If digital strategies aren’t thoroughly integrated throughout your marketing mix, you’re missing opportunities.

Amazingly, after all this time, many marketers continue to regard digital marketing as an add-on to conventional marketing strategies and tactics—which means they are ignoring two of marketing’s most fundamental axioms: 1. Be where your customers are and 2. Speak their language. The fact is, your customers are living, working, and communicating in a digital world, so that’s where your brand has to live.

The use of smartphones is way up among physicians. And while most doctors use these devices for everyday treatment activity, a growing number also use them to interact with e-details and participate in online surveys. At the same time, most patients who search for health information online (and that’s pretty much everybody) are turning to medical Web sites, informational Web sites, social media sites, and online communities more frequently than to pharmaceutical company sites. With all this in mind, you can’t simply develop yourbrand.com and assume you’ve addressed the digital component of your marketing program.

Bottom line: If your agency is plugging digital tactics like an extra piece into some section of your plan, they’re doing you a disservice and missing critical opportunities. Digital communications should be an integral part of how you view every marketing challenge—a cornerstone of the foundation on which you build your brand.

Natrel would be happy to help you develop a marketing program that is seamlessly integrated and makes the most of all available opportunities. To learn more, contact Allan Trent at atrent@natrelusa.com or call 973-292-8400.

Positioning is the soul of branding, advertising, and all marketing communications. That means, it better be right. To make sure it is, our industry has developed various disciplined approaches—including complex templates—for drafting positioning statements in a methodical way.

The good news is that these templates generally call for a “brand differentiator” or “core idea,” which is the essential and actionable part of the positioning statement. And these templates can certainly be helpful when you’re trying to generate consensus among a multidisciplinary group of people who may not all be highly practiced in the art of positioning.

On the downside, these wordy, complex constructions can mask the lack of a truly insightful and valuable positioning. The fact is, positioning is all about the strategic power of a single, essential idea. It should never, ever be a list of product features and benefits, as we occasionally see.

The real challenge of positioning—the art of positioning—is to chip away extraneous words and information until all that is left is the single, shining spark that will ignite your brand.

So, of course, natrel is perfectly comfortable taking the template approach when it is in keeping with the client’s culture and expectations. We do it every day. But we always keep our eye on the ball—that single differentiating idea at the core of the exercise. And for clients who are comfortable letting us drive the process in our own way, all our best thinking may boil down to a single, clear, and potent phrase of three or four words.

To learn more about how to optimize your positioning and branding process, contact Allan Trent at atrent@natrelusa.com or by phone at 973-292-8400.

To learn more about natrel communications, click here.

The amazing power of brand personality

The evolving regulatory environment is making it harder than ever to express clear, differentiating claims about pharmaceutical products. A scan of the advertising in today’s journals tells the story of an industry in flux, as some advertisers continue to find ways to make a creative impression, while others are forced to settle for an MOA illustration or a patient photo accompanied by the indication as a headline.

Fortunately for marketers, there is a second path to brand differentiation—a path that bypasses the intellect (where messages are absorbed and deliberated) and reaches directly into the emotions (where most decisions are made). That path is brand personality, and it represents a powerful opportunity for your brand.

While many consumer marketers have long since begun shifting their focus to personality-based advertising (think Target, Tiffany’s, Geico), health care marketers have, on the whole, been slow to get on board. This may be because our scientific, information-heavy industry is not entirely comfortable addressing something as squishy and unquantifiable as emotion.

What has been missing, in many cases, is a method capable of bringing discipline and objectivity to the development of brand personality. To address this need, natrel communications has developed a method that reflects the kind of rigorous discipline our industry has uniformly applied to the development of positioning and messaging. And we have employed this methodology with truly exciting results.

Regardless of the method you choose, the important thing to remember is that we, as marketers, have an exciting opportunity—and an obligation—to go beyond messaging and positioning by tailoring an emotional effect, and brand personality is our most direct channel to the emotions. In addition, while claims are tightly governed by regulatory constraints, personality provides a parallel path to differentiation—and one that may be less obstructed.

The fact is, every communication has a personality, whether intentionally or by default. And if you don’t develop your brand’s personality with the same level of attention and sophistication that you devote to positioning and messaging, you will miss a critical opportunity to impact the success of your brand.

To find out more about brand personality and how it can differentiate your brand in a tight regulatory environment, contact Allan Trent at atrent@natrelusa.com or by phone at 973-292-8400.

To learn more about natrel communications, click here.