Whitepaper: Marketing to Gen X/Y HCPs

Date:                           July 15, 2011

                       

Analyst:                      Dr. Susan Dorfman, SVP, ByDoctor® and Customer Insights

 

Subject:                      Comments/Recommendations on the Emerging Prescribers

[This whitepaper is complementary to "My Generation," MedAdNews, June 2011.]

We all have clear experiences demonstrating that generations grow up with different beliefs and perspectives often driven by factors such as state of the world, economy, technology, and social trends. They all tend to impact the overall behavior of each generation – and this too holds true for healthcare professionals on whom our industry is so reliant.  

With nearly half of the nation’s physician base gearing up toward retirement, and an emerging generation of physicians growing in number, never before has it been so critical to understand the workstreams, promotional access channels, and experience needs of multiple generations of prescribers. The habits of emerging physicians differ from those of baby boomers, and it is important to understand each group and how they will work together.  

As such, we wanted to focus your attention to the following article “My Generation,” which provides leading industry insights on working with emerging prescribers. To complement the article, this document provides an additional perspective on how this emerging group of doctors differs from their baby boomer counterparts, in both their daily work preferences and engagement with Pharmaceutical companies. 

Deep understanding of these physicians’ workstreams, current brand experiences, and promotional access channels, including differences by generation, is key to promotional effectiveness. 

  • Baby Boomer Physicians
    • Want the prestige and revenue of a busy practice and satisfied patients who refer. 
    • Pharma’s contribution to education and support tools enables doctors to achieve better patient outcomes in less time (therefore seeing more patients to generate more revenue) will be key to this group. Understanding their busy schedule, giving these doctors the opportunity to access important information in ways easiest and most preferred will be important, and can include the use of their office assistant, nurse or administrator. These doctors tend to be highly promotionally accessible through non-personal promotion. The majority, based on a recent ByDoctor analysis, can be accessed using 5 or more channels.
    • While technology was a secondary learned behavior to this group, they have successfully embraced it into their worksteams on an as-needed basis, as a critical tool for gaining instant access to health and drug information. Providing these prescribers easy access to what they need, when they need it, will be key, and will result in a few trusted sources of integrated quality content.
    • These doctors will often work on weekends, so don’t be surprised if the best time to engage them in eDialog would be on a Saturday morning, when the family is asleep and they are checking email. 
    • This will not only be leveraged by them, but also by the other prescribers practicing with them under the group umbrella.
  • Emerging Physicians
    • Want the freedom of a work-life balance with a focus on innovation and outcomes that deliver healthy and even self-sufficient patients.
    • They are amalgamated to technology. They were born into it, and it is their daily life. It is in everything they do – particularly the mobile device.
    • Interestingly, these doctors are less promotionally accessible than their Baby Boomer counterparts – especially through access by email; yet demonstrate the greatest access through direct mail and medical journals and have the highest uptake of mobile vehicles for promotion.
    • Their trust of pharma is limited, so the provision of trusted, transparent and non-promotional patient self-help tools can be key for this group, particularly if they can access them (or get patients to access them) using mobile devices, the web or a medical assistant. Getting face to face access to these docs may be difficult, but multi-channel virtual access can certainly be achieved.

The commonality these doctors seem to have revolves around “multi-channel” access and experience development.  It is the closed-loop experience factor that will need to be integrated into the workstreams of Pharma Sales and Marketing teams – integrated with shared goals and objectives to deliver the ultimate experience to the prescribers and practices in which these unified brand and franchises teams jointly serve their customers by providing proactive information as well as serving them in response to their needs, time tables and demands across multiple channels of engagement. 

For more information on how CMI’s ByDoctor®, ByDoctor® OnDemand, Strategic Advisory and Promotional Planning services can help you segment and define experiences, preferences and promotional access channels to best reach and engage these prescribers, please contact Trey Riley at 317-506-2244.