Great things happen when you focus on the individual customer.
Yet in healthcare we often talk about ‘medical professionals’ without really considering that each doctor, nurse or specialist has a unique set of interests, challenges and knowledge.
To see the difference that a closer focus on the individual can make, let’s invent a simple case study.
We’ll need a product; let’s call it Exemplar. For simplicity, imagine that Exemplar has just three potential customers:
First let’s first run a traditional marketing campaign. There will be a specific campaign every quarter about safety, efficacy, onset of action, and ease of use.
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Q1 |
Q2 |
Q3 |
Q4 |
Right, it’s time to find out what happened...
One year later...
At the end of the year we have one customer. That’s a 33.3% percent market share. Just two customers left to convince!
Right, let’s run those campaigns again.
Another year later...
Huh. Same result. Two years have gone by and we still only have one customer.
OK, let’s try again…
Yet another year...
What??! Same result again. The campaigns must be OK because they worked with Customer #1.
What’s going on?
Rewind
Now imagine that we can have those three years back.
We’ll do exactly the same thing but with one small difference. This time, we’ll pay close attention to how each campaign was received by our three customers. Nothing else.
OK run those campaigns again!
One year later...
OK, we’ve found the problem areas: Customer #2 didn’t understand the efficacy campaign and Customer #3 didn’t understand the onset of action campaign.
Now we have something to work with:
• Customer #1 understands all the campaigns. So we can move on to another topic. Let’s go with reduced healthcare costs through more efficient treatment
• Customer #2 needs more information on efficacy
• Customer #3 needs more information on onset of action.
Another year later...
Well, Customer #1 is prescribing as before. But she now sees that there are major cost benefits from Exemplar too.
Customer #2 is also prescribing.We just needed to explain efficacy properly. That went well, so we moved on to cost reduction in the second quarter.
Customer #3 was tough. It took a whole year to demonstrate the better onset of action; but we got there by providing the detailed information he required.
At the end of the second year, we have three customers where before we only had one – just by paying close attention to individual needs.
So why haven’t we always done this? The answer is that it simply wasn’t possible in a ‘paper world’.We have many thousands of customers, not just three. How would we keep track of it all with paper and filing cabinets?
But those days are over.We live in a digital world now. And that changes everything.
We’re not limited by technology any more. We can already relate to thousands of people on an individual level. And keep track of it all. In fact, the only limitation now is our own thinking.
So we really can ask ourselves: “If everybody’s different, why not treat them as individuals?”
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