Persuading Scientists: Marketing to the World's Most Skeptical Audience Read online

  PERSUADING

  SCIENTISTS

  marketing to the world’s most skeptical audience

  HAMID GHANADAN

  courageous thought leadership content

  Rockbench Publishing Corp.

  6101 Stillmeadow Dr.,

  Nashville, TN 37211

  www.rockbench.com

  Copyright ©2012 Hamid Ghanadan

  All Rights Reserved

  Interior Design by Faceout Studio

  Interior illustrations by Pradnya Dighe and Faceout Studio

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012936238

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition, 2012

  ISBN: 978-1-60544-013-2

  PERSUADING

  SCIENTISTS

  marketing to the world’s most skeptical audience

  HAMID GHANADAN

  For Ada

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  1 MARKETING MATTERS—A TRUE STORY

  2 MARKETING TO SCIENTISTS AS CONSUMERS

  3 GAINING CLARITY OF THE LANDSCAPE THROUGH SITUATION ANALYSIS

  4 MASTERING THE ART OF POSITIONING

  5 ENGINEERING AN EFFECTIVE MARKETING PROGRAM

  6 CREATIVELY EXPRESSING THE CAMPAIGN

  7 DEPLOYING AND MEASURING

  8 MARKETING WITHIN THE ORGANIZATIONAL MILIEU—A FINAL WORD

  1

  MARKETING MATTERS—A TRUE STORY

  A RAINY WINTER NIGHT, SOMEWHERE IN SILICON VALLEY

  “If we don’t do this, the genomics business unit doesn’t have a good chance to succeed,” I said to my client. It was the first time in my career I had made this assertion.

  My client, Gloria,1 sat with us in a conference room at Agilent Technologies at 8 p.m. on a Wednesday in March 2006, eating cold pizza under fluorescent lights. It had been the only free block of time on her calendar. A seasoned marketing executive, she had spent most of her career building the brands of companies that were now the darlings of the science industry. Exactly four weeks before this meeting, she had been hired as the senior director of marketing communications, and one of her many duties was to rescue Agilent’s fledgling genomics microarray business.

  “How do I know your plan will work?” she asked. I had been expecting this question. Clients often ask for novel ideas, only to reject those ideas because they are untested. But Gloria was no dummy, and I knew that my job in the next five minutes was to get her over this conceptual hurdle. “I admit what we are asking is a tall order,” Gloria went on. “We need to turn this ship around and start to get market traction in a very short amount of time. I asked you for out-of-the-box thinking, but how do I know this will work?”

  “You don’t,” I said. “This is a novel approach, and a departure from traditional marketing. But it is not an experiment; it’s not some crazy idea. It is based on sound principles of how scientists naturally seek information.” I then talked her through a series of slides that mapped out the scientific purchasing process and the places where traditional marketing falls short. I showed her the aspects of consumer psychology that our campaign was designed to exploit, and slowly I built up her confidence with our approach. I could see her processing the information as I spoke, weighing the options in her mind. When I finished, she sat quietly for a moment, staring at the slide projected on the wall. Then she nodded twice to herself, and I knew that she was in. She put down her pizza and said, “Let’s go over it again.”

  For the next hour Gloria grilled me for the details of the plan, why it was architected the way it was, what the contingencies were, and how we knew it would work. But she had already made up her mind, and this was just the scrutiny she needed to devote herself to what amounted to a high-stakes strategy. If it paid off, the genomics business would be saved, and she would be a hero.

  THE WHOLE TRUTH

  Six weeks earlier, my agency, The Linus Group, had received an invitation from several other Agilent executives from the genomics business unit to meet with them. “We have a really good story in genomics; we just don’t know how to tell it,” the genomics marketing director told me in that first meeting. I listened to his pitch. “We have no idea why we are having such a difficult time breaking into this market. We’re doing everything we’re supposed to be doing: advertising, brochures, tons of technical content, trade shows, discounts. Our sales team is top-notch. Our products are superior in many ways; we have much better accuracy and sensitivity. But our marketing is simply not working, and we’re not gaining any traction.”

  He was right. Agilent’s microarray platform provided serious benefits to genomics researchers, but after five years in the market, the company had failed to gain any significant market share and had yet to move into profitability. During that first meeting, we learned the stakes of the assignment; in the absence of significant growth over the coming quarters, the genomics business would likely be divested.

  Over the next several weeks, we dove deep into Agilent’s situation. We reviewed hundreds of PowerPoint slides, interviewed internal teams, and analyzed the company’s collective marketing output. We systematically mapped the competitive landscape and reverse-engineered each competitor’s positioning. We fielded two research studies: an in-depth qualitative study, followed by an online survey that enabled us to quantify our findings and hypotheses.

  Based on our investigations, it was not difficult to arrive at a strong positioning point for Agilent’s microarrays or to align all of the internal stakeholders. Agilent was fighting against Affymetrix, which dominated the microarray market with its catalog of high-density arrays. But Agilent’s key differentiator was the flexibility of the platform and its ability to cost-effectively create arrays for virtually any need.

  We focused on the benefits of Agilent’s flexibility and positioned its array as a blank canvas for genomics discovery. By taking this stance, we were celebrating the scientists themselves, the ones most truly at the forefront of discovery, and we were making a sharp distinction from Affymetrix, which took a very prescriptive approach with its products. It boiled down to a single line:

  “Agilent’s microarray platform is a blank canvas for discovery, enabling genomics research on your own terms.”

  We had ample support for this statement, and we documented each proof point in the positioning-strategy document. But based on our audience research, we also knew that simply saying these words would not be enough. No advertising campaign, brochure, or 16-page application note could ever change Agilent’s lack of credibility in the genomics market. In short, the traditional AIDA marketing funnel, as follows, was the wrong framework for Agilent’s marketing:

  AWARENESS → INTEREST → DESIRE → ACTION

  It was not a lack of audience awareness that needed to be fixed; it was audience indifference. Instead, we needed to create an experience to first disrupt the market and then to encourage scientists to deduce Agilent’s value on their own.

  To achieve this, we developed a new marketing funnel specifically aimed at overcoming Agilent’s barriers.2 Our campaign architecture was based on the idea that scientists engage with their peers and with content much more willingly than they will engage with marketing or sales. To take advantage of this, we took a significant risk by engineering a campaign focused not on Agilent’s products but instead on the science done with those products. Rather than tell scientists the value of Agilent’s technology, we let third-party science demonstrate that value, enabling us to build awareness and credibility at the same time.

  We developed an extremely detailed content strategy, which focused outbound activities on inviting audiences to consume the repository of “peer science” that quietly and firmly demonstrated that Agilent was facilitating meaningful and significant genomics research. This repository became an Agilent-owned microsite called OpenGenomics, incorporating the following:

  Webcasts of scientific presentations from invited scientists who described their research with no mention of Agilent products

  A series of editorialized podcasts that discussed trends in genomics

  A comprehensive database of all papers published, using Agilent’s genomics products (all very carefully meta-tagged)

  Reviews of the most seminal publications

  All of these activities were aimed at generating high-quality leads based on scientific interest while overcoming Agilent’s lack of credibility in the genomics arena.

  We repurposed the content from OpenGenomics to nurture leads. Finally, we recommended a new suite of sales collateral as well as an internal, monthly newsletter to the sales reps to update them about every new research publication in which Agilent’s microarray products were used and its scientific significance to enable sales reps in furthering their conversations with prospects. All of this served to help sales reps close deals more effectively with the warm leads they were given.

  Creatively, we needed a strong visual metaphor that would communicate the core idea of “a blank canvas for discovery,” while clearly communicating that Agilent was selling microarrays. Often, product imagery is forced into campaign creative after the fact at the insistence of the product manager, but in this case, we chose to make the product itself the hero of the campaign. Using a handwritten statement as a metaphor for the scientist’s experimental goals, we literally transformed Agilent’s
glass slide into a blank canvas for discovery. By taking this approach, we were able to unite all communications while iterating the messages endlessly across applications and audience segments.

  FIGURE 1-1: The basic premise of the creative expression for Agilent’s microarray platform.

  By the time we presented our recommendations to Gloria on that rainy Wednesday night, we had full confidence in our plan for Agilent’s success. While we leveraged many familiar channels such as advertising and direct mail, it was our content strategy recommendation that made the pivotal difference in our idea’s reception. We had carefully lined up different kinds of content to match the states of mind of scientists as they considered Agilent’s microarrays, with the belief that this approach would yield fast and dramatic traction in the marketplace.

  FIGURE 1-2: Agilent’s OpenGenomics microsite, illustrating content-centric marketing. The microsite housed a repository of editorialized scientific information aimed to build Agilent’s credibility as a serious provider of products to biologists.

  All that was left was gaining Gloria’s approval.

  Making more rain in Silicon Valley

  The months that followed were a blur. We launched our campaign, the sales team embraced and applauded our efforts, and the marketing personnel within Agilent supported the creation of additional content and made introductions with scientists for additional peer content.

  On launch day, the OpenGenomics microsite had more than 300 pages of content, including six recorded webcasts, two recorded podcasts, a meta-tagged database of 250 publications, and dozens of research reviews. And this was just the beginning. We all knew that the key to success would be to feed this campaign the content fuel it needed to become a credible repository of useful scientific information. The OpenGenomics microsite would eventually grow to 2,000 pages and ultimately be incorporated into Agilent’s main website, serving as a template for web strategies for the company’s life science businesses.

  We watched the numbers constantly with the goal of abandoning any tactic that underperformed, thus enabling us to focus more effort on tactics that exceeded expectations. Excited by our highly iterative campaign, our media partners went out of their way to provide us with as much flexibility and as many metrics as they could muster and even suggested useful ways we could gain additional benefit from our efforts.

  We established an ongoing rapport with Agilent’s sales team, routinely distributing information about new peer-reviewed literature that cited the microarray platform. In return, they gave us valuable feedback on the changing landscape from the field. They were energized by the shift from the marketing efforts, and this new confidence, along with the new tools, armed them to win more sales and grow their accounts.

  FIGURE 1-3: A double-gatefold sales brochure for Agilent’s microarray products, of which the rep could customize the delivery to a prospect by unfolding the brochure in multiple ways.

  Approximately nine months after launching the campaign, I received a call from Gloria. The latest sales numbers had just been announced, and she was beaming. The genomics business unit had grown 52 percent year over year and was in the black.

  In the years that followed, the genomics business would continue on its path to become one of the growth engines for Agilent, serving the genomics community with exceptional and innovative products and services. Gloria would take on more responsibility across other areas of Agilent’s Chemical Analysis and Life Sciences business units. The Linus Group would go on to refine its model for marketing to scientists and embark on a path toward solving some of the most challenging commercialization efforts in the industry. I would synthesize all of these lessons about marketing to scientists and write this book.

  In the coming chapters, I will present a framework for marketers to develop highly effective marketing programs in the life science industry3 that transcend the mediocrity of traditional campaigns. I will deconstruct the Agilent case study further and provide additional examples that illustrate the power of this new framework for persuading scientists.

  2

  MARKETING TO SCIENTISTS AS CONSUMERS

  SYNOPSIS

  Why do some marketing campaigns succeed while others fail? I have spent 16 years trying to answer this question by testing a variety of variables, and I have concluded that, as consumers, scientists follow a very specific and predictable pattern in making decisions. Marketers must understand this pattern if they wish to engage effectively with scientists and ultimately persuade them. In this chapter, we will review the pattern and how it impacts the marketing process. Specific topics include the following:

  Why a new model is necessary

  A definition of “marketing” and “scientist”

  How scientists make decisions

  The archetypal buying journey that scientists undergo

  Principles of content-centric marketing

  We will then use the concepts introduced in this chapter to walk through the process of building highly effective marketing campaigns throughout the remainder of this book.

  THE CURRENT STATE OF MARKETING

  Answer this question honestly: Does marketing in the life sciences work?

  Most life science marketing activities are wasted. Advertising the way it is typically employed often creates very little awareness. Lead generation statistically results in 1 percent response rates at best, deeming the process 99 percent fruitless. Trade shows ordinarily convert approximately 5 percent of attendees as leads. And traditional, printed sales collateral is expensive to produce, ship, store, inventory, and update. The life science industry spends approximately $250M4 per year on these marketing activities, yet we cannot concretely point to the results. This is a big problem.

  Some believe that technology will provide the solution, and the surge in adoption of sophisticated marketing automation software, next-generation customer relationship management (CRM) systems, social media marketing, and mobile technologies is evidence of this line of thinking. Others embrace the notion that good creative expression is the critical variable in producing better results, much to the delight of advertising agencies that perpetuate this notion mainly for their own benefit. Some reduce marketing down to sales support, rationalizing marketing by the tactical deliverable. And yet others reject the entire practice of marketing altogether, focusing their attention only on sales strategies and coverage. While new technologies, excellent creative, and strong sales strategies can all impact marketing effectiveness, none holds the path to significant revenue growth without a solid marketing strategy.

  The world has also changed, and life science companies have not always kept up. The democratization of information and ubiquitous access through the Internet has changed how scientists interact with vendors and make purchase decisions. Social media can no longer be dismissed as the buzz du jour in marketing, and the rise of new online information channels has fundamentally changed purchasing behavior. In late 2010, A Harvard Business Review article on branding in the digital age summarized a McKinsey Quarterly study of the purchase decisions of approximately 20,000 consumers across five industries and three continents,5 concluding that, “far from systematically narrowing their choices, today’s consumers take a much more iterative and less reductive journey.” In other words, the old “funnel” metaphor is no longer appropriate for mapping customers’ decisions. Whether or not scientists actively engage in social media during the course of their work, their exposure to it as members of society has changed the way they are influenced to make purchasing decisions.

  This same democratization of information translates into a loss of control for companies. Scientists trust information from their peers and typically hold corporate information in contempt as biased, and since anyone can publish anything about any company, product, or service, companies can no longer ignore the power that the collective voice of their markets holds in making—or breaking—their brands. In short, the era of traditional command-and-control marketing is over.