When people say that positioning ‘must be’ emotional, it is a clear sign that they are conflating both consumer and pharmaceutical positioning, and communication/ messaging with positioning. The opposite of rational is not ’emotional’, it is irrational. Brands do have emotional connections with their audiences, but they are/ should be positioned rationally. But they are not a landscape against which to position a drug – they are a paint-by-numbers picture rather than a Monet.
I second that emotion drivers#
Products that promise to stop your patients coming back have traditionally done better than those that promised partnership, unless there is a financial incentive to keep them coming back (the drivers of behaviour often seem contradictory to the professed goals of the physician – witness the way that payments for IV infusions change practice country to country).Įmotions are great places to go looking for insights. Lipitor’s positioning as the most effective statin understood that while doctors talked outcomes and saving lives, they acted on proximal markers – LDL coming down reliably and rapidly was much more of a concern in day-to-day practice, and that was how Lipitor was positioned ( essentially ‘the most effective LDL lowerer ’). And in fact, many of the best pharma brands have had this as part of their effective positioning. Something well understood outside of pharma is positioning based on negative emotions: anxiety, desire for peer respect, fear of doing wrong.
I second that emotion free#
Agencies (especially the brandname agencies) would never dream of ‘positioning’ on anything other than ‘optimism’, ‘trust’ or ‘joy’… Genericism by design… It is hugely frustrating to see positioning statement after positioning statement take the unique features of a great product and turn it into ‘makes the doctor feel like a hero/ guardian/ partner.’ Of course, if you have Coke’s marketing budget and its reach, feel free to take a tilt at making doctors feel like heroes when they use your brand. Agencies and these marketers are made for each other. There are even fewer positive emotions, and in restricting the choice to positive emotions, the marketer is choosing from a pretty limited pool – unsurprisingly one that has been fished thousands of times before. In choosing an ’emotional’ positioning, the less experienced / misled marketer is, by design, choosing a generic positioning. The problem is that there are fewer emotions than there are products. (There are even lists of them, dozens of constructs and hundreds of emotions: ). But if you start with the heart, and forget the mind, you don’t have a positioning, you have a vapid tagline When you pick a place in the mind of your customer, you may also pick a place in their heart. Positioning needs some differentiation if it isn’t to be pointless.
They may have had, indeed should have had, some emotional component to their communications. To the annoyance of many, no pharmaceutical product has ever had an ’emotional’ positioning*.
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