Creating a launch sales aid for a women’s health innovation that has supported the brand for nearly a decade
Problem context
A women’s sexual health oral product was being launched in Europe. It offered a significant benefit to women in terms of their feeling safe and the ease of adherence. The challenge was that the product was not reimbursed, and it came at a significant premium over other treatments. The communication had the difficult task of establishing the value to private gynaecologists, and to change their behaviour.
Whilst the business goal was the primary objective, the CEO wanted to use this project as a basis to galvanise the organisation to be insight-driven.
Our approach
Cross functional co-creation: Through the entire duration of the project, we ran several workshops with the client and the ad-agency team. Our belief is that such high involvement is necessary to capture the intuition of team members, clarify the real hard questions, and create concepts, messages, and material iteratively and fast. More importantly, this was the beginning of the creation of an insights-driven culture.
Multi-stage research with a wide repertoire of qualitative research techniques: We began by getting insight into patient needs, physician needs, and the dynamics of the patient-doctor interactions. Patients were required to maintain diaries capturing their experience before participating in a “mock-consultation” with doctors. Following this stage, we tested a variety of concepts and messages, story flows, creative concepts, and final sales aid options over multiple rounds of in-depth interviews and triads conducted with about 90 physicians in Italy, Spain, and Germany. We utilised many projective and creative techniques to elicit material that resonated with physicians at both a ‘system 1’ and ‘system 2’ level.
We also used semiotic analysis to understand the distinctiveness of the visuals. The research covered 90 gynaecologists and 18 patients.
Insights
Examples of insights that shaped the communication were the following:
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The “mock-consultations” that involved observing real patients having a 10-minute conversation with a gynaecologist revealed points of friction where the gynaecologist encountered resistance from the patient. Addressing these situations were central to formulating the story. Also, we could simplify the sales aid by picking messages that were focused on the needs of the women
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We predicted that the mechanism of action, more than the efficacy data, would convince physicians about the value of the drug. The final mechanism of action creative that was developed was simple and compelling
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Semiotic analysis of advertising in this category allowed us to be distinctive and make the woman the centre of the communication
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We could communicate price in terms of the value provided to the women
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The sales aid could be tailored to three distinct segments of physicians
Impact
At the beginning of the study, on exposure to the concept, the percentage of patients deemed as eligible were 10%. Post exposure to the sales aid that figure was over 50%.
Over time, the drug, despite having a significant premium, achieved a 10% market share. During this entire period, the sales aid has remained unchanged except for a few minor tweaks, and has receive positive feedback from gynaecologists consistently.
Of particular interest to us is that gynaecologists consistently cite the mechanism of the drug as one of its most distinctive advantages, something that we had predicted much before the launch. The client has even branded the mechanism of action.
The piece of work set the manner in which the team conducted insights work for many years that followed.
The aspects that this case highlighted for us were the importance of the following:
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Continuous cross-functional and co-creation with the client, ad agency and Insight Dojo teams working together
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Including the voice of the patient even though the communication is addressed to physicians
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Designing research innovatively with a mix of techniques combining ethnography, semiotics, depth interviews and triads with many projective techniques
