Small Talk

November 21, 2011 »

Why the Digital Age Can’t Replace Word of Mouth Marketing

When it comes down to it, word of mouth marketing influences the vast majority of our day-to-day decisions.

Think about it. Why did you decide to go out to eat at that new place in the next town over last week? Chances are someone you know suggested it, or perhaps you went to Yelp and read a few glowing reviews by people with your similar tastes.  That same logic holds true for the last place you went on vacation, how you chose your interior decorator, and where you decided to send your kids to summer camp.

Welcome to the fast lane of the Digital Age! We’re all currently involved in the most advanced collection, sharing and application of data and information that this civilization has ever seen.

These are heady times, ripe for innovation and growth for companies that embrace and apply the tools and trends that made Pandora, Amazon and Netflix internet legends. These online giants have all tapped into the power of a social persuasion technology called ‘collaborative filtering.’ This is a fancy name that describes the magic behind their latest product suggestion algorithm, derived from you previous selections.

This relatively new, killer app of the tech world manifests itself in your decisions as you interact digitally. The song that comes up next on Pandora, the car rental option when you book a flight, the iTunes suggestions, and the ‘random’ suggestions that Amazon offers you when you purchase a product – these are all the results of collaborative filtering.

How important is it?  Recently Netflix held a competition and awarded one million dollars to the company that improved on their movie suggestion algorithms.  Yeah, it’s that big.  And with services like these - that will serve up more and more precise suggestions as they aggregate more data - the value of human intervention on the decision by others to buy books, music, movies and clothes will actually decrease over time.

So where do prescription drugs fall into this mix?  Imagine if a pharma marketer could tap into the power of collaborative filtering just like they do at Amazon with an ePharma marketplace!  Just enter your current condition, tell us which drug you are taking for what ails you, and we’ll be happy to suggest three other products that you might like.  Day or night, consumers could order from an online pharmacy what they needed to get better! Isn’t that the evolution that Pharma needs to embrace if they are to grow and compete in this Digital Age?

Absolutely not.

The dynamics of the way health conditions present themselves across individuals are much too random than the way large groups of people might enjoy certain cadences and musical patterns or brands of humorous films.  No, healthcare is about people, and it will continue to rely on the active exchange of information between a patient and a healthcare provider.  You can’t write an algorithm for that.  Instead, Phama needs to emphasize the true “social networking” between patients and enhance how to distribute that conversation to create more informed patient-to-physician dialogue.

Our advice to pharma marketers is to leverage the millions of non-digital conversations that happen every single day. We believe that person-to-person conversations - where the relationships, context and knowledge are present – still represent the best form of collaborative filtering for pharma.  Here, the value of human intervention is actually increasing!

The digital age’s algorithm is about creating consumerism, helping you figure out what to buy next.  Word of mouth marketing is about tapping into the power of human conversations, where trust and non-alogorithmic insights exist, to effectively shape how the right product can get into the right person’s hands. 

This responsibility, and this personal touch, is the cornerstone of healthcare and pharma that even this technological revolution cannot replace.

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