Ah, wouldn’t it be lovely to work on a brand that had a nice, simple relationship with its customers? One where there could be a nice, simple compelling message to a single, unified target audience consisting of people who both bought and consumed your product?
Well, perhaps. But I suspect, if you work in healthcare marketing, that scenario doesn’t come along that often – and maybe we’d be a tad bored if it did.
Here at Foundry Healthcare, I can’t think of a single project we’ve worked on where we haven’t had to plan our communications around the competing needs of several distinct and different audience segments – purchasing, HCPs, patients, carers, specialists… I’m sure you too are familiar with the challenge.
And it does represent a real challenge when it comes to audience insight research, for who should you talk to? And given that few of us enjoy unlimited budgets, where do you draw the line?
Of course, we have to be pragmatic – and often, that means we focus in on our ‘core’ audience with our research dollars, using the insights we gain here, together with existing knowledge and experience to infer our direction when it comes to our ‘secondary’ audiences.
It’s an eminently sensible approach. However, while any decent researcher will be mindful of making assumptions about what person A might actually be thinking, based on what person B tells you about person A, there are still some insidious traps that anyone can be prey to when it comes to untangling issues of audience perspective.
It’s an issue that was brought into sharp relief for me in a recent project where one of our objectives was to understand the dynamics of the different teams working together across acute and community; and how they interacted on the usage of, and education around, a product.
Being able to talk to the different specialisms in a coherent treatment protocol highlighted just how inaccurate individuals are when reporting the behaviours and attitudes of colleagues from different disciplines – they were all miles out.
It was a similar story, recently, when I talked to both the customers and the salesforce of another healthcare brand – the picture from the salesforce had some major discrepancies from the actuality of the customer experience.
Of course, this shouldn’t be surprising. People will always respond in a way which matches their own internal perspective – whether that’s due to a need to protect their own status as a specialist and thus deny that anyone else has anything like the same understanding; or because their sales performance is wrapped up in a particular belief about the market.
So what can we do to get to a reasonable facsimile of ‘the truth’?
Well, thankfully, it doesn’t mean that every time we embark on a research project, we have to talk to every last person.
But it does mean that we need to understand the team dynamics behind the decision-making process, and question the veracity of respondents’ assertions on what others think. As always, it’s about not simply buying what’s said directly, but also seeking to understand the motivation and rationale behind the responses to our questions. And to acknowledging that, however much you learn from talking to one audience segment, you may have to proceed with some incomplete knowledge of another.
And admitting we don’t have all the answers is infinitely preferable to assuming that we do, just because we’ve done some research.
