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How does my message compare to competition?
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One of the most common errors made by pharmaceutical marketing teams is the development of a new campaign or
message without an in-depth understanding of competition's message and its place in the minds of the physician.
For example, if a new message is developed for your product that is misassociated with one of your competitors,
you could be driving your competitors sales with your promotional dollars! Marketing research services are
available that provide for the evaluation of a message relative to retention, uniqueness, believability
and relevance and which allow for comparison to competitive statements in virtually all major drug classes.
"Norms" for these attributes are available by therapeutic class and for new versus established products
within the primary care market and the specialty market. As might be expected, there can be significant
differences in the norms from one drug class to another. For example, class norms for message retention
can range from 24% to 57%, while an even broader range can exist for a specific message within a class.
Depending on the particular therapeutic class, a message that has a retention rate of 40% could be
significantly above the norm ... or significantly below. Similar variation is seen for uniqueness,
believability, and relevance. What these ranges show is that it can be easier or more difficult to make
convincing arguments for a given message relative to believability and relevance depending on the therapeutic
class in which a product completes.
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ACNielsen HCI has also developed a procedure to determine message uniqueness or the degree to which
a product "owns" a given message or position in the marketplace. This is referred to as the product's
Unique Selling Proposition (USP) Index. This measure indexes the degree to which a product's message
is uniquely associated with that product. The measure can range from a high of 100 (when all responders
link the message with the correct product), through 0 (when the message is not at all unique in
that it is equally "owned" or shared with at least one other product), to -100 (when all responders
actually connect the product's message with another product in the market).
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Do's and Don'ts
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Do's
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Determine how your message stands versus competition on the measures of retention, uniqueness, believability and relevance.
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Dont's
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Don't assume that you have a strong or weak message without some basis for comparison to competitive statements.
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