Yesterday, March 8th was International Women’s Day in case you missed it. It’s a day aimed at inspiring women, celebrating their achievements and advocating for bigger and better things in the future. This year several Med Tech companies supported International Women’s Day in a variety of ways. Here are a couple of our favorites:
More than 62M girls stayed home from school today across the globe. Unfortunately that’s not by choice. The Let Girls Learn initiative was started to address the physical, cultural and financial challenges that are preventing girls from attending and completing school. Says the organization, “Educating girls can transform lives, families, communities, and entire countries. When girls are educated, they lead healthier and more productive lives. They gain the skills, knowledge, and confidence to break the cycle of poverty and help strengthen their societies.”
GE is still bringing good things to life – whether that’s still their slogan or not. The company has focused significant efforts in India specifically by supporting skill building and education with a special focus on empowering women. GE has undertaken a series of initiatives in support of the well-being of the community in Chakan, near Pune, Maharashtra, where it has set up the first of its kind multi-modal manufacturing facility. ‘To ease the commute of girl students, we provided them bicycles,’ – Amit Kumar, Director, Global Supply Chain, GE South Asia.
‘GE’s continued focus on diversity, leadership and career broadening opportunities for women is testament to women being celebrated at work every day!’ Rachana Panda, Chief Communications Officer, GE South Asia.
Abbott and the Abbott Fund is working with Nobel Prize nominee Sakena Yacoobi to empower women as healthcare providers in Afghanistan as part of the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL). Abbott’s support has helped provide health education and critical care for more than 1.5M women and children. They have enabled the training of more than 75 midwives and continue to support women-staffed clinics which helps provide not only health care, but jobs and economic opportunities for these women and their communities.
Says Katherine Pickus Divisional Vice President, Global Citizenship and Policy at Abbott, “What we found within a year of their completion of training is that each and every midwife had a job and was making money for her family, investing that money in their girls’ education, and really developing a cycle of empowerment.”
We’ve taken the pledge for parity, have you?
So many companies are doing their part of make a difference for us all. We thank them for their efforts!
The return on investment in marketing and advertising activities has always been tricky. It doesn’t help that sales can be quantified in a number of different ways – dollars, units, share. And then when you add the extra complexity of selling on consignment, slob rates, inventory turnover, contracted pricing, NGOs, it’s no wonder that clearly demonstrating the impact that your marketing dollars are having can be tough!
In the world of pharma, you can track scripts and refills. That data is fairly easy to buy. Not so with medical devices. So what do you?
Here are some different ways to think about marketing metrics for the medical device world
1. Determine your marketing objectives:
Your marketing metrics should be directly tied to your objectives. Hopefully you have already determined your marketing objectives, but if not, take a look at our template for building S.M.A.R.T goals and objectives.
Let’s create a hypothetical situation as an example to use. Say you’re expanding the use of a device you currently market into a new adjacent space – for a new procedure.
So, one of your objectives could be to educate your current customers that ARE performing this type of procedure but not using your device or technique because they have no idea that it can be used this way. And for these customers, you want to get them to switch from what they’re currently using to your product.
A second objective could be to educate your current customers that ARE not performing this type of procedure on the procedure and encourage trial and adoption.
And maybe a third objective is to target surgeons that are currently performing this procedure but not using your device or technique. And for these customers, you want to get them to switch from what they’re currently using to your product.
Which of these would be considered ‘low hanging fruit’? Number 1, right? And which would be considered your second most achievable objective? It could be 2 because the sales force is already at that call point and has already established a relationship with that physician. BUT unless your reps are really good at procedure-based selling, they may not be equipped to actually teach a new technique or procedure to a physician. So depending on the resources you have available and the competancies of your organization, it actually may be easier to get in front of a new physician and try to steal competitive share.
2. Identify what is important to measure and how to measure it:
So often we work with clients who outline their marketing objectives and then maybe define a couple of strategies for meeting said objectives, but there are three additional steps that you can take when building out your marketing plans that will really help you more clearly track the impact of those strategies.
The first is to decide what is important to measure and how exactly you’re going to measure it
Are you going to look at awareness of the overall procedure?
Awareness of your product?
Awareness of your product in the procedure?
Number of participants registering for a training?
Number of accounts trialing the device?
Usage?
And then depending on the metrics you choose, how can you measure those? Can you track awareness via a formal market research study? Could you do a sampling of attendees at upcoming conventions? What about tracking online search volumes, or traffic to specific landing pages on your website. How about rep reported metrics or establishing an early experience trial or usage contest?
3. Define your baseline:
Okay so once you understand what is important to measure, then you have to define your baseline. How many times have we heard that old adage that you can’t get where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been? So for our hypothetical, say we choose to measure actual usage. In this case, our baselines could look like this:
Current customer set: Articulate the number of total CURRENT customers you have and segment that by the number that are currently performing the procedure versus those that aren’t. If you have 1000 current customers and 300 are currently performing this type of procedure then your baseline is:
0% usage by 30% of the current customer base
0% usage by 70% of the current customer base
Potential customer set: Articulate the number of total POTENTIAL customers you have and segment that by the number that are currently performing the procedure versus those that aren’t. If you have 2000 potential customers and 800 are currently performing this type of procedure then your baseline is:
0% usage by 40% of the potential customer base
Note: in this example we don’t care about the potential customer base that isn’t performing the procedure because that’s a lot of work!
4. Quantify the results you’re looking for:
Finally, once you have an idea of what your baseline looks like, then you can forecast the potential impact that specific brand strategies will have on those different metrics. Make sure that those results are reasonable and take the selling cycle into account. If it generally takes 6 months to close a new customer, don’t expect to convert 15% of your potential customer base by month 3. But maybe that is a reasonable expectation for the 30% of your current customers that are using your device and performing the procedure.
5. Track and adjust:
Once you’ve drawn the line in the sand, have identified your objectives, your metrics, understand your baseline and set your goals, put your strategies in motion! And then track the impact that you’re having whether that’s through formal quarterly reviews, monthly reportings, weekly calls, whatever it is, just don’t let the good work go to waste. Because by tracking what you’re doing and the results that you’re able to achieve you can make adjustments throughout the year that will better ensure that you hit every one of the milestones you’ve set for the year.
So there you have it. 5 steps for creating meaningful marketing metrics for med device marketeers!
Determine your objectives
Identify what is important and how to measure it
Define your baseline
Quantify the results you’re looking for
Track and adjust
And if you are still hungry for more – click below for a deeper dive into Step #2. A little cheat sheet 6 Metrics that Matter Most (to your boss that is).
In all seriousness, thank you. Thank you for being our clients, our customers, our followers, our friends. We don’t offer heartfelt thanks or praise enough but saying ‘Thank you’ is one of the most powerful phrases in the human language. As our thanks to you, here’s Laura Trice’s TED Talk on the importance of Thanks.
What in the world do we mean by your brand’s SQ? No doubt you’ve heard of I.Q (Intelligence Quotient) and perhaps even E.Q (Emotional Quotient / Intelligence). Now a high IQ doesn’t necessarily translate into anything meaningful in life – fortunately or unfortunately depending. But a high EQ? Then you also likely have better job performance, enhanced leadership leadership skills and even increased overall mental health. So developing your EQ can actually make you a better employee, a better manager, a better parent and give you a better overall perspective on life.
Excellent. But what about the SQ at hand?
At The Matchstick Group, we believe that just as it is important to develop your personal EQ, the same could be said of your brand’s Strategic Quotient or SQ.
FOUR THINGS MARKETERS SHOULD CONSIDER AS PART OF THEIR BRAND’S STRATEGIC QUOTIENT
The here and now of where you are
You know that saying, you won’t get where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been? That’s so important when it comes to the marketing of med device and med-tech. The clockspeed of innovation is usually such that you could be launching a ‘next generation’ product in the next six months to a year. So clearly defining where you are right this minute is critical.
Brand vision
And equally as important is a clear picture of where your brand is going. The strategy at launch is often reflective of what’s going on in the market at that moment. However, in order to optimize a product or portfolio launch, teams really need to understand not just where the market is now, but where it’s going in the next 2-3 years. Only by understanding potential future states can companies proactively develop and shape the landscape to optimize their products success.
Brand vector & velocity
Once you’ve identified understand your brand’s vision, how are you going to get from where you are to where you want to be? What direction will you take and how quickly do you need to move? If you’re launching a new product for instance, are you launching it into an existing category or creating a new category? How much market development needs to be done and by when?
By working through the brand’s Vision and then mapping out the Vector and Velocity, you can really set the stage to increase your overall Strategic Quotient and make the biggest impact on the market as efficiently as possible – and as we all know – time is money!
At The Matchstick Group, one of the ways we help companies do this is by conducting what we call our 3-V Planning Workshop: Vision, Vector & Velocity. We help our clients uncover the primary drivers in the market from a macro (social, economic, political) and from a more micro (competition, hospital/rep relationship, procedural rate increase / decrease, reimbursement). And then as a function of those micro and macro factors, we can help them identify the vision and positioning for their brand that sets them up for success. From there we look at where we (and the market) are currently in order to understand the Vector (direction) and Velocity (speed) that we need to shape the market we’re competing in.
I just got off the phone with a client who asked if we could post a recent Webinar up to their website. No problem – we have tons of medical device animations and physician case videos on their site already. But this was a little different. This file needed to be available for a short period of time, only for a pre-specified audience AND they wanted for it to be password protected. Okay, that’s a little bit different… We could spend a ton of time and money creating a portal, registering users, building profiles and firewalls, but our clients needed this up yesterday and they didn’t have the luxury of spending a lot of time or money.
Here’s how we did it…
Now first of all, I have to give a shout-out to WebEx because if you’re looking to record video on the cheap, it’s a great way to go. We have been using their service for years and we’ve used it in a number of ways
1. Market Research: We’ve used WebEx in the past to conduct one on one physician interviews.We also tried UStream and a specialty Panasonic HD video recorder with built-in wif to no avail. WebEx was fantastic. The record function allows you to capture and save both audio and video files. The webcam functionality also enabled us to conduct interviews at a physician conference in the UK and stream them live to the US, Japan and EMEA markets. We recorded the videos and were able to store them directly onto the Webex server. Webex even has an option to schedule the sessions in advance so our clients were able to check-in to see what interviews were coming up next.
2. Physician Case Presentations: Physician case presentations and actual interventions that demonstrate how thought leaders use a given product – that’s the content that they (physicians) find most valuable. It’s some of the most shared content too.
3. Internal Videos: We have developed internal videos for multiple clients. But with internal videos, budgets contraints can be quite high, especially when R&D is in a different location than marketing, etc… For one client, we used WebEx to help us facilitate and monitor a video shoot in Israel from NY, NJ and CA.
4. Webinars: And then of course there are webinars – the very thing that our client above was looking for!
So once we had the video, how did we post the content and make it private in about 15 minutes?
Vimeo Pro. We use private channels on YouTube to host a lot of video because we like the ability to set up ‘play lists’, but YouTube doesn’t offer the ability to password protect specific videos the way that we (and our clients) needed to in this case.
With Vimeo you can:
Upload files up to 100M
Make your videos available everyone
Make your videos available only to people who have a link or who have been ‘approved’
Password protect your videos
So there you have it.
Video can be a great online tool for attracting and educating new and potential customers. Our med device clients have found it invaluable both online and offline in this day of Show & Sell. And physicians are much more likely to stop and watch a case presentation than read a dense printed how to guide. For real examples
If you have a video that you need hosted, password protected and shared our recommendation would be VimeoPro. If you need an easy way to capture specific moments consider WebEx. And if you have some great content, but no where to house it – consider reaching out to us to build your new site ; )
For those of us in the med device industry, we know that there are geographic pockets that seem to incubate new device technology. The fact that California is the top of the list comes as no surprise. We’ve been jetting out to Orange County and San Francisco to meet with clients for years. But the fact that more and more innovation is coming from the mid West and some of the Southern states – North Carolina and Georgia – is both intriguing and refreshing.
And we can tell you first hand that organizations like the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston where we are now located is on the cutting edge of innovation, technology and entrepreneurship.
My first introduction to the idea of 3D printing came in 2010 when I read this great little gem of a book written by an advertising exec. For the life of me, I can’t remember the name or the author. Sad, I know. But Andy Spitzer, who’s now the Creative Director at GSW lent it to me once while we were working together and there were some great stories about Nike and other big brands but one thing that struck me is that this agency had procured a 3D printer – ‘way back when’. Now either they were completely visionary or they had way too much money on their hands but I just remember thinking how cool that was. And now of course 3D printing is becoming much more mainstream – and we’re seeing loads of potential applications in the med device space. But we haven’t seen a lot of it in advertising and/or promotion yet.
This month, Huggies launched a new Counting Down the Days campaign, which of course has incredibly moving stories of moms as they dream about their little babes to be. But the one episode (I can’t even call it a commercial) that moved me to tears was the one that they shot in Brazil with a mother who is blind. The story follows the mother as she thinks about her baby – all of the things that she wants to show him, for him to feel, smell, taste and touch. And then it transitions into the OB office where her physician is doing an ultrasound. He describes what he sees on the screen and then unbeknownst to her, prints it out in 3D. He hands it to her and she – and probably everyone on the set sobs as she ‘sees’ her yet to be born son for the first time.
This campaign is brilliant – yes it touches on the heartstrings and it makes use of some really cool, ‘it’ technology. But more than that, it positions the brand so beautifully as the one that helps a mom hug her baby – even when she can’t.
If you haven’t the campaign yet, check it out below!
New technologies are providing opportunities for completely changing the business worlds that our companies operate in. The Matchstick Group is no exception and in fact, we rely on technologies like video conferencing via Skype, file sharing via DropBox and YouSendIt, and project management systems like BaseCamp to operate virtually in a much more efficient manner. This saves us money on overhead and gives our creative teams the flexibility to work at a frequency, time and pace that works for them. All in all, we save ourselves – and our clients – time and money.
At the same time, there is something inherently human about our business. The Agency Creative teams can’t function in a silo and Agency/Client relationships that are conducted solely via email are fraught with ‘miscommunications’. People do business with people that they like and they trust and nothing builds a stronger relationship faster than a face-to-face conversation.
In this article in Return on Performance magazine, founder Melissa Wildstein was interviewed by Jodi Ferguson on the ins and outs of operating with a virtual workforce. I recommend setting clear guidelines and expectations all around, communicating frequently and always going out of your way to grab a beer with a co-worker.
LinkedIn can be an especially powerful tool for building your business or brand in the B2B space. When you look at the statistics, 96% of Americans are on Facebook so it’s no wonder that many people are focusing efforts there. But the second highest percentage of people are networking on LinkedIn and the types of transactions that are being conducted on LinkedIn are different than on Facebook.
Most people are on Facebook to update their photos, checking-in to see what their friends are doing – they’re using it more for personal and social purposes (and a recent poll suggests that less than 20% of people have ever made a purchase based on something that they saw on Facebook). LinkedIn on the other hand is primarily a business networking site, so if you’re looking to network with potential customers (yes, MDs are on LinkedIn too!), recruit talent or otherwise engage in industry-wide discussion, LinkedIn is a great place to go.
LinkedIn is also a place where the playing field is somewhat leveled between the ‘big boys’ and the smaller start-ups. Regardless of whether you have a $100M or a $100 marketing budget, everyone kind of looks the same on LinkedIn. So it’s a great place where as a smaller med device start-up, you can start to build some credibility. So then the question becomes, how can you build credibility and portray yourself as an expert on LinkedIn?
Set up your company profile on LinkedIn. You can increase your exposure on LinkedIn by creating a company profile which can include your location, related companies, employees, products and services, etc… Just as people can add your personal profile to their LinkedIn Network, they can also follow your company. This is also a great way to keep stealthy tabs on your competition and what they’re doing (!)
Join and Participate in Industry Groups on LinkedIn. It’s your job to be an expert in your field. That’s why people buy your products and hire your company because you provide a unique product, service or expertise that they need. The beauty of LinkedIn Groups is that they’re a ‘safe place’ where people can talk, hang-out and meet others in the industry. By participating in these groups and sharing good, salient, VALUE-ADDED information, you’ll generate the interest and respect of your group members. Just like in any social-networking forum, opinion leaders and experts start to rise and bubble to the top, so join some groups and participate in the conversation.
Ask for recommendations on LinkedIn. Recommendations are something that you can use on your website, in your marketing materials and even in your internal communications to your team. Nothing motivates a sales team more than a physician or patient success story. Plus, recommendations show up on your profile and are a great way to quickly demonstrate both the types of products that you develop and the types of customers who appreciate your work.
Post Your White Papers, Poster Presentations and Clinical Papers in a Group: LinkedIn is a B2B communication zone. People in groups want to talk and learn more. If you publish new content, post it in relevant groups on LinkedIn, and pick up new exposure, comments, and potentially new customers.
One note of caution: Keep in mind that most of the content on LinkedIn will be publicly available so do make sure that you’re mindful of what you are posting as it will be read by physicians and consumers alike as well as by friends – and potential foes.
The rise of 3D printing technology has opened up exciting new opportunities and possibilities for medicine, particularly in the medical device space. Some early game changing instances have already been reported this year, as a 3-D printed medical device was used earlier this year to save an infant’s life.
In late May, 6-month-old Kaiba Gionfriddo was diagnosed with tracheobroncholomalacia, a condition where breathing is impaired due to soft cartilage throughout the trachea. Had Kaiba been brought into Univeristy of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s hospital a year later, this condition would have been fatal. Fortunately for Kaiba, among those handling his case was Scott Hollister, a biomedical engineer who had been exploring the medical applications of 3-D printing. When no option seemed available, he stepped in with the idea of creating a custom splint that would fit into the infant’s trachea. The medical team proceeded to take a CT scan of Kaiba’s chest and then create a 3-D render of the child’s trachea. From here, they designed and printed a custom splint that would be a perfect fit once implanted. Within three weeks, Kaiba had resumed normal breathing without the assistance of a ventilator.
The case is an early example of what could soon become the norm in life-saving medical technologies. While the technology of 3D printing has been around since 1984, the last five years have expanded the range of models expanding both the large scale capabilities and reach in larger consumer markets. The trend in technological development shows that as 3D printers are becoming smaller and cheaper to make, their range of capabilities are growing in depth. For hospitals and medical centers, this means owning a 3D printer could soon be common practice and no longer a privilege afforded to specialized centers such as C.S. Mott’s Children hospital.
Combined with CT Scanning capabilities, 3D printing could lead to an increased number of devices that will be created to specifically match the need of that patient. Additionally, as the range of materials that can be printed are expanded, common and frequently used disposables could soon become printed based on need, potentially freeing up shelf space and opening up inventory for items that previously could not be justified keeping on site.
Assuming the inevitability of 3D Printing devices in hospitals, it is worth predicting how this new technology could affect companies that currently manufacture the devices that could be printing. First, how medical devices are licensed and intellectually owned could be brought up into debate. As hospitals begin printing their own devices on a larger scale, manufacturers of those designs might claim licensing over their design. While the hospital would seek to save costs by printing such devices themselves, these manufacturers could charge a licensing fee as is seen in other industries. Claiming licensing over 3D printing blueprints for certain medical devices could offer manufacturers a unique financial incentive as well, potentially allowing them to evade the medical device tax posed by Obamacare. One way to think about how this system could function is to consider how we digitally purchase music today from a platform such as iTunes. While we are not paying for a physical manifestation of a song, we still pay a licensing fee to iTunes as part of every music purchase that grants us rights to play that song. Device manufacturers could lease product blue prints to hospitals the same way, charging hospitals for the rights to print certain materials.
As has been the case with the music industry, 3D printing could also lead to “pirating” medical devices. This issue has already arisen in other fields of 3D printing. In May of this year, a US company Defense Distributed produced a blueprint that could be downloaded and used to print a working firearm, spurring a new debate over gun control amid fears of unregulated gun printing. With a life on the line, it is not unreasonable to imagine a scenario where a hospital on a tight budget could turn to a pirated blueprint for an emergency device. Unfortunately, these unlicensed blueprints would have not have the same guarantees and would put a patient at risk.
Considering again the manufacturers of medical devices, one final problem 3D printing could pose is the lost of income medical device manufacturers could face as a their products become increasingly printed instead of bought in bulk. While it is easy to chalk this up to pure capitalism and claim it as an instance of new technology replacing the old, it cannot be ignored that the profits of these sales are more often used to fuel the innovation and creation of new technologies. With the sudden loss of a stable revenue stream, manufacturers could curtail researching efforts, resulting in a wide spread reduction in the rate at which new medical devices are produced.
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