My position on position

Here's soem thinking that really brings home what appears to be a major stumbling block for the development of communications strategy. The big 'P'.

I have met senior executives in this industry who are hamstrung without a clear (and usually formuleic-formatted) description of a 'positioning statement'. It usually derives from possibly the most painful all-day sleeves up meeting, at which the product is interrogated until every ounce of it's functional capabilities are confessed. These are then ranked, and cross-referenced against benefit statements, which are then further tortured until the product, now weak and losing consciousness (along with half the gathered crowd), allows the collected crowd to derive 'emotional value' from the tirade of benefit revelations. Maslov is frequently referenced in the process, as the product attempt to climb the heirarchic ladder to self-enlightenment.

Then, the parts of this remarkable process are shoehorned into a proposition statement that tells every one that to whom it may concern (key customers) the whatever it is is the frame of reference yadda yadda yadda. From that moment, the destiny of the product (in terms of communications strategy and even brand development) is set.

I have a bit of a problem with this.

Over the years I have worked alongside some of the world’s leaders in positioning strategy and practice, including the eponymous Trout & Reis. Compared to the sophisticated practices of today, they actually made it all very simple. My conclusion from these years of experience – there is only one rule of positioning – that your product (or service) must earn it.

No other rules, just logical, consistent approaches. You cannot pursue development of a healthcare brand without being able to articulate a position, or value proposition. The decision you make on a healthcare product‘s position is anything but trivial. There’s too much at stake: careers, budgets, political and economic clout – all can be built
or broken based on that decision.

In healthcare the position you take is not just a template for developing a communications strategy & plan, it is a challenge you take to the marketplace. In this world, you can be sure that the marketplace is going to find out whether you deserve to hold the position you’re after. And after the marketplace has conducted its interrogation of who or what you think you are, how you compare with competitors, what customers think, what newsgroups and reviewers and analysts say, one of two things is going to happen:

1. The marketplace will find that you are who you position yourself to be. Good news: you’ve earned your space. And hearts and minds of customers can be collected and retained as your brand develops and grows your business.
2. The marketplace finds you’re not. That’s bad news.
   Position ii) is the most heavily populated position of all in the healthcare marketplace: the ‘Full of Hot Air’ position. In a more colourful vernacular you may find your position is full of something else.

Monumental Brand Insight:
The Customer owns the Brand!

When you position yourself, you are saying to your marketplace, “We promise that the more you get to know us, the more you’ll learn that we’re this kind of product- we deserve this position.” If you’re right, the marketplace will create that position. Because the marketplace is the place that allows you to occupy it. Not the smart team of people who sat in workshops debating rafts of benefit and value statements that fit neatly into this years’ bestformat for positioning development.

Brands are built on the meaningful delivery of experience and delivery
on expectation.

To create either in a way that stands out, you’ve gotta get out of the box.

Service from Cornflake

In 1987 I bought a stereo system from the Cornflake shop in London.

The store is an independent outlet that deals primarily and expertly with high quality, high end systems that appeal to audiophile types (in the same way that BrandPhial appeals to Brand types). I was pleasantly surprised by their willingness to allow frequent auditions of a number of suggested system solutions that were in my budget, and eventually I settled for a system that made the most of my record collection, which is both extensive and mainly well cared for. The stereo was delivered and expertly installed by the company's co-founder, who did not leave until he was completely satisfied with the performance of the system in my home. It was nearly midnight.

Boy was I a happy bunny!

About a month ago the pre-amp stage of the system stopped working. It's a Bryston - a little known but extremely high quality Canadian-manufactured amplifier. So I rang up the Cornflake shop and spoke to Michael. I had not spoken with Michael before, but he told me to bring the amplifier in and it would be fixed for me free of charge by the Bryston agents in London, PMC (The Professional Monitor Company). It turned out that my amplifier was covered by a 20 year manufacturers guarantee. Michael suggested that I also bring the power amp as it would be possible that some components might also require renewal.

2 weeks later I received a call from Michael saying the amps were fixed up, cleaned up and awaiting my collection.

Fantastic. I'm back in vinyl heaven (it really is the best sounding music medium!), and it has not cost me a single penny.

How many brands out there reward their customers with such astonishing service and commitment to their products?

I would like to personally congratulate Michael at the Cornflake shop for his attention to ME, and Chris at PMC for returning the 17 year old amplifiers to their former glory. And recognise and thank Bryston for being a company that so clearly and openly believes in the quality of its products.

Imagine a world in which all companies paid such painstaking and genuine attention to their customers. Imagine how special you would feel, and how often you would feel special.

Lesson to be learned here. Beliefs and behaviours (acted on by both the company, and the company's channels/partners) drives customer expectation and experience.

Branding is not a 'field of dreams'. If you build it, they will not come. Brands are built by actions, not words.

If I ever need a new stereo, there is only one dealer in the world, as far as I am concerned.

Cornflake.

Jagged Thoughts

A real challenge for today's Pharmaceutical industry leaders is to embrace and create new meaning for their stakeholders by adopting (branding) behaviours and beliefs that drive cultural change through their organisations. Great brands have great leaders. Great leaders transform businesses. For any corporation, its employees, its stakeholders, its partners, leadership is the very mirror of meaning, of what that company or product or service stands for.

You cannot have an external brand unless you commit as an organisation to building an internal brand (just look at the successful transformation of WD-40 - see Lubricated Leadership).
At Doghouse, our work has led us to development of a program that delivers value to your business, and meaning to all who are involved in brand transactions. Here is what we discovered.

• Branding is the creation and management of meaning to the benefit of [the brand's] stakeholders and your business
  
  
• The brand is the 'vehicle' of experience and expectations driven by meaning
  
  
• Meaning is the currency of Leadership, Change, Trust, Relevance, Clarity, Unity, Direction, Decision, Communication, Knowledge and Belief (These [like meaning itself] are all in short supply in Pharma right now: their lack, in a sense, defines an impression of an industry in identit crisis)
  
  
• Leaders create new meaning in the way they behave
  
  
• Without leadership, where is the brand?

It follows that the discipline of Branding is now critical to success in the establishment and development of Leadership, the acceptance and management of Change, the creation and exploitation of new Value and the birth and nurturing of Trust.

Branding is thus the key to solving our most fearsome challenge in Pharma - that of Direction

The Meaning of Meaning

At a recent presentation I was asked to expand on the subject of meaning.

For once, I was truly delighted with the request, as it’s a word that can be easily misunderstood or in the context of brands, underestimated. I was also in a position of potential 'exposure', as it was a challenge that I had not spent any time at all preparing for. I had always (and quite wrongly) presumed that my branding presentation content was largely self explanatory.

However, the challenge came from an individual of some stature and respect within their corporation (and the industry), and therefore deserved a ‘meaningful’ answer. Eyes in the board room turned towards me.

The weekend before the presentation I had been consigned (with one of my two children in tow) to the weekly supermarket shop. Never a pleasant experience, made even more demanding by the distractions of young Jack, who is only prepared to show interest in breakfast cereals that are at least 140% sugar, with added chocolate.

We are spoilt locally by a profusion of large supermarkets, and for no reason, I chose on this particular weekend to favour Tescos over Sainsburys. The shopping process itself went without incident, and with trolley piled high, I approached the check-out.

I was a little surprised when the till I arrived at was being managed by the most pregnant (and delicately attractive) Asian young lady that I had ever seen. The scale of her fruitful belly was made even more apparent by the fact that she was otherwise exquisitely tiny.
I was half expecting her waters to break under the strain as she lifted my 3 litre box of Rumanian Pinot Noir across the laser scanner.

I’m sure it was something about her imminent motherhood that made me suddenly realise and exclaim all at one moment... “Oh bugger it, I’ve forgotten the milk!”

As you know, with all supermarket layouts the items that are most frequently forgotten (eggs, sugar, milk, bread) are always the ones most distant from the check out.

I was in for a long walk.

Before I had the chance to say another word, my tiny, fragile, pregnant check out girl leapt off her chair, squeezed through the check-out entrance hatch, and cheerfully said “I’ll get it for you! 2 or 4 pints?” And she trotted away.

She reappeared in no time at all, carrying not one but two four pint cartons, one full fat, one semi skimmed. I was flabberghasted.

That simple act of total dedication to personal customer service meant more to me than I could have ever imagined.

Way more than the declared intent of management, and more than the slick, expensive and occasionally clumsy advertising campaign (Prunella Scales, Jane Horrocks et al). This was a real employee absolutely delivering the experience that Tesco wants us to believe.

Almost beyond the call of duty.

I cannot drive past a Tesco store without reliving the memory of this young ladies actions.

That is the power of ‘meaning’.

That’s the story I told to the room of International Pharmaceutical Marketing executives.

They all understood.

Lubricated Leadership

With people like Peter Drucker predicting the demise of major corporations in the next 10-25 years, global industries are starting to wake up to today's challenges. Some are leading the way.

WD-40 (the stuff you've had in your garage for the last five years) has transformed a 'one general purpose product' business into a corporation the world's leadership gurus look up to with admiration and respect. A company that has rebuilt its culture around the magnificence of its workforce, through the creation of a set of values that the business lives by day to day. Values that allow every employee to own their decisions and act on them. Values that let employees know that their actions reflect their commitment. If people are not capable of magnificence in this environment, other careers beckon. It's a truly remarkable transformation.

While they were doing this, WD-40's profitability ratios soared, and they more than doubled their annual revenue. With one, ninety-year old ingredient. One molecule.

But for the entire workforce, WD-40 became a brand.

Slick leadership generating a massively motivated workforce, and a remarkable business turnaround.

Wouldn't it be great to see such inspired leadership in Pharmaceuticals?

Brand Grenades - A fresh look at brand dynamics

Look at the many and varied definitions of brand, and then, think about which elements are important, and which lie under the control of the brand officers.

If we take a contemporary, comprehensive, realistic look at brands in their typical scenarios – out in the world, we rapidly see that the brand elements that impact most on the success of the enterprise are ultimately those which lie at the further reaches of our control.

We’re not talking here, mind, about who has the better product. We’re looking only at commercial success – Betamax vs. VHS, Microsoft/IBM/Intel vs. Apple - and brand as a critical driver of same.

We are thus obliged to consider that the success of our branded product or service lies in the hands of the communities (or networks if you prefer) of stakeholders. In the pharmaceutical business, this can be a minimum of 10-15 distinct groups (from KOL’s across to investors and the board of the business itself).

One more “brand grenade” before we move on …

Brand Messaging – that sacred cow of monolithic brand thinking – has also spun out of our control.

How? The most critical messages are no longer those that we push out to the market. They’re the observed, shared and noted behaviours and statements (to themselves and each other, tacit and explicit) of belief about our brand that, partly due to our own endeavours, partly due to, well, all sorts of factors, our key stakeholder groups manifest.

The realpolitik of brand takes yet another twist!

The good news …
… is that once we get engaged with the real world interface between our brand and our stakeholder groups, we can, if not control, then certainly meaningfully influence, a lot more than we might have initially expected. Like:

• The relevance and value of the brand's informational communications;
• The responsiveness of the brand's communicators to the needs of its stakeholders, according to specific need;
• The quality and mutual value of the ongoing dialogue with specialists and opinion leaders, especially as indications evolve over time;
• The brand's adherence (behaviourally) to what it stands for, its principles (this will come under increasing scrutiny in the coming years...);
• The brand's support for and engagement with its key communities, understanding interactions both within and between them.

Rational Visioning works inward from envisioned and rational success criteria to target the optimum brand proposition and core brand meaning, and then outwards again to create the behavioral route to achieve that success across the entire lifecycle.

It's a fresh approach to unwrapping the real and meaningful potential of your brand, of internalising fresh behaviors and beliefs across your organisation that resonate with the brand's core meaning to all external stakeholder groups.

To discover a little more about truly meaningful approaches to healthcare brand development, devised to add value and energy to your brand development processes, contact Top Dog at Doghouse, brian@doghouseonline.net, or for a broad view check out their website www.doghouseonline.net. It might be of interest to anyone who has only obsolete or orthdox brand development models to work with.

Orthodox Obsolescence

It strikes me that, in an age where technology is evolving more rapidly than at any single moment of human existence, a reliance on orthodox behaviours and beliefs is almost certainly going to be counter-productive.

The healthcare industry (by this I mean Pharmaceuticals) is critically at a point in time where reliance on old or orthodox value modelling is rapidly becoming redundent.

Its sheer scale poses two problems:

1. Inertia. To move a massive object from a stationary state requires untold energy. The smaller, more agile corporations have displayed the greatest ability for (comparitively) rapid reaction and response. Inertia is a bad thing in business. At the world's present speed of change, it could prove catastrophic.

2. Momentum. As with a giant ocean liner or freight tanker, it takes this industry enormous time and effort to establish a change in direction, once a course has been plotted. It also appears that large corporations are not led by forward vision, but by frequently scanning the horizons astern. There are leadership issues here that are occasionally harmful to the reputation and perceived value of an industry that, let's face it, is here to protect humanity. The public's view is more akin to 'making profit out of people's misfortune'. Cynical, maybe, but I don't see many of the large Pharma companies making any kind of headway to change such damaging perceptions. (Fuelled as they are by incoherently massive CEO dividend payments, dodgy supply deals and a social acceptance of counterfeit parallel imports)

Orthodox industries attract orthodox workers. A truism, but it's one that is currently holding the industry back. There needs to be a brave influx of unorthodox behaviour and belief, led from the front, by leaders who are prepared to conspicuously place emotional intelligence alongside business acumen.

To develop leaders who take a genuine interest in other people's experiences and emotional worlds. It's a rare (and possibly natural) gift. Leaders create new meaning in the way that they behave. New meaning, and value, and direction is what this industry needs.

If one accepts our definition of Branding as 'the relentless discovery and management of meaning to the benefit of (the brand's) stakeholders', then the link between great healthcare brands (where are they?) and great Pharmaceutical Industry leaders (where are they?) becomes apparent.

Great Brands all have one thing in common. They are managed by Great Leaders.