Driving In Traffic

Yesterday I trundled on down to the mailroom at our office complex in an effort to help out. What I found was simply an excessive amount of high dollar direct mail items with the aim of detailing doctors on medications.

Now– I’m used to seeing a flyer and phamphlet here or there. But By-Mail detailing has gone to whole new levels. The most excessive ones are packaged in boxes and shipped to look like you are getting a book, schwag or something of value. I suppose all those focus groups conducted by Pharma have helped them learn that it is pretty easy to sniff out old time marketing material. Thus its fate is to go unopened directly to the trash bin. I suppose this new packaging is likely to get opened just to make sure that nothing of value is thrown away.

However, folks– the gig is up. Imagine my surprise when I got to the mail room to hear a disembodied voice coming out of our mail drawer. Apparently, the lastest parcel used the annoying talking greeting card technology (Guys– this is annoying for birthdays and other celebrations– why on Earth did you think it was a good idea for marketing?!?!). It had gotten squished by a larger parcel and had activated the push button mechanism which provides you with a voice to detail you on various aspects of the drug. Thankfully it shut up soon after I pulled it out of the drawer. I honestly do not think I could get on the elevator with that thing going off in my arms. Although now, working in psychiatry, I suppose a disembodied voice in an elevator could have been a good way of drumming up some business.

Let me just cut to the chase… pharmaceutical detailing by mail is a waste of money! Unless you employ some sort of intermittent reinforcement (i.e. periodically sending something that is actually helpful) the items never get opened and end up in the trash bin. Oh yea– if you are going to send something helpful– ask before you unilaterally decide cause you pharma marketing guys and gals just don’t get it.

Tags: pharmaceutical marketing pharmaceutical detailing disembodied voices medications pharmaceutical

OK– I admit it…on a challenge of two friends I have ventured forth into Second Life. A Double Dog Dare– is more like it. I’ve honestly found the whole experience a little flat. Perhaps I’ve been going to all the wrong places.

Anyway, in an effort to expand my experiences in SL, I’ve been trying to find a meeting to go attend. So wow… now I’ve found a healthcare conference to attend. But call me a cheap skate… there is no way I’m forking over $4700 Linden Dollars to go– especially when I have no idea who will be speaking or even who is organizing.
Are there really enough healthcare wonks out there who are into SL enough to spend some decent RL dollars to go to a conference like this?

Help me here… I’m obviously missing something.

Tags: Healthcare Second Life Conference Linden Labs

As some of you may know, I sit on the board of an animal rescue group in Atlanta.

If you actually drop by my site in person, you will see a number of items in my sidebar. However, for my friends who read me via my Feed, I kindly ask that you consider donating $10 to the Six Degree’s badge I’ve created for them.

If you are not familiar, SixDegrees is a joint undertaking of the Network for Good and Kevin Bacon to raise money through social media for nonprofit organizations. The six organizations that have the most number of people donating will have their donations matched by Mr. Kevin Bacon, himself.

Boy— would I love for our organization to win. We are an all-volunteer organization that rescues dogs from death row and finds them homes (BTW– over 70,000 animals in Atlanta are put to death each year because they can’t find a home).

Thus I am asking you kind folk to please consider helping me and Our Pals Place out. Click here to donate. Because it is the number of people who donate that counts most, I’m just asking that you donate the Network for Good minimum of $10.
I’d love to put the badge in the post, but it keeps knocking off the formatting of my blog. However, if you would like to put it on your site, you can get the code by clicking here and

I’d be forever in your debt for any help you can provide.

Tags: Our Pal’s Place Network For Good Six Degrees Kevin Bacon Animal Rescue Dogs

Today I heard that Georgia Congressman, Charles Norwood returned to Georgia today to enter hospice care for metastatic lung cancer.

For those of you who do not know, Congressman Norwood has been quite proactive in healthcare policy. He has been quite vocal about medical malpractice reform and was one of the driving forced behind the passage of the  “Patient Bill of Rights.”

Now I can’t say that I agreed with everything he put forth.  However, meeting him when I took a graduate school trip to DC to learn about health policy, made me respect him for what he was trying to do.  It was clear upon that short little meeting that Congressman Norwood really had the patient in mind and his intent was to make policy that would benefit those without power or voice.

It makes me sad that he reaches this point in his life and has had to step down from public service.  With that said, I wanted to take a moment to publically thank him for his efforts. I was going to email, but I’m sure the staffers are covered up and won’t be able to respond.  I know it sounds trite, but sincerely–my thoughts and prayer are with him and his family.

Thanks Congressman Norwood for caring enough to work hard for healthcare and many other issues.

One of my favorite topics is discussed this week at the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants posted today at Spare Change.

Eventhough I did not submit, Nedra picked up one of my posts to include. 

Thanks N!  That was really quite flattering.

I had the pleasure of meeting Nick Jacobs at the Healthcare blogging summit.  I heard him speak about his philosophies and practice of running a healthcare system.  I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.

You see-  to him healthcare is about caring– plain and simple.  Caring enough about your patients, community and employees to do your best at all times and when you fall short of your own expectation be honest and forthright. Furthermore, his model breaks the traditional mold of the ivory tower of administrators and the us (clinicians) vs. them (admin) mentality that works to only harm the patients.  It seems that he fervently believes that if the leaders don’t care then there is no way for the organization to care.  Ultimately, this will burn out employees and translate to patients not getting what they need and deserve.  The clearest and most inspiring articulation of this was his post over at Hospital Impact.

Nick also has his own blog at Windber.  He definitely gave me a glimmer of hope that one day, if we get back to what matters, we can fix this mess.

One of the physicians (aka:  Blogging Doc) I work with will be interviewed on a local radio station (Radio Sandy Springs) on Feb 5th at noon.  You can listen to this online.

Read more at his blog:  Click Here

During my Christmas break, I had a few moments to sit down and indulge in some absurd hours of quality TV time catching up on all of my missed episodes of Poirot and Midsomer Murders. During that time, commercials came, were muted and then I was returned back to my indulgent, guilty pleasure of doing nothing and watching TV.

At that time, one series of commercials always scared me and made me gasp– even after the second and third run. I have not seen them since, but I still remember the company and product. They were Volkswagon commercials where there are a car full of people driving along talking about mundane things (the funniest being the men talking about the side effects disclaimer of DTC advertising of ED medications) and then from out of nowhere– CRASH! Head on, side impact– in the filming the other car just appears. Then the commercial closes with everyone out of the car, shocked but ok— illustrating the safety of the vehicles. Click here and select “Like” to see one of the ads.

In a new spin on using the unexpected, State Farm has started the “Now What” ad campaign. They are using a series of short films where bad things unexpectedly happen to people’s property and then you see the logo and webaddress for the “Now What” campaign. Which — in no longer than it took to fire up old bessie, had me typing in the web address and seeing what all of this is about.

Why does this work so well and how can we use it in healthcare?

In Chip and Dan Heath’s book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, they spend a whole chapter on explaining why surprise works in marketing. One reason why the unexpected works is that it grabs a person’s attention and stimulates an emotion within the person. Such is my experience with the VW ad.

As for the “Now What” campaign, it worked for me because it surprised me and then left me hanging. The Heath brothers explain this in the terms of The Gap Theory of Curiosity- originally articulated by George Lowenstein of Carneigie Mellon. Simply put– this theory states that curiosity occurs when we perceive a gap in our knowledge. These gaps produce subjective discomfort that requires some sort of action to dispell — similar to having an itch that we need to scratch.

This theory likely explains why I love to luxuriate in mystery TV marathons. Those shows expertly tap-dance on my curiosity buttons and I keep watching because I want to gather more information. I suppose secretly, I think I can best Poirot or Barnaby in figuring out who-done-it.

In healthcare, we can really use this tactic to our benefit. One’s individual health is a very personal and emotional issue to most. So–like I am obviously are a sucker for having my curiosity stimulated, most people have a sensitivity to being engaged in anything that relates to their own health interests. I think the statistics about people seeking health information on the internet speak to the validity of this notion.

By using surprise and creating a perception of a gap in knowlege, we can increase the likelyhood that individuals will be “drawn” to us as resource. What we then need to focus on is creating an environment (virtual or live) that will encourage and educate seekers to take action/ implement behavior changes that can have a positive impact on their health.

If done well and people are able to find the answers they seek, then the subtle emotional experience of that is that ‘we’ care and are able to meet needs. This, in turn, can increase reputation, provide content for word-of-mouth referrals, increase the subjective perception of wanting to be one of ‘those people’ who get their care from THE BEST and otherwise get people in your door to see what you are about. If the quality of care they receive is consistent with the perception, you are on your way to creating loyal customers that no longer need to be ‘won’.

Tags: Made To Stick healthcare marketing unexpected volkswagon NowWhat Chip Heath Dan Heath

As my mentor and friend Toby Bloomberg says: “Blogging is about relationships and community.” After a 16 months participating in the blogosphere, I have been able to meet and get to know a host of others who share my interests and who have taught me a few things.

One of those people is Nedra Kline Weinreich. She’s smart, witty, creative and has a good heart, to boot. She has a real knack of communicating social marketing how-tos to inspire positive changes in behavior with the goal of improving health or creating social change.

Nedra is holding a training session on March 28-30 in Washington DC. She has set up a Squidoo Page to give information about the agenda and the content. If you can’t go, then consider purchasing her book from this page– as squidoo will donate a portion to a charity of Nedra’s choice. Plus it will get you started thinking in a whole new way!

Held in conjuction with the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, some of the training highlights of the seminar include:

• How social marketing uses commercial marketing tools to create behavior change
• How to think like a social marketer
• How to develop a strategy using the 8 Ps of the social marketing mix
• How to design effective messages and materials
• How to work with the media to get your message out through news and entertainment programming
• How to use cutting-edge technologies to put the new media to work for you
• How to get the most out of your social marketing budget — even if it’s small

Given all the work I’ve got piled up for the non-profit I’m a part of and my other blog, I wish I could go. However, right now significant travel is just not in the budget (time or money). However, if Nedra comes to Atlanta— I’m so IN! and I’m dragging some friends! Hint!!! Hint!!!

However in the honor code of BBF-edness (Best Blogging Friends) and fellow RUSH fan-edness (The Band not the simpleminded pundit–no google juice for him!), Nedra has generously created a cool coupon so that DIT readers can get a little savings if they can attend. You get $75 off of registration if you register and use the code: DIT75    Cool Huh!!!

Tags: Social Marketing University Nedra Kline Weinreich Social Change Nonprofits conferences Washington DC

The quotation of the week overheard in our office as a doctor was giving some Rozerem samples to the patient:

“What! You want to give me a drug advertised by Abe Lincoln and some ratty-ass rodent? Come on now doc!”

John Mack over at Pharma Marketing Blog has been quite critical of the ads for Rozerem (a new sleep medication) which is made and marketed by Takeda Pharmaceuticals.

Honestly, I didn’t like the ads and I was getting tired of seeing them EVERYWHERE, but I did not find them as offensive/stupid as Mr. Mack. After visiting Japan a year ago, I had just thought that Takeda had used the Japanese trend of using furry characters to advertise the medication. (For those of you who have not been to Japan, you never see anything advertised without an animated little Pikachu thingy with a high pitched voice).

However, now it seems that this advertising campaign is losing whatever punch it had. It never was something that generated a positive emotional response to the product, but the creativity did garner attention.

Now– the ad seems to be having a detrimental effect. It was too obtuse— the average guy was never able to figure out the symbolism, the above average guy was not moved by the symbolism. Now the insane frequency of the ads are annoying people. The lack of any sort of content that would enable people to ‘identify’ with the product is now coming back to make people doubt the efficacy of the medication and the motives of the company.

Takeda really needs to re-think their strategy. Afterall, at least in our office/state, the drug requires prior authorization for most insurances to pay for it. So— add a stupid, annoying ad that turns off patients with increased administrative nightmares for the prescriber and you get a medication that nobody will prescribe because patients don’t want it enough to warrant the hassles (20 minutes on average per patient) of doing the paperwork.

I suppose that to date there has always been a good ROI on DTC advertisements. I guess people think that it is pretty much of a slam dunk that can’t be messed up. Instead, the Takeda/Rozerem story may go down as the textbook case of where things went terribly wrong.

Tags: Rozererm, pharmaceutical marketing, insomnia

Photo credits: Leedy-Voulkos