Vince Parry

PE: What's the difference between brand vitality and brand equity?

Parry: Brand equity describes the set of values a brand represents in people's minds, and it evolves over time. Brand vitality drives that evolution and is what makes the brand relevant to customers, affects doctors, and brings clarity to patient care. An icon can represent brand equity or brand vitality, but sales reps can't behave like an icon in the doctor's office.

PE: Why can't brand vitality be measured through iconography recall?

Parry: Physicians and other healthcare professionals encounter brands through personal interactions with sales forces, yet very little is done to carry branding through to sales force activities. Doctors also encounter brands at conventions. Quite often, the brands that are most successful in maintaining vitality are not necessarily the ones that display their advertising imagery around the booth. Instead, they are the ones that create an environment that embodies the brand's set of values.

PE: Who does that well?

Parry: Merck, for Propecia [finasteride]. In that case, brand vitality is all about the science behind hair loss prevention. They don't sell the brand with imagery. They do it through interpersonal methods, such as how they put the sales materials together. They gear everything toward enhancing the dialogue between physicians and patients, making them comfortable. At the booth itself, Merck gives doctors an opportunity to actually see how they look with more or less hair. The company creates that experience to help make doctors more empathetic to patients' feelings. Besides having fun, physicians also learn that they have the power to make a difference in patients' lives and that hair loss is a condition for which a doctor-patient conversation is appropriate.

PE: What can pharma learn from consumer goods marketing and research practices?

Parry: They can bring together a group of healthcare professionals that wouldn't normally interact in a community, such as specialists and primary care doctors-or, if it's a hospital product, pharmacists, nurses, and physicians-and stimulate a discussion about a brand. The group will project a collective understanding of it.

In one technique, a facilitator asks members of a focus group to think about a brand, then go through different magazines and use scissors and glue to build collages together. Other techniques simulate the same exercises used in a branding workshop with clients, in which members think about the brand along with its competitors in terms of sports. For instance, is it flashy like car racing or classic, like baseball?

In another technique that's especially useful with brands promoted to consumers, doctors observe a focus group of patients from behind a two-way mirror. While the doctors listen to patients discuss interactions with their physicians and experiences they've had with products, they are unaware that they themselves are the research subjects. In a session held after the patient group is finished, the doctors discuss what the patients said about their experiences.

What the doctors don't realize is that they are revealing information about how they view the brand's vitality: how the brand helps the doctor-patient relationship, how trustworthy the brand is, and how it may be at odds with the way it is being promoted iconographically in print.

It sounds like we're tricking them, but actually, we are distracting them to behave naturally instead of the way they think they should behave. They don't know they're engaged in a market research activity, and that frees them to be themselves and share more valuable observations about the brand-observations that our clients can use to evaluate and effectively manage brand equity.