done, having a drug that achieves blockbuster status and upgrades the standard of care another notch make all of these efforts worthwhile.