Here are the top six golden rules for online marketing success.

Rule #1: Be Useful

Cut-through starts by making sure your communications are ‘useful’. The biggest message in recent years from consumers to all marketers is simply this: be useful to me, don’t sell to me. Add value to customers and patients by plugging pain points and gaps of knowledge, and providing them with something relevant to their issues, that takes them closer to achieving their treatment goals.

Rule #2: Emotion and Science Works

Use emotion, always! Use your brand’s unique mix of science and emotion to tell your story and connect with customers and patients. We, humankind, make decisions based on emotions. That’s why corporates invented procurement departments: to take the emotion out of buying! The most powerful way to connect with humans is through storytelling. Your online marketing content must be ‘story-rich.’

Rule #3: Determine your target audience and channel-plan

Make sure you’re going after the audience with the right focus or breadth to achieve your company, business unit, sales or communications goals. We often find that the GP, the HCP, the patient isn’t the only important audience to consider.

1. Who are you targeting?
2. Who are they engaging with to form opinions?
3. What channels are they using, what content are they looking at, what keyword phrases are they searching for?
4. Which of your competitors are indexing well for those search terms?
5. Where are the gaps in the channels, content, stories being used and told? Focus on filling the gap competitors are not active in so you can stand out.

Also, as you build out your strategy to cut through make sure you don’t miss out on trying to engage with the KOLs, the carers, pharmacists and other specialists that could help you achieve your objectives.

Rule #4:  Understand your customers’ journey   

When trying to solve the First Golden Rule, Be Useful, you’ll need to give the audience what they want and need. But if you don’t know what that is, you may want to map your customers journey and work out the opportunity for your brand to stand out.

1. What is the customer (HCP/Patient) diagnosis and treatment pathway?
2. What happens along this path, what is adequate and what are the problems?
3. What role does your brand play and how can it add value that’s differentiated from your competitors?
4. How does your customer read/view/interact with content along the journey? What channels, formats, frequency, voices?

At the end of completing this tip, your brand will be in a stronger position to fill the gaps and to dial-up its greatness.

Rule #5:  Integrate your channels 

When thinking about how to deliver a great impact, plan how your channels should work together to engage the audience at the right points in their journey. When channels are integrated, the customer’s experience is improved and the brand can achieve better results.

• Ensure your channels connect with one another and have synchronized messaging that funnels through awareness, engagement, and conversion.
• Involve your sales reps – ensure they understand your digital channels and can promote them.

Rule #6:  Engage with your audience 

If there is an opportunity to engage with an audience while being useful, take it! It will help your brand better understand your customer and potentially generate insights which in turn could add future value and improve health outcomes.

• Have a two-way conversation with your audience online, not just a static presence.
• There’s a significant opportunity for your audience to interact with you through chat-bot, social, Q&A submission.
• Ask: What are they (my customers) looking for, are they getting it, can we offer it to them, and are we interesting?
• What is the creative potential? Is there an opportunity for a brilliant idea, a really well-crafted design, something interactive?
• Engagement contextually in channel and medium.
• Influencers and KOLs are a key leverage here – our target customers listen to each other, and pay attention to the views of like-minded sources who they respect.

Simon Davies simon.davies@bastionbrands.com.au M: 0402 425 545

Omnichannel campaigns were ranked by Australia’s leading Pharmaceutical marketers as one of the least effective channels for marketing effectiveness in 2023 – yet the majority plan to double down on spending more in omnichannel in 2024.

• Omnichannel effectiveness is strongly linked to having a clear Omnichannel strategy and plan with cross-functional stakeholder buy-in from the top down. Pharmaceutical companies are obsessed with knowing ‘Where to Play, and How to Win’, yet when it comes to Omnichannel, there is a clear gap in developing this strategy and plan. Without a plan, there is no clarity on what “Effective” looks like, and therefore perceptions of impacts are often scored poorly.

• To develop the Omnichannel strategy and plan, Pharmaceutical companies need to assess their Omnichannel maturity and evaluate their baseline capability. Pharmaceutical companies often don’t have the capability or experience to measure Omnichannel maturity. Without this maturity benchmark, Pharmaceutical companies don’t know what Omnichannel goals to create or actions to take. 

• Omnichannel needs clear ownership and leadership. Pharmaceutical has unclear internal and/or external Omnichannel leadership, and without clear and accountable leadership, Omnichannel will remain ineffective.

Simon Davies simon.davies@bastionbrands.com.au M: 0402 425 545  Dan King  dan.king@bastionbrands.com.au M: 0439 190 700

Bastion Brands Executive Creative Director Bruce Williams looks at the essentials of building better human connections in healthcare advertising.

What will 2024 bring to the way we view creativity in marketing? And how can we make sure we are ‘pulling all the right triggers’ in producing communications that not only resonate but make a behaviour-changing impact on our audience?

With the world still facing uncertain times ahead, it’s never been more vital to show healthy respect to and comprehensive understanding of the state of mind of our audience. Add in a heightened sense of ‘political correctness’ and you start getting a feeling for how creativity could be compromised.

But that’s nothing new in pharma marketing. Working within strict medical guidelines and restrictions have always been boundaries for healthcare marketing creativity – and yet the quality of work still reaches new heights each year…

2024 should be no exception – as long as we follow some tried and tested rules – and continue to push the emotional outcomes higher up the scale in supporting the science and core claims of the services and medicines we promote.

FOCUS ON THE OUTCOME
Your drug may be able to do this or cure that. It may perform XX% better than your competitor. It may increase life for patients over 80 for an extra 6 years. Your science is incredible!

Of course, it is vital, but what does all that science mean in human terms? Rather than focus on the data, focus instead on the patient – and how their life has improved as a result of your innovative medicines.
For example, having a drug that gives cancer patients an extra year of life is wonderful to give to people… but showing what that patient did in that extra year of life is a thousand times more compelling.

BE AUTHENTIC, AND INCLUSIVE
People can always spot fake and HCPs and patients are no exception.

So where possible, use actual patients (and therefore create photo assets that are unique to your brand). This approach resonates much more with target audiences, with the key focus on their story and how your brand has enabled a transformation or change within the individual.

Audiences react well to inclusivity, and brands that are consistently committed to diversity.
This ties back to a desire from consumers for brands to go beyond the tokenistic: to the authentic. If done well, you reach a level of relatability that will resonate greater with the Australian consumer.

FOCUS ON POSITIVITY
In terms of creative execution, it’s often hard to evaluate where your brand needs to stand. Do you focus on the problem – a bit like using ‘scare tactics’ to highlight a need – or the solution?

If we are honest, most of us don’t want to be reminded of the ‘bad’: we want to focus on the ‘good’.

We work with many clients whose brand identity prohibits the use of imagery that shows people with ‘frowns’ or ‘negative expressions’. Even the use of words with negative connotations is not permissible.

And while it is a restriction that can hinder the creative process, it also reminds us of the results we all hope for – that outcome of ‘getting better’. So why focus on showing conditions and ailments Doctors and specialists live with daily? They get enough of that in their practices, journals and med ed seminars.

In healthcare marketing, the right balance of positivity and compassion – brought to life with emotionally engaging stories – is a better balance to connect with your audience.

Simon Davies  simon.davies@bastionbrands.com.au M: 0402 425 545  Bruce Williams  bruce.williams@bastionbrands.com.au M: 0407 359 582

Another year of Cannes Lions has come and gone… and in the wash-up, we are left to contemplate where next?

Remembering that the Cannes Lions Awards are all about celebrating creativity, AI played a larger role than ever before, being referenced in the case studies of over 8% of the winning entries as either a key driver of the creativity or a vital tool that helped ‘enhance creativity’.

Other emerging themes included getting back to the fundamentals of building brands and leveraging what makes a brand unique. Part of this move involves authenticity – and brands that showed up as genuine ‘community partners’.

In both examples, this seemed particularly evident in the pharma and health & wellness sections, where involvement in communities often means a better life experience for patients, and can be a starting point for building more effective brand engagement.

A quick glance at the work that won the highest awards shows how innovation and pushing the creative boundaries are still a non-negotiable, but clearly the rise of AI innovation and a more ‘community first’approach, show a seismic shift toward altruistic marketing – delivering tools and services to help raise standards in healthcare – and better outcomes for patients – BEYOND THE MEDICINES.

A great example of this was the Pharma Grand Prix winner, from Brazilian multinational pharmaceutical corporation Eurofarma .

Together with global creative agency Dentsu, they created an AI-powered facial expression recognition experimental tool enabling patients with Parkinson’s disease to practice their prescribed facial exercises doing something they love doing – controlling their social media engagement using facial expressions.

In association with the Brazil Parkinson Association, they developed ‘Scrolling Therapy’, a Facebook and Instagram integrated app which, through the use of AI encourages patients to navigate the feed through their smiles, mouth, nose, forehead and eyebrows movements, and other facial expressions. It’s designed to stimulate vital face-muscle exercise, complementary to other treatments focused on their condition.

See it here https://www.lbbonline.com/news/eurofarmas-scrolling-therapy-is-an-innovative-digital-tool-for-parkinsons-patients

Gold winners in the Pharma category also utilised AI and AR technology, but not as the sole idea behind the campaigns.

The Most Beautiful Sound was a project aimed at getting people to be more aware and bring a new notion of hope to cancer research for ASCO (American Society of Clinical Oncology). In a left field and very novel way, they re-focussed attention to the cause (of research toward cures for cancer) by inviting people to listen to the sound of cancer cells being destroyed. Contained on its own (stunningly simple) website, you can explore and take a listen here: https://themostbeautifulsound.org/home

Winning silver was a ‘disease awareness’ initiative ‘Outside-In Experiment’ aimed at bringing home the pain of uncontrolled gout to HCPs. While I’m not sure how effective it might have been in getting them to actually recommend the Horizon treatments, it certainly pushes the ability of AI to generate content and in this case take the viewer to a world that resembles an Heironymous Bosch painting!

https://www.outsideingout.com

In the Health & Wellness category we get a little ‘closer to home’ as we look to the Grand Prix winner – an entry from New Zealand. Titled ‘The last Performance’ utilised a brilliant strategy to make us sit and take notice of life insurance in a format we know and understand well. And while there is no clever use of AI or technology, this idea really shows the power of a simple idea done very well, goes a long way to create great interest and even greater results, with web visits up a massive 132% during the campaign.

See what they did here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWKWMcjA-68

And finally one of our favourites (not surprisingly generated by the Havas Global network!) While it’s not commercial in the sense of generating sales, it does a brilliant job raising awareness in a beautifully simple way. It’s also the kind of work that gives us hope in a better world, and wish more clients would think laterally and embrace ideas that we can all share.

In this case, rather than create a beautiful ad, or generate innovative tech, it instead generated incredible interest and piqued curiosity, simply by changing one word to give new meaning to an international icon, which in turn made an iconic difference to a worthy cause.

Take a look here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GQOAIwGoF8

This case study really does remind us that simplicity is often the best solution. It also reminds us that if you commit to a strong idea – do it well! The ‘official’ nature of this execution is breathtaking and the attention to detail is spectacular! Can you imagine if they had shortcut on anything? The idea would have fallen short… goes to show that one powerful idea often takes a massive team effort to execute to perfection.

There are so many other examples of great work that can be seen from Cannes. A quick visit will show just how much quality work was nominated, and the worthy winners, which are all worth a closer look.

Cannes Lions Awards 2023

If you’d like to know more – and walk through our ‘Best of Cannes 2023’ presentation, get in touch. Who knows, it could be the start of seeing your brand nominated for the 2024 Cannes Awards…

Simon Davies  simon.davies@bastionbrands.com.au M: 0402 425 545  Bruce Williams  bruce.williams@bastionbrands.com.au M: 0407 359 582

The pharmaceutical sector, marketing profession, and digital disciplines are awash with jargon and buzzwords.  It’s high time for ‘digital straight talk’ to be implemented.

Jargon overload is leading to our key stakeholders and practitioners become particularly prone to confusing their customers and patients,  when they use buzzwords and digital waffles to make a sale.

As an industry, we need to make the complicated simple. In this article, we identify the major ‘jargon culprits’  and offer some simple advice on how to get to the bottom of what we are really saying.

Acronym Addict

Signature trait: TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms)

You’ll hear: SEO (search engine optimisation), SEM (search engine marketing), CRM (customer relationship management), CRO (conversion rate optimisation)

They mean: Strategies to make customers find and engage with your brand and how much that engagement costs you.

Stage an intervention by asking questions that require direct and acronym-free answers. Try:

>What are the outcomes of this strategy/campaign?

>How has this affected awareness/sales/referral?

>How would you describe our return on investment?

Directing the conversation this way encourages them to use words rather than letters – QED (quod erat demonstrandum, Latin for ‘thus it has been demonstrated’.)

The Futurist

Signature trait: Wants you to think they are tech-savvy.

You’ll hear: AI/artificial intelligence, automation, algorithm, machine learning.

They mean: Tools that can help put your brand in front of greater numbers of more relevant people.

The benefits of a lot of these tools are still emerging, so keep The Futurist on track by pinning the conversation to the functions of the new technology they are recommending. If they cannot explain it in a way you can understand, it usually means they don’t understand it themselves. It takes a true expert to simplify something complex. Do not under any circumstances ask them about specifications until you know and understand what the technology does.

The Strategist

Signature trait: Wants you to see them as intelligent and in tune with customers.

You’ll hear: IA (Information architecture), CX (Customer Experience), UX (User Experience), Omnichannel.

They mean: How people interact with your brand and its products and services.

Place the customer at the centre of your brand’s narrative. If the customer doesn’t know the jargon, The Strategist, if they are who they say they are, should be able to tell that story without using the buzzwords. It’s a trick to make them think like a customer, not a Strategist.

The Data Analyst

Signature trait: Loves assigning meaning to numbers.

You’ll hear: metrics, conversion, meta data, tracking code, analytics.

They mean: The way we measure digital engagement.

Incite an existential crisis by telling them that numbers are meaningless… without context. Have them explain the context before allowing that numbers may, in fact, have meaning after all.

The Creative

Signature trait: Tells rather than shows.

You’ll hear: wireframe, UI (User Interface), front end, parallax.

They mean: The structure on which digital elements are presented, how they look and interact.

Have them visually show you what they mean rather than getting lost in a buzzword forest.

The Developer

Signature trait: Cares more about what they can do than the business requirements.

You’ll hear: CSS, HTML5, PHP, MySQL, Python, AWS, IOS, server, database.

They mean: The programming languages and technology that controls the building of digital outputs.

Have them demonstrate functions and outputs rather than talk about what they think they can do. Do not start a debate about whether Ruby is better than Python because you won’t be talking about bejewelled snakes (fun, irrelevant, and potentially dangerous), you’ll be reigniting a flame war about programming languages (boring, irrelevant, and potentially dangerous).

In the know

When it comes to marketing pharmaceuticals, it’s tempting to use impressive buzzwords. However, this approach can cause confusion and undermine trust among stakeholders and customers. It’s crucial to communicate objectives, scope, and timelines in a clear and straightforward manner. This ensures that everyone is on the same page and fosters productive partnerships that deliver tangible results.

Simon Davies  simon.davies@bastionbrands.com.au M: 0402 425 545  Bruce Williams  bruce.williams@bastionbrands.com.au M: 0407 359 582

There’s no doubt that pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing went through a rapid cycle of digital transformation during the pandemic.

Now that we have returned to normality, it’s time to ask how far your digital strategy should reach. How far has your digital offering transformed, if at all? Do you stack up against the new industry benchmarks? Is your organisation leading the way, or falling behind? And most importantly, are you providing your audience of healthcare professionals the best possible digital platforms to make their jobs – and the connection to your brands – as seamless as possible?

You can start to get a better feel of where you stand in terms of digital excellence, by taking note of these five essential considerations for your digital strategy.

1. ALWAYS OPEN, EASILY ACCESSIBLE
Healthcare professionals are busy and work long hours, often shift work. They can view a meeting with a rep as a distraction. Because reps work more restrictive regular business hours, it’s clear we’re limiting sales potential.

Sales reps or medical science liaisons often hear “I am too busy to see you” or they can’t find a suitable time to schedule a meeting with a healthcare professional. The solution? Find a more convenient method to reach clients at a time when they are both ready and willing to listen.

Remove that barrier by giving your target audience the option to access material on demand, 24/7. A digital offering allows clients to access the same information on their terms and according to their availability. Just like we’ve moved from watching TV at a fixed time every week to streaming services, health education and marketing messages must be led by convenience.

2. COMPLEX DATA PRESENTED SIMPLY
Sharing key insights and presenting data in a clear and compelling manner are two important skills your teams need to excel at to be of value to healthcare professionals.

If they struggle to confidently explain complex data, digital content can help enhance the communication process.

Used properly, a digital content strategy will help your audiences more easily find the data most relevant to them. This is especially true of clinical data, which is in great demand when HCPs make decisions around new medicines or therapies.

Digitisation allows for intelligent segmentation beyond demographic, including analysis of attitudes, feelings, thoughts, and behaviours akin to what surveys and research can produce, and can help all delve into the data in new ways.

3. CURRENCY AND IMPACT – THE HUB STRATEGY
We have seen more and more pharma companies utilise the digital hub strategy as a cost-effective way to keep their audience up to date with the latest news and data.

This digital strategy is ideal when you need to update information quickly or leverage a small budget for the biggest exposure. In this scenario, print material is not ideal, and there’s no way to tell if HCPs (and therefore patients) are using outdated material.

Having the material available digitally ensures you can edit clinical data rapidly, control which version people are viewing and share the latest research with a large audience.

4. ENGAGEMENT AND INSIGHTS
While many campaigns focus on awareness, a more valuable measure of success in the digital space is engagement.

Healthcare professionals often don’t want to see sales reps all the time, so digital channels allow brands to track and measure how clients interact with them.

Tactics like content marketing and online support assure your target audience that the rep is still in touch, but at a distance. The power is with your audience to drive the relationship on their terms.

Many healthcare and pharma companies will say they don’t know enough about their clients and would like direct relationships to understand how to serve them better.

Tracking and analysing how clients interact with digital content enables the healthcare and pharmaceutical company to understand the audience better and improve their ability to contextualise marketing efforts. By optimising how we engage and interact with customers, we have the potential to help them improve the quality of patient care.

5: MAXIMISING THE POTENTIAL OF AI
Today there are very few industries that aren’t affected by the increased capability of AI to provide a more personalised and predictive approach to healthcare solutions for patients, and they can also be of benefit to the way we market to and educate healthcare professionals.

A great example of a one-to-one communication opportunity is the friendly chatbot, which can help create a more compelling and helpful digital experience, answer commonly asked questions, and even provide better data analysis depending on the HCP’s needs and questions.

Importantly, they can provide a more personalised and therefore relevant experience for the HCP, allowing them to get the exact answer they want and help them use their time more effectively.

Once you evaluate your patients’ journey, their needs, and the questions they frequently ask (whilst taking privacy and medical guidelines into consideration), you might decide if a chatbot is right for your digital strategy.

Either way, a strong and adaptable digital strategy is a ‘must-have’ for healthcare and pharma brands. How you employ digital tactics in conjunction with your sales team will mark the next era of healthcare marketing innovation.

So, make sure you and your teams are alert to the signs that remind us to leverage the power of digital channels.

Simon Davies simon.davies@bastionbrands.com.au M: 0402 425 545 Daniel King dan.king@bastionbrands.com.au M: 0440 190 700

How often have you been to an industry event where the first thing the keynote asks is to write a short poem to describe yourself?

Could you write a simple sonnet about yourself or Haiku of what you do?!

That was exactly the task set by Alex Waddleton to the 120 pharmaceutical marketers at the recent Sydney pharmaceutical marketing event in Barangaroo, sponsored by Bastion Brands.

As co-aut­hor of  “Right Brain Workout”, Alex believes we all need to spend time reconnecting with our ‘right brain’ and start thinking more creatively in our day-to-day life and work.

He believes creativity isn’t limited to artists, musicians and writers – but to any profession, including science and pharmaceuticals.

He points to a startling fact that 98% of five-year olds have a genius level of creative problem solving. By adulthood, this figure falls to only 2%.

It’s why Alex’s mission about ­­being creative has never been more important to bringing life-changing ideas to life, unlocking solutions to global issues, helping people connect better and, importantly, making each day just that little bit more fun!

Like writing a poem to describe yourself, his talk outlined many hints, tips and real-life examples of the power of creativity to change behaviour and outcomes.

It led us to thinking of a few ways we could apply this in our day-to-day work in promoting pharmaceutical brands and providing medical education to HCPs.

Here are 3 ways that could help bring more creativity, spark new ideas and maybe help create better campaigns.

1. INJECT MORE EMOTION:

Clearly HCPs make decisions based on data and evidence – after all, they are scientists in a scientific world. But they’re also human and therefore make decisions on strong emotional triggers as well. Like all of us, they have fears, frustrations and desires. Those emotions affect their prescribing decisions and behaviours towards pharmaceutical companies.

While important, it is NEVER just about the data and facts. Injecting emotional content is vital to changing entrenched habits and creating better connections.

The creative question:  Are you maximising the power of emotional content in your marketing campaigns? Take a moment to think of 3 ways you could inject more emotion!

2. WORKSHOP YOUR WORKSHOPS!

We’ve all been in a ‘workshop’ and struggled to stay involved and focussed.  Rather than make them the ‘free-flowing’ environments where ideas thrive, we bog them down in agendas and power-points that miss the mark, and achieve little.

How can you make them more dynamic and alive with creativity?

Start with a 5-minute poem-writing session… ask everyone to sketch and share ‘what they did on the weekend… try some exercises from the right brain workout book… How about some communication starters and ice-breakers that help attendees feel more involved and relaxed and open to broader thinking – and not shutting them down initially because they won’t be ‘approved by Medical’?

Remember: A more effective workshop is one you’ve already ‘workshopped’ to include more opportunities for participants to feel more creative.

3. PUT YOURSELF IN THE PATIENT’S SHOES:

It’s always important to remember why we do what we do – improve patient’s lives. The work we do helps patients recover from serious illness, live with chronic disease, prevent serious disease, have more time with loved ones and have a better life. But it’s easy to forget about this as work tasks take over.

Here’s one simple creative idea that can help re-align our focus. In every meeting, select a member of your team to play ‘the patient’ for the entire meeting. Having a dedicated patient voice in the room could change the discussion and ‘usual’ thinking and help others to better understand the patient POV.

It not only gets the creative juices flowing, but helps everyone realise it’s more than just the medicine.

Developing creative ways to communicate is what we do, all day every day – and we love it. But even we need to take the time to think of different ways to approach things and come up with new creative solutions – or we stagnate and become formulaic.

Staying at the forefront of ways to boost idea generation and maintaining a dynamic, highly creative approach to our day-to-day activities has never been more vital than today.

Simon Davies  simon.davies@bastionbrands.com.au M: 0402 425 545  Bruce Williams  bruce.williams@bastionbrands.com.au M: 0407 359 582

In part one of this article, we looked at how the healthcare brands that are digitally progressive, especially during COVID and beyond, have already seen the benefits of having their own independent customer access and access to direct customer insights and not relying on 3rd party media platforms, external advertising or large sales teams to drive their brand.

These profound advantages are pushing some brands further ahead in shaping their offering, improving customer engagement and focusing their promotions.

For many, it’s time to take a longer-term view on preparing and planning for a digitally dominated future that can give you direct access to customers and an opportunity to gather their own customer view directly.

A FIVE STEP STRUCTURE

To help brands progress digitally, and develop better customer databases and engagement programs, takes a structured approach. At Bastion Brands, we’re working with many late adopters, along with advanced brands to build and roll out their customer database and engagement strategies with our 5 step structured approach.

  1. ASSESS & AUDIT

Current state assessment and auditing your customer data: Take a look and you’ll probably find customer data all over the place – lists of customers from sales reps, conferences, events, webinars, and e-newsletters are all likely. Find them to understand what the data sources were, what format the data is in, what data points you have, and store them all in one location. Also consider if you have organisational policies and procedures, and legal requirements regarding data gathering and usage.

  2. PLAN & ALIGN

Planning: Align your business, marketing and comms strategies and objectives with your data and digital strategy. Work out what data you currently have, and what you want to acquire, and the use cases associated with gathering the data in order to achieve the right outcomes.

  3. STRATEGY & STRUCTURE

Complete your data gap analysis and work out your initiatives that could include list consolidation, cleaning, analysis, and growth. Use these initiatives to work through a road map.

  4. PROCESS & OPERATION

Operational Plan: Work out processes, along with roles and responsibilities to make sure that the data gathered meets the objectives, is governed well, is stored and accessed through the right technology, that the team are skilled and capable, and that the pending organisational changes are well managed.

  5. ESTABLISH & IMPLEMENT

Implementation: This is where the rubber hits the road. Empower the team to roll out the strategy and operational plan, and make sure scheduled reviews are undertaken.

Truth be told, brands that can both understand and access their audiences to develop insights, without 3rd party barriers, through their own customer databases and engagement programs, are the ones who are prepared to succeed now and in future.

No matter if your brand is in its infancy or is particularly advanced in terms of developing your customer database, customer insights and engagement programs, these assets are worth investing into for shaping your future success.

For more information, contact:

Simon Davies
simon.davies@bastionbrands.com.au
M: 0402 425 545

Dan King
dan.king@bastionbrands.com.au
M: 0439 190 700

That was then, this is now…

Back in the late 90s the internet was commercialised, which enabled an opportunity that would radically change how people and brands connected and communicated.

At that time browsers were crude, interactivity was limited, data transfer speeds were glacial, social media was embryonic and digital marketing was quite simple.

All you needed to be a progressive brand in early stages of digital marketing was a website, along with a customer database and an email broadcasting tool. If you had these essential assets at your disposal, you could develop deeper insights and understanding of the needs and interests of your customers, which in turn could help your brand tailor and improve its offering.

KNOWING YOUR AUDIENCE = OWNING YOUR OWN DATA

Without these assets, companies were dependent on 3^rd party research agencies and sales teams to help explain who the audience was, and what they were thinking and feeling. So it came with great expense (research) or as simply ‘heresay’ (anecdotal). Hardly the right approach to often complex audience understanding.

Back then, and unfortunately sometimes even now, the understanding of ‘audience’ was often described primarily with geographic and demographic data, and creative briefs would usually state the target audience to be something as broad as ‘25-54 year-old women with children, on the eastern seaboard’. These blanket approaches lacked rich insight, and customer data was greatly needed to shape the brands support, value and message for their customers.

Digital was a new way to accumulate customer data, and digitally progressive brands understood that building and engaging with your own customer database would provide a competitive advantage by shaping their offering from the insights gained. So brands started to build customer data driven programs of work, loyalty programs, newsletters, content hubs, and social networks.

What makes a compelling content platform?

Johnson & Johnson’s BabyCenter, for example is the world’s biggest content marketing platform for people planning and having children. BabyCenter delivers content in nine different languages, with more than 50 million parents visiting its 11 websites every month. The platform provides rich content, product sampling, market research projects and conversation forums which in turn, provide valuable insight. These insights, that Johnson & Johnson own by building the platform, have significantly shaped the product and service offering for the customers they serve and given them a major competitive advantage.

In a similar way, to a more targeted audience, Gilead have recently built a digital hub and presence that engages with HIV focused sexual healthcare professionals. 

This platform, https://www.hiv-australia.com.au/, provides HCPs with the latest global and local HIV news, research and content, and integrates a centralised hub with additional outbound channels to distribute new content when it’s published. This initiative shows Gilead’s ongoing commitment to develop deeper insights and understanding of the needs and interests of healthcare professionals. With these insights, Gilead can tailor offerings and create increased support and value for the healthcare professionals they serve and people under their care.

The point is that these databases provide access to a much clearer understanding of who the audience really is. Knowing your audience, was then, and remains now an important competitive advantage. Being able to directly access your customers’ ‘who, what, when, where, why and how’ is one of the most impactful ways of shaping a business and brand offering, adding value to customers and focusing all marketing activity.

Digital engagement in healthcare

More than 20 years later, the need for customer data, insights and digital engagement programs are now required more than ever and the disadvantage to those brands without them have become even more pronounced.

The COVID-19 restrictions benched sales teams, and constrained advertising options within the healthcare marketing industry, so having an own customer database, website and engagement programs really helps continue to gather insights for your brand while access remains limited and behaviours change.

It’s fair to say, that relatively few of the world’s leading healthcare brands are digitally progressive. However, the healthcare brands that are, have already seen the benefits during the ongoing constrained economic condition, of having their own independent customer access and access to direct customer insights, as they do not rely on third party media platforms, external advertising or large sales teams.

The message is clearer today than it has ever been – in uncertain times the certainty of owning your own data and digital platforms is invaluable, and will continue to prove so.

In part two we will discuss the advantages of digital independence and the best ways to achieve it.

For more information, contact:

Simon Davies
simon.davies@bastionbrands.com.au
M: 0402 425 545

Dan King
dan.king@bastionbrands.com.au
M: 0439 190 700

With circumstances changing every day around the ever-evolving situation created by COVID-19, Bastion Brands have developed a suite of tools and deliverables that can help you reshape the way you communicate and help your brand maintain a strong voice in changing times.

Over the next few weeks, we will focus on each of the following in more detail and hopefully shed more light on how implementing these tactics can benefit you:

6 ways to stay ahead of the curve during COVID-19 and beyond:

1. Sales Team Engagement: 

The way reps engage with customers has changed dramatically. Now is the time to start focussing on how to re-train and adapt your sales team to the ‘new normal’. This not only includes useful tips on working from home and helping keep the team motivated, but moving to direct channels and virtual meetings by delivering key messages in a much shorter time, re-framing call dialogue and sales materials, and utilising channels like direct mail more creatively.

2. K.O.L Engagement Strategy: 

With no face-to-face meetings allowed, what is your action plan to engage with KOLs over the next 6 months? Opportunities exist to create virtual ad boards, podcasts, a fortnightly meeting etc. This is perfect timing to engage with your top 10 KOLs and critical to strengthening relationships.

3. Content Strategy/Marketing:

People are consuming more online content than ever before. The rise of digital media has increased exponentially over our first 2 weeks of lockdown alone. There has never been a better time to plan your digital content and start providing salient material.

4. Virtual Conferences: 

It will be at least 6 months before conferences as we knew them will return to normal. How will your brand appear in a virtual conference world? Are you prepared and ready to face this new dimension?

5. Patient Journeys/Customer Journeys: 

The way we interact and receive information has also changed forever, as has the doctor/patient relationship itself. Teleconsulting is becoming more prevalent, and consideration must be made to how this impacts patient and HCP alike.

6. Patient Support Program: 

If there is an existing patient support program, how are you evolving it for these times? Your patients need your leadership and brand strength more than ever. If you don’t have a patient support program – the time is now to explore what else can you do to support patients on your product during this time.

Our clients have already seen the benefits of strong, positive and responsible communication with their key stakeholders, partners, HCPs and their patients and patient advocacy groups alike, through our ability to provide expert message development that is clear, helpful and on brand.

Now is the time to think beyond the crisis and establish new work cycles and activities that work – from finding new ways to connect with customers, to providing timely helpful communications to those in need – and ultimately help your brands endure and become more salient in times of crisis.

Stay tuned for more on each of our 6 ways to stay ahead of the curve over the upcoming days and if you like anything you read, please reach out and get in touch.

A solid and achievable communications plan is a much better way to get through COVID-19, than stockpiling toilet rolls!
For more information, contact Simon Davies
simon.davies@bastionbrands.com.au
M: 0402 425 545

It’s brand plan season. You understand your product, the brand objectives, you know your audience, now you need to work out how to reach them. But this is where the tide can change.

How do you decide which channel is going to effectively engage your audience and not leave you stranded?

Truth is, it’s never smooth sailing…
There are so many different channels and so many different media providers claiming they have the best reach, the most engagement, the longest interaction times and greatest click through.

They can’t all be the best choice…or can they? How can you be sure you’re not missing out on something better or more effective?

Especially in this age of rapid change, as much as we think we know the ‘waters’, there are now more unexpected conditions that could quickly change. Suddenly you could find yourself in a ‘less than perfect storm’, having to reconsider channels quickly.

But it doesn’t have to be sink or swim!

Knowing where you can best reach your target audience has always been a vital component of marketing success. Today it’s even more so, with many more options to explore to deliver your message.

All the development, research and creative time you put into your product’s marketing could be wasted if you don’t identify the best communication channel that makes the most sense for your particular target audience and contributes significantly to the success of your message reaching your market.

It’s times like these you need a guiding light to help you navigate the right channels and plot the safest and most effective course of action.

Bastion Brands are a media agnostic company. Which means we don’t have a vested interest in choosing a particular channel for your brand. Instead, we have a vested interest in working with you to develop the most effective multi-channel campaign that will yield the best results for your brand. Our channel planning services extend to:

We have 7 years’ experience studying and working with the various channels unique and vital to the Pharma space. This knowledge places us in a unique position to provide unbiased, third-party advice to brand managers and Pharma companies when it comes to channel choice.

We can help navigate you through the right channels at the right time, to reach the right people, as well as fully integrate your choices to achieve the absolute best results for your product or brand.

And in a volatile and vast ocean of channel choices, we’ll not only keep you afloat, but make sure you are steering the right course for your brand.

Why not get on board today?

The statistics surrounding mental health in Australia demonstrate this is an issue that is starting to dominate the healthcare landscape more than ever. Which is why, Bastion Brands have been making it a priority to build an in-depth understanding of this space.

One in five Australians will suffer from a mental illness. The significant efforts of charities, advocacy groups and disease awareness campaigns have slowly been working to reverse the stigma associated with depression and anxiety. It has also lead to more patients seeking and receiving the help they need. In fact, the RACGP report, Health of the Nation, 2018 found that GP’s are treating mental health issues more than any other.

So, why should we stop and take note? Because another fact suggests that patients being treated for long term physical conditions are more and more feeling the impact on their mental health as well.

The Australian Government released a report into the comorbidity of mental disorders and physical conditions in 2012, which found that 12% of Australians aged 16-85 had a mental disorder and a physical condition at the same time. Indeed, the most common comorbidity was anxiety disorder combined with a physical condition which affected around 9% of the population.

Understanding the prevalence of the link between certain chronic health conditions and mental illness is more important than ever as patient centricity begins to dominate our approach to health communications. Putting the patient at the heart of what we do requires us to truly understand the whole of the patient.

More and more of the work we’re undertaking at Bastion Brands with our clients puts a focus on the patient and draws insight from the challenges they face as a result of their disease burden. Bringing this to life for healthcare professionals through innovative medical content is something we are fast becoming experts at.

To this end, we are now taking our passion further, attending industry events to absorb the latest information and best practice in this area and understand how technology is playing a bigger role than ever in closing the gaps found in patient care, especially those managing a mental illness. Such as the images captured at the recent ‘Designing for Better Mental Health’ event (pictured below).

It is also why Bastion Brands has begun a long-term partnership with One in Five, a volunteer organisation established in 2002 to fund medical research into mental illness, whose ultimate aim is to create a world where mental illnesses are understood, effectively treated and one day made preventable – together we hope to see One in Five become None in Five.

We look forward to sharing the impactful work we are creating in the space that without a doubt brings to life our agency philosophy ‘where Science & Emotion collide’ and our passion to create seriously life-changing work.

In the meantime, if you are considering how best to ensure your marketing efforts are making a truly life-changing impact to healthcare professionals and their patients, then get in touch to find out how the power of Science and Emotion can help.

Those who couldn’t make the Melbourne Pharma Marketers breakfast this week or Sydney Pharma Marketers breakfast late last year, missed out on a valuable insight into one of the most interesting brains in the business. Which is why we have dedicated this edition of Bastion Pulse to providing a valuable recap.

Famous for his role as a panel member for ABC’s Gruen and having made his name in the advertising and marketing world as a strategist and CEO of one of Australia’s biggest agencies, Leo Burnett, Todd Sampson has since taken on a whole new aspect to his life and career – literally pushing himself to the limits to discover first-hand the power of the brain.

As keynote speaker at the MPM breakfast, he revealed three key factors how everyone can improve their ‘brain plasticity’ and backed his arguments with some incredible and often terrifying personal accounts of his ‘theories in practice’ as he shared footage from his successful TV programs ‘Body Hack’ and ‘Redesign My Brain’*

Todd used his own real-life scientific ‘experiments’, such as a ‘blind rock climb’ on a death-defying rock peak in Arizona, a ‘Houdini escape’ while chained underwater and a ‘sky walk’ tightrope between buildings 21 floors high, to demonstrate the power of the mind and its ability to handle and overcome fear in highly stressful circumstances.

This was balanced by some more straight-forward methods we can all incorporate into our daily lives to improve our brain power everyday, such as meditation techniques. Todd even gave attendees a simple way to extend and train our brains to challenge the norm and help us practice doing something different to our everyday routines. His challenge – simply brush your teeth using your opposite hand for 30 days! By thinking about a routine task in a different way we not only become more ambidextrous, but we improve our brain power.

His compelling and inspirational narrative was backed firmly by proven facts of science, which was a perfect fit for the record crowd of over 70 in attendance.

Some of the stories were hardly what you’d expect to hear from a board member of Fairfax and Qantas, which made his presentation all the more fascinating!

As Gold sponsor of the Sydney and Melbourne Pharma Marketers, Bastion Brands continues to join forces with Principal Sponsor Princeton Digital and the industry steering groups to support and drive the breakfast series and we will shortly make everyone aware of the next event, planned for a date around September 2019 for both SPM & MPM.

To make sure you don’t miss the next event, join the ever-growing pharma marketing communities by Linking in at Melbourne Pharma Marketers https://www.linkedin.com/groups/7026137/ or at Sydney Pharma Marketers https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12135845/

Simon Davies,
Managing Director, Bastion Brands

*Essential viewing and watch out for the BodyHack series 3 soon to be aired.

There is a crisis of trust globally and everyone is feeling the strain. Like it or not, all businesses and brands are – and will – be affected by it. The chain of trust brands have worked so hard to forge could be broken in a snap, unless we understand and accept the two forces at play underpinning the crisis, namely:

Expectations. Simply put, we (brands, leaders, companies, individuals) are all being held to much more exacting standards than every before. In particular, millennials (now making up 33% of the workforce and growing) look very seriously at the standards and behaviours of those they will work for, buy from or invest in.

Empowerment. The rise in activism, coupled with the instant and global power every person has to distribute information about poor conduct, has empowered the public more than ever in history. Humans have always behaved badly. Today, poor behaviour is going to be found out and distributed widely in an instant. Like a raging fire, once it’s been lit, it’s difficult to put out! The banking and finance industry has felt the full force of the trust decline following decades of behaviour perceived by customers as ‘questionable’, and through the horror stories that emerged during the Hayne Royal Commission into Misconduct in that industry. The ‘reputations’ of the banking and insurance sectors now rate only just above those of the tobacco industry.

Reputation is built on two key pillars. Perceptions about you have to be thriving in both in order to gain a worthy reputation.

Capability. You need to be perceived to be very good at what you do, delivering consistently great results.

Character. You need to be perceived to have good values, integrity and to genuinely be ‘doing the right thing.’

Think Harvey Weinstein. Even with world-class capabilities as a movie producer, his character is deeply flawed. His overall reputation is therefore the lowest of the low. A package that no one wants to be associated with.

At the other end of the scale, think Roger Federer. World-class capabilities as a tennis champion, and character traits that are nothing short of perfect. His overall reputation is therefore through the roof! A package you can literally bank on.

If you want to build trust, a brand, company or individual needs to work on delivering excellence in communicating a consistently powerful story. True trust is found at the intersection of your ability, benevolence and integrity, defined thus:

Ability. Delivering results, capable, expert, good at what we do.

Benevolence. Our intentions are good, we are givers, we put back in, we support others.

Integrity. We live our solid values, follow the rules, we do the right thing – always.

A great place to start in reviewing your ‘Trust Fitness’ is to check how much we actually put our customer at the centre of everything we do.

A genuinely customer-centric strategy, delivered with consistency over time, will deliver a high degree of trust – for a brand and for a company. Deloitte has developed a ‘Conditions of Trust’ model that describes the three steps required to genuinely have the customer at the centre of all you do.

1. Want to keep promises
A hard question that needs to be answered first up. Do we really, really, really want to put our customer first? Will we fight hard, every day, to ensure our actions keep the customer front and centre in all we do?

2. Making the right promises
Are our products aligned to customer needs? Are they clearly described? Value-for-money? Are they customised to changing circumstances for our customers?

3. Be able to deliver on promises
Do we have the processes, platforms, and people to deliver on our promises?

Remember – reputation is the gap between what you say you will do, and what you do.

How well is your brand or company positioned to survive the deep scrutiny that will inevitably come your way – and likely, very soon?

More importantly, what are you doing about building trust in this age of rage? An age where our customers not only expect but demand genuine trust in the companies they choose to engage with, and let the world know when their trust is broken.

A good starting point is to unpack the above model to see where your brand or company stands in light of the trust intersection. An even more accurate and honest appraisal could come from an external resource, (such as Bastion Brands) to help you identify your ‘Trust Fitness’ levels and implement a plan to build, establish or regain trust in the areas in which your brand is lacking.

As a keynote speaker Janine Allis proved that you can still be an approachable, warm and modest human being as well as an intrepid, successful and driven businessperson at the same time.

Held in Melbourne at The Craft and Co on March 19 and on the shore of Sydney’s harbour at Doltone House on March 26, Janine enthralled the record number of attendees with her inspiring story and in particular her ‘top ten’ learnings gleaned over her incredible career.

As Gold sponsor in 2018 and 2019, Bastion Brands continues to join forces with Principal Sponsor Princeton Digital and the industry steering groups to support and drive the breakfast series and we are delighted with the turnout to see Janine.

Bastion Brands feel strongly about supporting organisations like SPM and MPM as they are important for many reasons….

The events we sponsor create a strong sense of community amongst pharma marketers. represent the chance for us to come together, network and share news, catch up with peers on a social level and start the day with some inspiration from quality key note speakers known for their success and ability to motivate a room.

There is little doubt that of the 70 in Melbourne and 116 in Sydney, there were not many who went away disappointed.

For those who missed out, it’s our pleasure to list Janine’s Top 10 learnings:

We invite you to be part of the next SPM event, planned for August with dates and venue details to follow shortly.

However, as a teaser for our Melbourne clients we can announce that Todd Sampson has been confirmed as guest speaker at the next Melbourne Pharma Marketers – so watch this space!

And please join our ever-growing pharma marketing communities by Linking in with us at Melbourne Pharma Marketers or at Sydney Pharma Marketers.

On average every 60 seconds, we generate approximately 3.3 million Facebook posts; nearly half a million tweets; 65,000 Instagram posts, there are over 120 new LinkedIn accounts created and YouTube now houses more video content than you could watch in a lifetime!¹

The point is, the sheer amount of content generated, created and distributed to achieve a reaction and engage a viewer is staggering. And it’s no longer purely social, with mainstream brands and businesses embracing the power of digital in ever increasing numbers.

The 2018 Sensis social media report shows 79% of Australians use social media, with 47% of small/medium businesses and 60% of larger businesses using content to build engagement and trust with their customers.²

Further to this, currently 23% of marketing budgets in Australia are allocated to content, while 36% of marketers forecast an increase over the next year, according to the Content Marketing Institute.³
But how many of those are healthcare companies? And how likely in our highly regulated world – will content marketing play a comparable role?

When you consider some of the statistics that directly relate to healthcare and issues such as choosing a doctor or clinic, it won’t be long before digital content will be the ‘new norm’ in health industry marketing.

The advent of ‘Google Doc’ and the ease in which ‘self-diagnosis’ is initiated online, has enabled patients to be more informed about their own conditions.

The fact is that 35% of adults in the US have gone online specifically to “figure out” some medical condition. And 59% of Internet users looked online for health information in the past year.⁴

Incredibly, searching for health-related information has now become the third most popular online activity,⁵ as content providers are helping people better answer their growing health concerns.

In Australia specifically, 75% of users reported that information sourced online through their smartphone helped them make decisions about local professional health services.⁵

Our need for immediacy is creating trends that continue to shape the way patients look for, find, and interact specifically with doctors, treatment centres and hospitals.

In fact, 72% of internet users looked online for health information of one kind or another within the past year.⁴

In late 2015, Google declared that 1 in 20 Google searches were for health-related information.⁶

26% of internet users went online in the last year to read or watch someone else’s experience with a health or medical issue.⁴

16% of internet users say they went online in the last year to find others who might share the same health concerns.⁴

The last two points prove that socially, we are becoming more inclined to share experiences and actually seek peer-to-peer support from those prepared to exchange stories about their ‘real’ health issues and impart knowledge about what to expect from treatment, the process of care and even the drugs involved moving forward.

The companies that help facilitate this patient support and activity could be the ones that benefit most from digital content. As they embrace the trend of 90% of top performing content marketers who put their audience’s informational needs ahead of their company’s sales or promotional message.⁷

The strength of this argument leads to one undeniable fact – that most certainly digital content can play an important role in the future of healthcare marketing, across branded and non-branded messaging, patient support and facilitation of patient generated content.

Content has the power to demonstrate your expertise, show your on-going support for doctors and patients alike and importantly, to both audiences, build the kind of trust that’s hard to cultivate in more traditional channels.

By its very nature, content marketing doesn’t aim to get attention. Instead, the whole point is to giveattention. Which is why it’s tailor made to help pharma companies build empathy, consideration, support and understanding around patient needs over a long-term relationship.

All of which leads to one big question – how will you embrace the opportunities in this space to ensure digital content is more than a buzzword, but a strategic, vital and dynamic part of your marketing mix?

Understanding your digital landscape is a great starting point to further enhance or explore richer digital content marketing. Bastion Brands offer a comprehensive digital auditing service to help your brand understand the current competitive analysis and where opportunities could abound.

References:
1. Based on infographic from Smart Insights 2016
2. https://www.sensis.com.au/about/our-reports/sensis-social-media-report
3. https://www.adma.com.au/sites/default/files/2018-australia-content-marketing-research-11_13_17.pdf
4. http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/01/15/health-online-2013/
5. Google/Galaxy, “Consumers in the Micro-Moment,” Australia, June 2015.
6. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/02/health-info-knowledge-graph.html
7. https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2018/10/research-b2b-audience/

Welcome to 2019. I hope you are all feeling at the top of your game as we take on another year. I know I am!

Although over the holiday period, as I over-indulged a little (maybe too much!), or jumped a little too high with the kids on the trampoline, I found myself reaching for anything that would make me feel better.

Luckily, a cure was most-often quickly available. The hangover didn’t last long thanks to a fast-acting paracetamol… My indigestion soon eased after taking some antacids… and the strained back muscle from too much playing with the kids, was soon soothed by a rub of some reliable anti-inflammatory gel.

So my holiday was made all the better for the fact that I felt great – at least most of the time!

It was then that I realised that unlike any other, our industry – the pharmaceutical, medical, health and wellness industry – is primarily concerned about one question above all else – ‘How are you feeling?’

As pharmaceutical and healthcare marketers, we honestly WANT our customers to feel their very best. We produce drugs and devices to help people feel better, by actually making them better.

I’d even argue that’s why the healthcare industry exists – we’re concerned about it, we desire it at many levels and we even consider we haven’t done our job if the outcome hasn’t made people feel better.

We are all about feeling better as an outcome.

Primarily speaking most other products or services are purchased to ‘serve a purpose’, rather than actually improving how we feel. If they help us feel better as well, it’s obviously a bonus, but it’s not at their core. That’s what makes the health and wellbeing sector so vital – we are genuinely concerned about improving lives. As our prime purpose we want people – all people – to feel better.

It led me to make a big resolution moving into 2019 – to convince the great companies we work with to talk more about the ‘feeling’ their products provide – and to help them innovate and explore new ways to capture these feelings and touch their audiences in more authentic and involving ways.

It made me excited about the possible strategic directions this could take our marketing. It may be a virtual experience. Or a real one. It could be a brand story video that succinctly captures a feeling… or a fully-interactive, sales conference augmented reality…. A new digital platform that helps sales teams better communicate to HCP’s , or a bold social media campaign where we encourage patients, their carers and health care professionals alike to share their feelings an help others feel inclusive.

The options are endless and as we enter a year where anything is possible, that gives me – and the team at Bastion Brands a truly great feeling.

As we round off and reflect on 2018, we all can’t help think a little further afield and what 2019 might bring in terms of trends, ‘must haves’ and ‘next big things’ in terms of pharmaceutical marketing essentials. But let’s start by taking a look at what this year has taught us.

Simplicity:

It seems this rule is never really lost. We crave it, work hard for it and, in a market that is saturated with messages, we must achieve simplicity if our message is to be remembered. The principle of ‘keeping things simple’ has never been more salient than today and often it’s a ‘feeling’ or personality that’s remembered rather than a fact or figure. If your brand or product has the right simple core meaning, it’s a big step in making it remembered.

Relevant Technology:

Generally speaking, pharma marketing sets a serious tone. The products and brands we market ultimately need to be trusted and this takes respect from the marketing teams. Our messages change lives and are important. We are not selling something as simple as soft drink or fashion… we are dealing with life changing treatments. What we market, on the most part, are treatments with years of science, testing, research, formulation, data and proof behind them, so we need to respect that when we communicate. Our communications – and the media, digital platforms and sales technology we use – should never be viewed as ‘gimmicky’. So when utilising technology, the trend has been toward simple, easy and authentic platforms that clearly state the data – otherwise our discerning audience will dismiss the messaging. We believe these trends will remain long into 2019.

So what’s new for 2019?

We have noticed an increasing connection with disease advocacy and patient support groups with pharmaceutical marketing teams. Depending on the therapy area, there is a growing desire for patients to fully understand their condition and therefore seek the support of like individuals. We believe this trend will continue to grow for two key reasons:

1: Access:

Social networking and access to a wide range of information is strong. No longer do patients simply get ‘diagnosed’ for one condition. We are heading rapidly toward holistic outcomes – and potentially awareness of multiple options. So patient advocacy groups often look beyond ‘treatments’ – the drugs themselves – and assist patients and families/carers with a plethora of information that is genuine and unbiased, to help them in ways they may not have thought about (eg: psychological impacts, patient mentoring, etc).

2: Authenticity:

People crave authenticity and genuine emotion. We believe this is a great sign for our industry as the human side of our message has too long been ignored in favour of presenting cold, hard facts and clinical data. Recently we were asked by a global company to help bring more emotion into the sales force messaging, because research had shown that the HCP’s had become dulled to the constant, predictable sales deliver that was fact-based. Whatever trends 2019 holds for the industry, there is only one thing we know will hold true. That companies that strike the perfect balance of science and emotion, will find success in their marketing endeavours.

In our digital age, collecting detailed insights into how healthcare professionals behave online is a critical starting point in developing a truly evidence-based digital strategy – a strategy that sees you investing in the right digital projects at the right time, for maximum impact.

From Bastion Brands’ digital team, here are three ways healthcare marketers can apply a more scientific approach to their digital communications strategies in the new year.

1. Understand your audience

How do healthcare professionals really behave online? From search terms to Twitter mentions, sophisticated social listening software can now help marketers deliver critical insights into your audience’s behaviour and information exposure.

2. Understand the digital environment

The digital world is ever-evolving, so a real-time understanding of where your treatment sits in the context of its competitors is nothing short of critical.

3. Understand the conversation (and know who’s leading it)

Every minute of every day, conversations are happening about your therapy area, and your treatment. Understanding the tone and scale of each conversation taking place, as well as who your Key Social Opinion Leaders are, may sound out of reach. But the Bastion Brands Digital Landscape process makes this critical information easily accessible, allowing it to act as a starting point for proactive management of the online conversation.

Learning. Experience. Knowledge. In the world of Pharma, there is little else that matters when it comes to creating new treatments and releasing new studies around well-known and trusted drugs. We know that experience matters, because it’s a simple fact that the more we learn, the more we grow. Expertise is respected in our industry, for good reason. A proven track record has been – and remains – the basis for so many developments and advancements in treatments. Of course, there is another key word that matters just as much to HCP’s, who we know make their choices around what is best for their patients, and so while experience, expertise and trust is important, ultimately it comes down to ‘facts’.

We deal in data daily. Research (often worth $billions of investment by pharma companies) leads our strategies and importantly the Key Selling Messages (the facts) that make HCP’s pay attention to what we are selling. So as Bastion Brands enter its 7th year of operation, we started to reflect on a few ‘facts’ of our own. Facts that add up to a wealth of Learning, Experience and Knowledge in influencing HCP’s behaviours. Facts we can continue to build on, and share.

The image above displays the data we’ve accumulated over our 7 years in healthcare and pharmaceutical marketing. If you’d like to benefit from our 7 key learnings on how to influence HCP’s behaviours, get in touch – we’d love the chance to share them with you.

Bastion Brands is proud to announce that our ‘Continue the Fight’ campaign has been selected as a finalist for Best Single Advertisement at this year’s prestigious PRIME Awards. The only prescription brand ad (or print ad) to make the cut, ‘Continue the Fight’ utilised hard-hitting portrait photography to communicate a simple and motivating truth about battling an incurable disease: ‘there are always things in life worth fighting for.”

The resulting ad compelled specialist doctors to support their patients to dust off their gloves and continue the fight against multiple myeloma for longer, helping them to reach their key life milestones.

Bastion Brands would like to thank our client on this project, who had the courage and trust to support us on this journey to create brave, challenging (and hopefully award-winning!) work. View the campaign, and Bastion Brands’ 2016 PRIME Award-winning work, here.

‘Continue the Fight’ will battle it out against four other outstanding OTC and Disease Awareness campaigns at the Awards ceremony on Thursday 20th September.

More information about this year’s PRIME Awards is available here.

Introducing Bastion Med Ed – The New Home of Innovative Medical Education 

Much like the world of healthcare, Bastion Brands is always evolving to better serve the needs of our clients, and theirs.

In June this year, Bastion Brands Medical Team was proud to announce the launch of Bastion Med Ed, a new specialist division providing medical content and educational experiences that engage specialist audiences through a compelling collision of science and emotion, delivered with the help of innovative technology and event design.

You can find the full run-down, including exciting new case studies about our latest Med Ed work, on our new website For now, here’s a taste of what’s on offer with Bastion Med Ed in 2018…

Interactive Educational Experiences and Events

At Bastion Brands we’ve tipped the traditional medical event model on its head. Using the latest in holographic technology, we’re bringing patient case studies to life – facilitating interactive education and peer to peer learning along the way. Learn more here.

Unlocking the power of Life-Saving Digital Tech

Digital technology gives you the tools to engage in critical healthcare conversations 24/7. Our digital market research methodology is designed specifically for the healthcare industry to help our clients generate evidence-based digital strategies and measure the impact of their investments

Advisory Boards and KOL Management

For medical teams wanting to get even better value from their KOL advisors, Bastion Med Ed delivers collaborative agenda planning and bespoke processes to get to the heart of your objective, leave no stone unturned and maximise the value of your meeting/s. Learn more about how we use lean six sigma to gain actionable insights here.

Offering ‘early experience’ to the right people

Product familiarisation programmes (PFP) are vital in providing early experience with a new medicine to key prescribers before reimbursement. But targeting a PFP to the right customers and integrating it into a wider medical communications strategy can be a challenge. Learn more about how Bastion Brands fully subscribed a PFP with specialist prescribers within two weeks, here.