Chart of the Month - The problem with taking an “either/or” approach to F2F and non-personal channels
December 2022, our CHART of the MONTH:
All too often it’s tempting to take an “either/or” approach to selecting F2F and non-personal promotional (NPP) channels. Makes sense, right? Either customers prefer an in-person approach when engaging with pharma, or they don’t – in which case more non-personal (but not non-personalized!) engagement of the sort offered by digital channels is the solution?
But while this might sound logical, the data actually show that when we segment HCPs according to their affinity for each respective approach, HCPs who express a strong affinity for F2F promo channels also tend to show a strong affinity for NPP channels (and looking at the totals shown at the bottom of the columns we can see that pharma has the potential to reach more than half of US oncologists with strong commercial NPP, regardless of their level of affinity for F2F).
These insights suggest that rooting your go-to-market approaches in traditional "either/or" thinking (either big focus on F2F for top segments and "NPP-only" for lower-tier segments) is clearly suboptimal, and that omnichannel should indeed be the default option.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the continuum, as shown in the bottom right corner of the table, the second biggest segment is the group that expresses a weak affinity for both F2F and NPP channels and is therefore difficult to reach through pharma promo (a not-insignificant 28%). But we shouldn’t just accept that these HCPs are out of reach… perhaps they might respond better to medical channels? Or turning to paid/earned channels offers another potential solution.
If you would like to know more about how Navigator365™ can offer uniquely actionable insights to help you optimize your channel mix, then please get in touch!
Chart of the Month is an ongoing series where we highlight an interesting chart or statistic from our Navigator365™ Core research, and offer a brief commentary on what this can tell us about trends in customer engagement in the life sciences.
