Putting it all together

Jack Peron was the partly fictional marketing director for a totally fictional pharmaceutical brand, Rozamsta, for the treatment of insomnia. His product was the branded market leader, but there were some major perception issues. Journalists criticized it as a lifestyle drug and focused on the side-effects. The market was crowded, and prescribers didn't fully understand the product's attributes compared to competitors. Consumers still relied greatly on convenient, but less effective, over-the-counter products. And a similar generic product was quickly gaining prescription share.

As if the market wasn't complicated enough, marketing had changed. In the 'old days,' Jack could isolate certain promotional activities and, with some certainty, their impact on consumer behavior. But the proliferation of message carriers and media channels presented as much challenge as it did opportunity – these days a blogger could have a greater impact than $100 million in advertising.

Regardless, Jack was confident that an aggressive marketing campaign could protect market share. He had on his roster a specialty healthcare public relations shop, a customer relationship management company, an advertising agency that did the professional and consumer pieces, a medical education group and a managed care consultancy. His brand team was seasoned and his agencies were top-notch, but given all the moving pieces, sometimes he felt like the brand managers were managing the agencies more than the brand. He wondered if he was realizing the full potential of his marketing spend.

Evolution without revolution
Most marketers that manage multiple-stakeholder brands have run into Jack's problem. Agencies, after all, are typically created to be specific to a marketing discipline; they survive by identifying a core capability and excelling at it. It's common for agencies to come together for the purpose of a specific client engagement or a pitch, but they don't do it every day or for every client.

From the client side, true marketing alignment across separate disciplines and agencies is often constrained from a resource allocation standpoint, with real integration efforts perceived as 'administrative' costs given a low priority. Human capital also comes into play, with responsibility to show marketing synergies falling to a division or brand manager without support required to truly implement it.

The vast majority of agency integration happens only in the planning stages of marketing campaigns and then only periodically afterwards – if at all. Thus, while overall messaging and goals may be aligned, everyday synergies and opportunities to reach customers are hard to realize.

The Rozamsta path to prescription
The path to prescription of an average Rozamsta customer can serve as an example of lost opportunity.

Betty suffered from insomnia and became aware of Rozamsta after she read a magazine article in which her favorite musician mentioned he swore by it. As a result, she posted in the chat room she regularly visited to get diet tips and people responded positively about their experience with Rozamsta. During her annual physical, Betty forgot to ask her doctor about Rozamsta. However, months later her gynecologist brought up sleep habits and Betty mentioned she thought she might be a good candidate for the drug based on what she'd read online and heard in ads during The Biggest Loser. The specialist wrote the prescription for one month, since she wasn't a high-volume prescriber and hadn't been detailed on the long-term data. Betty filled the prescription and saw a significant improvement, but never made the effort to get a longer-term prescription.

Could Betty's experience have been made more productive with better agency collaboration? Research shows that if she had encountered a pop-up on the chat site linking her to the Rozamsta website to download a rebate coupon, she would have been more inclined to ask her general practitioner about her insomnia. But the CRM agency didn't learn from the PR agency handling media monitoring that a robust insomnia conversation recently started on this site, so didn't include it in the digital engagement plan.

Although Rozamsta has excellent long-term data, the professional advertising agency didn't share focus group learnings that awareness of this data is lacking in the ob/gyn community with agencies they considered 'patient-focused.' This precluded the opportunity for the PR agency to leverage professional trade media to cover an upcoming data publication and bolster the advertising and sales forces' efforts.

Jack's wake-up call
Jack thought integration seemed prohibitive in terms of cost, human capital and even mind share internally. But after two years of his marketing spend steadily increasing without an increasing return on investment, he realized he had to address the issue to remain competitive.

Jack created a call to action across his brand team and agencies, creating both shared and separate measurement goals. He established an agency incentive structure based on the ability of the agencies to demonstrate value by providing increased impact of existing budget and/or lower overall budget without change to scope of work.

The results – a case study
Jack was based on an actual case in which the client ultimately consolidated agencies within one holding group, Omnicom. Network affiliation may have facilitated organization, but linked objectives, measurement and incentives were key to Jack's results in integrating Rozamsta marketing.

Year one:

• Better marketing communications measured by elimination of duplicated work, quality control across disciplines and time saved by knowledge transfer
• Five percent decrease in marketing spend with no decrease in the scope of work.

Year two:

• Increased impact due to the implementation of standard processes across disciplines, use of technology to facilitate workflow and communications, and removal of steps from existing processes
• Approximately 10 percent reduction in spend with no change to scope of work.

Year three and beyond:

• Additional efficiencies realized due to the ROI model put in place across all communication disciplines to optimize channels used to communicate with customers
• The client has enjoyed 15-20 percent savings over the period before agency consolidation. 

The author
Melyssa Weible is Managing Director at RX Mosaic Health and can be contacted at MWeible@rxmosaic.com