Why customer strategy is the missing link in marketing personalization

Organizations have been investing in omnichannel capabilities to evolve the commercial model and deliver improved personalization and customer impact. But to date, these investments too often have had an underwhelming impact.
 

There are numerous reasons why this is the case. Digital investments (in buying tech tools, decision engines, AI, data scientists, etc.) have been used to make marketing and sales operations faster and smarter. Decision engines determine the next best action for a customer to receive; they also determine the optimal field suggestions for the rep to leverage. All are examples of improving operations using data, insights or AI.
 

But brand teams still plan exactly the same way they did before any of this investment was made. The typical brand plan focuses on strategic imperatives, then identifies campaigns to run. Very few brand plans focus on the customer engagement they’re trying to deliver. Since there’s no customer strategy today, the decision engines, martech and data scientists are optimizing operations metrics, not necessarily strategy. There is a gap between what the brands are trying to do and what operations is doing. This is apparent when brand teams don’t know or aren’t involved in how the decision engines are delivering and optimizing for customers.
 

As a result, companies spend a lot of money on tools and capabilities. But since brand teams (who set strategy) don’t really understand how the tools work, they don’t get too involved, and they simply trust the operations team, IT team or analytics team to drive them without providing much input.
 

These problems occur because while companies have designed the marketing engine to deliver customer engagement at scale, they haven’t established the capability for customer strategy in the organization. Organizations have product strategy capabilities (like brand strategy and planning) and customer engagement execution capabilities (including marketing operations). But there’s a missing link preventing companies from realizing gains from their omnichannel efforts: the capability for customer engagement strategy and planning.
 

The current model impedes planning for increased personalization and creates a disconnect between marketing and the marketing operations and digital teams and sales operations. The gap also affects sales and sales operations. Field suggestions are a decision-engine output, but if the brand team isn’t engaged (or not engaged well), then not only will the digital tactics be disconnected from the strategy but the field suggestions will be too. The result is tension and a misaligned work product.
 

To get the most out of the omnichannel transformation and to deliver on a new future model, pharma companies must build that missing organizational capability.

A review of strategy and planning tools finds that most of today’s organizations don’t have a unified view of the customer. Instead, brand planning focuses on the product and the brand’s strategic imperatives. For example, we see many strategic imperatives that read like this: “Establish Product X as the therapy of choice” or “Leverage belief in Y to strengthen Product X’s positioning.” Tactical plans are organized by tactic or campaign rather than by customer, focusing on “what we will do” but not “who we will do it with.” And key campaigns are often product-oriented, not customer-oriented.

Today, accountability for the customer and the customer strategy belongs to no one and everyone, both across functions and products (since multiple products go to the same customer). Insights and analytics owns the mining and assessment of customer barriers. Product marketing owns customer unmet needs and segmentation by brand. Field reps own individual customer context and insights. Field planning and operations owns targeting and call plan objectives. Marketing operations owns touch point delivery and business rules. And creative agencies own customer experience and content style and format.

These processes don’t support the increased personalization that customers are coming to expect. Objectives are set at the brand level on an annual basis. Message flows are developed for sales calls, and linear, predefined journeys are agency driven, not data driven, ignoring customer variations. Finally, content development and approval processes are slow, with limited variations. The bottom line: reliance on aggregate planning means that we’re tailoring for no one.

Fifteen years ago, pharma didn’t have personalization capabilities. Deploying a five-segment solution to market was a significant undertaking, and the industry’s strategic planning reflected these constraints. Today pharma can use AI to deliver an “n=1” experience. But the approach to strategy and planning still assumes we’re struggling to deploy a five-segment solution to market. The ability to deliver customer personalization has outstripped the industry’s ability to plan for customer personalization.

Other industries (like banking, technology, consumer tech or retail) have embedded the capabilities to use individual-level insights to develop and deploy dynamic offers and content to unlock customer behavior. They do ongoing A/B testing and content organization, and they continuously monitor and improve to achieve customer goals. Pharma does some of these activities, but it doesn’t strategically plan for customer engagement. 

It’s time for a strategy “catch up.” Pharma organizations can develop a customer strategy and planning capability by solving for the following:

• People: An owner and accountability for strategy and performance with customers
• Process: A process that connects between product and delivery
• Technology: The tools to deliver personalization at scale

Pharma needs to start by restructuring marketing to put the customer at the center. It needs to create accountability for thinking through and delivering on the customer strategy. Today’s marketer spends most of their time asking questions like, “How do customers perceive my product’s efficacy or safety? What are my product’s biggest value drivers? What data points are strongest versus the competition? What is my product’s share?” and so on. These questions are still important. But so are questions like “Where is the growth going to come from in the market? With which customers? With whom am I trying to drive depth or breadth in my portfolio? What products will be of most value to my customers? What content will have the most impact? How do customers want to be engaged?”
 

Accountability for the customer can be established by creating a function within marketing for customer strategy and planning. The customer engagement strategist is separate from the product and portfolio strategy and from engagement execution (including marketing operations). This role leads a coordinated effort to plan and drive customer behavioral shifts. This role is responsible for customer strategy and engagement planning, as well as experience design.
 

Customer strategy and planning include setting the customer strategy across the portfolio, designing data-backed tailored engagement plans for each customer, optimizing product and channel mix and defining metrics to measure engagement success.
 

Customer experience design includes defining the target customer experience by leveraging data, analytics and behavioral science and working with content centers of excellence or agencies to develop a modular content message and creative.
 

A focus on these areas drives more activity around the customer and around delivering impact. This leaves the product and portfolio strategists to focus more upstream on portfolio strategy (for example, life-cycle management, collaboration with market access, medical and evidence). Meanwhile, customer engagement execution and marketing operations can focus on measuring and optimizing the experience using predictive analytics and AI.

Today’s marketer spends 20% of their time on strategy, typically focusing on a single brand with a product-first mindset, according to a ZS benchmarking study. In the future, product strategy will become more strategic and savvy, focusing on medical, real-world evidence and life-cycle management. But organizations will also need clear accountability and a process for customer strategy and engagement planning.
 

By creating a customer strategy, we create a unified view of and for the customer that can drive the actions of the organization. This customer strategy includes defining and understanding:

• Who our customer is. Creating defined customer target segments (behavioral, adoption ladder, etc.), articulating the value of the portfolio for the customer, a defined customer value, planned breadth versus depth of prescribing, and utilization and the value “locked up” in the customer group.
• Our objectives with the customer. For example, why we believe that we can shift their behaviors (current penetration or upside, lookalike and propensity models, alignment of core needs to protect benefits); desired behavioral shifts (with whom are we trying to maintain, grow or drive advocacy); and understanding context, practice dynamics or engagement practices. There should also be key performance indicators, metrics and goals for the customer so that we know we have successfully delivered on the experience.
• How we are activating the customer (or market). This includes key moments to drive in the market and strategies to employ. Strategies could be community building, enabling network effects and building individual contributors.
• How we define the experience we need to deliver. For example, how we want customers to feel when engaging with us, what needs to be and feel consistent for the customer across touch points, implications for channel plans and the type of experience we want to deliver (top-tier or self-service, etc.), as well as capabilities required to deliver on this experience.

By starting from a customer strategy, we create an opportunity to bring a portfolio perspective to the table.
 

This is where other industries have managed to incorporate personalization. From Starbucks to Mattel to Wayfair and beyond, many companies are using technology to meet their customers where they are. To make this change, pharma’s planning process will need to shift from planning at the personal level to planning at a more granular level to drive personalization. The customer strategy will still be developed at the segment level, but it will be implemented at an n=1 level.
 

For example, all 100 HCP “loyalists” will receive the same strategy. And the customer strategist will develop the strategy for the loyalists segment and the AI or decision engine will deliver that strategy in an n = 1 way. One loyalist who is a “digital lover” will get many digital tactics and another who prefers face-to-face will get many face-to-face touch points. This is very different from before, when brands planned at a segment level and then ops ensured that all HCPs in the segment got the same thing at the same time.
 

The current practice of persona-based segments and their objectives driving message development, journeys and content development leads to a lack of personalization and impact. While we still need groupings to plan against, we can drive more precision by planning at the “barrier” level within phases of the adoption journey. For example, marketing will still need to plan at a group level, and within that group there may be multiple barriers. It will be possible to plan against the barriers in the group and deploy AI against customer actions and behaviors. 

Advancements in AI can be used to infer the key underlying drivers and barriers at the n=1 level. This means integrating provider characteristics across broad forms of data, including market research, secondary data, cross-therapy area data and public data (not all at an n=1 level). Seeing the fuller picture of customers in their CONTEXT (customer insights, observations, needs, trends, environment, experience and touch points) brings a deeper level of understanding. AI models can be used to infer n=1 insights on needs, beliefs, behaviors and preferences and to identify n=1 level drivers and barriers, both scientific and nonscientific. To leverage the n=1 drivers, companies will also move from planning message arcs for each segment to planning tailored messages for each key driver and barrier.

To close the gap between strategy (brand focus) and ops (customer focus), the solution is to first have marketing recognize the problem, which can be indicated by underperforming AI or decision engine models. Then we need marketing to start planning for the customer, establishing customer-focused goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) versus planning for the brand with brand-centered goals and KPIs. This is a reinvention of marketing.
 

Here are some ways pharma companies can begin:

• Build new capabilities. Evolve the structure of the marketing organization to support the designation of both product strategy and customer engagement strategy. Define and build the customer engagement planning process for marketing teams, including rethinking brand planning, governance and marketing operations and enablement.
• Adapt within your existing framework. Begin to implement AI-enabled marketing, starting with a single brand, to identify drivers and barriers of adoption. Adjust the hiring profile to start building new talent that is geared toward customer engagement skills and digital acumen.
• Stop doing things that don’t align. Stop planning at the brand level in a silo without taking a holistic view of customer engagement at the broader portfolio level. Stop hiring marketers with limited understanding of customer strategy and engagement across channels.

Building this capability doesn’t mean creating a large customer marketing organization. Instead, the priority should be on changing the process and accomplishing things differently. By creating new steps in the process that are geared to filling gaps between process and execution, companies can bridge the link between strategy and planning around the customer. This is an opportunity to create an intersection point that didn’t exist before.
 

When companies adopt these processes and ways of engaging, everyone benefits. Customers have better experiences that are more tailored to them. Companies work more efficiently and improve their overall return on investment. And companies can be more purposeful in the way they work because they’re informed by an internal and external perspective on their customers, validated by metrics decoupled from the brand. Finally, companies can build a skill and capability that they haven’t had before, further readying themselves for the commercial model of tomorrow.