Stone silence. After that deadly pause, he began again with explaining all about the product to me, as though I were dense and had not heard or understood a thing he said. After a few minutes of this, I politely interrupted and made the points:
1. The company needs to clearly identify from whom it wants to get business, and from whom it does not. Its website clearly speaks to people at risk of the disease (those who have the disease or family members), but what I heard from the CEO spoke about a huge spectrum of other stakeholders. Frankly, it was a laundry list of everyone who could possibly get involved all along the customer chain, not focused on the ones were core to their success.
2. What is the brand core strategy? Getting the consumer to recognize if he/she is at risk, then seeking diagnosis, then confirming disease status, then confirming if he/she is a candidate for the breakthrough treatment, then getting into and staying on treatment calls for the simplest, clearest, strongest core branding strategy.
3. What are the rationale benefits of the brand to the target customer? The CEO provided a strong scientific rationale (classic product feature and benefit oriented), but if indeed the target customer is the person with the disease (including one who may not even know he/she has it), the language of that rationale alone would be impossible to fathom. I asked if the brand had even been tested with the target consumer/patient. The answer was no.
4. What are the brand’s emotional benefits and kinesthestic appeal? For this particular treatment to work, the person will potentially be on it for life, and it requires an injection. To someone with cancer or ebola, a virtually painless injection may not seem like anything. But to someone newly diagnosed, not otherwise likely to be taking a lot of medicines and who also may be afraid of needles, it’s a completely different matter. To compound the problem, the healthcare system is increasingly expecting patients to self-inject (to reduce cost and burden on healthcare providers to do this for the patients). So on top of the initial hurdle of getting started, suddenly the person is having to give oneself a lifetime of injections. Simply put, this could be a huge barrier to acceptance, even though the novel treatment will be the only option for these patients for years to come. So beyond the rationale for treatment, such brands need a lot of emotional benefits and even kinesthestic appeal to overcome that mental blockade. How will the brand essence address these considerations?
5. What is the value proposition? Getting the healthcare system to pay for the testing, then the treatment, also calls for the need to foster strong consumer/patient advocacy along with a compelling value proposition for payers and governments. In addition, there is the consumer co-pay. For novel treatments such as this company’s, that could be $50 or $100 or more. In addition, the person at risk and healthcare providers must first conduct an expensive one-time genetic test, which may or may not be covered by insurance. Ouch! The value proposition for such a “targeted” healthcare product today has to show enough gain to justify the pain, literally and financially speaking.
What the brand essence is, then, is a synthesis of the last three questions, and is based upon the answers to the first two questions.
He then asked a very good question, “How can the brand essence serve multiple customers?” (as is a common need in most increasingly complex markets today). The brand essence is overarching, mainly focused on one’s primary target customer group(s). You then differentiate how the brand’s essence plays out in the market, throughout the customer chain, via the various elements of the marketing mix.
I then showed him a number of other companies’ “brand essences” in the public domain. Some I deliberately chose to start with were bizarre and confusing. There are various models some seemed based upon, complete with requisite jargon. I explained that these were similar to what I was hearing from him – hard to follow, harder still to compel a sustainable customer commitment to the brand. I then showed him some great examples. He could see the difference at a glance. At the heart of most of the best of them, regardless what the model, the brand essence is a concise synthesis of the answers to these five questions. More importantly, the brand’s essence is easy to remember and live by.
Here’s an analogy. Think of the fingers on your hand. Five fingers. That’s how the whole world remembers things. People everywhere start numbering off things on ONE hand. When you run out of fingers, you run out of memory. There’s also a magic number in the English language. 17 words. After 17 words, recall is almost zero. (If you doubt me, ask an American to recite the Declaration of Independence and count how far one gets.) So the brand essence (as well as the core strategy) should be able to be articulated on 5 or few fingers and in 17 or fewer words. This is not the time or place to start writing promotional lines, but it will drive the marketing message eventually.
How easy is it to develop the brand essence? It is possibly the most difficult marketing task a commercial organization can have. It’s also the most essential. After all, if those leading the company can’t synthesize and articulate the brand essence and communicate clearly to others, then how will your customers ultimately be able to know and respond to what the company thinks it is offering to them?
Figure 1: Five Keys to the Brand Essence (based upon a given set of target customers)
