solution

A spoonful of research helps the medicine go down

The only difference between doctors and other consumers is that this is a classic b2b market, in which customers are not in themselves the end consumers. However, they still have a set of beliefs about the value of a brand for themselves and their patients. It is imperative, therefore, that researchers get beyond doctors’ rational and logical outer shell. They need to find a robust way to underpin functional data with the kind of emotionally driven information that could be used to feed into differentiated pharmaceutical products. Having long known that doctors were adept at assuming and maintaining a professional, logical ‘distance’ in research, the Insight Research Group began looking at how this behaviour might affect the depth of the overall findings. The often thoughtful, cogent, technical and articulate responses from doctors were in themselves something of a barrier to getting at the more fundamental drivers and triggers for prescribing that were required to make really compelling campaigns. This led to the development of a research approach that placed a greater emphasis on non-direct questioning, increased observation and interpretation of materials, generated from purpose-designed exercises. In small workshops, doctors participated in group and individual work that helped to dismantle the ‘doctor’ behaviour and facilitate access to their deeper ‘sensing’ levels. At the analysis stage, the specific sorts of communication, imagery, language and even tone that would help the brand to trigger response at both rational and emotional levels became the focus.