The debate around pharma’s use of digital media has tended to focus on building relationships with patients or healthcare professionals through new web media.

Yet the potential for engagement is much greater than that. While companies, agencies and regulators thrash out the finer points of talking to patients through social media, and when that conversation morphs into promotional activity, digital techniques have also made substantial inroads into market research.

Indeed, suggests Chris Cooper, managing director of online communications specialist EPG Health Media (whose market research activities are 100% digital), market research (MR) was “perhaps a more obvious use of the digital space a decade ago, at least to us”. The business “saw digital, from the get-go in 1998, as not only a way to broadcast content, but a way to sample behaviour and opinion”.

By comparison, social media are “a relatively recent development”, Cooper notes.

And while they may provide further opportunities in market research, as yet the channel is “less well defined and often unregulated, so we consider it as an opportunity to be approached with caution, at least from an MR perspective”.

Damian Eade, director at Insight Research Group, which was among the winners at the BHBIA’s recent Best of British Intelligence awards, believes pharma is already further ahead with digital market research than some commentators suggest.

“We’re probably not managing to develop at the same pace as, say, our consumer colleagues are,” he comments. “But certainly the same sorts of questions and debates that we’re having within the pharma industry, and the implications for market research, are going on within the consumer industry.”

Digital market research is growing

For Andrew Forman, Insight’s director of marketing and sales, industry’s wariness about engaging with social media has led to a perception that “maybe they’re not as digitally savvy as their consumer peers”.

As market research techniques do not generally depend on social media, though, the digital explosion has reverberated more forcefully in the sector. 

“Traditionally it would be, let’s do an in-depth interview in a central-location hotel room, or a group discussion, or a questionnaire over the telephone,” Forman notes.

“But now we’ve got a range of options that really open up a new way of doing things.”

More than 50% of Insight’s work is “still the old-fashioned analogue stuff”, Forman acknowledges. But the digital component is growing and already makes up 5-10% revenue.

“We think it’s really important to engage with that whole space and really understand it, and try to steer our clients towards the best way of doing research that works for their brief, their brand and their products,” Forman says.

Access and speed

The question, though, is what digital gives us that cannot be gleaned from traditional MR methods.

The more obvious advantages relate to easier/wider access and the speed/cost of delivery. “Our experience is that clients perceive digital as a very fast and more cost-effective data acquisition method versus traditional MR agency methods,” Cooper says.

“Digital requires fewer resources to execute and deliver a study. So, given that research budgets are under strain, increasingly we are seeing direct approaches from pharma asking us to design, develop and execute studies - then report - on topics in very short time frames.”

The cost of these ‘snapshot’ activities is “a tiny fraction of larger-scale traditional research activities”, Cooper adds.

That may not be the case for all digital market research. As Forman points out, researchers working online can avoid travel expenses or the cost of a venue at £500 a day, but they still need to pay people for their professional time. And with community-based projects, money needs to be spent on incentivising participants to respond.

There is also the cost, Eade adds, of reading through and moderating responses, which can stack up quickly over time.

Plus, you need dedicated human resources. Insight’s eVillage, for example - the pharmaceutical MR online community it launched in January - operates both on a project-by-project and an ongoing basis.

“To keep that going, we’ve actually got dedicated full-time staff,” Forman notes.

“And then you’ve got to pay your respondents to stay with it over an extended period. So it doesn’t really save us any money and it can be a cost. However, if more people are buying into it more often, then that fixed cost soon gets covered and you start making more profit.”

Digital reach and communities

Costs aside, Forman sees a particular role for digital in accessing hard-to-reach or widely dispersed respondents - for example, where rare, specialist or difficult-to-diagnose conditions are involved.

Another clear advantage, he believes, is the capacity to build online communities with time to develop better shaded opinions. “Instead of, for example, a one-hour contact with a group of six selected doctors for a focus group, you can stay in contact with [an online community] for a really extended period.”

The Insight project with Boehringer Ingelheim that won the BOBI award established one such community, to assess and anticipate the impact of a pending competitor launch and other significant changes in the COPD market.

Ultimately the community ran for six months, with relevant topics explored through discussion forums, quick polls, diaries, live online groups, idea boards and campaign material assessments.

“You can do the knee-jerk response, and explore that, but then also over time have a more nuanced and probably slightly deeper reflection on any particular topic that you’re exploring,” Forman comments.

Social media principles

What also happens is that the researchers start to build a relationship with this group, which in turn informs the way they engage with respondents. “You go past the idea that they’re clinical people and understand that they’re just people, who happen to be clinically experts,” Forman explains.

As Eade points out, with traditional methods such as a 60-minute in-depth interview or a two-hour focus group, there is a set window of opportunity that tends to impose rigidity. “You have to almost get as much as you can around your brand and the very specific questions you have. As a result, it’s very much a question-and-response type of interaction.”

With an ongoing community format, there is “less question and response, which is not a great way to build up interaction, and more a stimulus-stimulus approach, whereby you plug things into the community for discussion and debate, and then the community starts to discuss among themselves what are the important issues”, Eade adds. Ultimately, “you get to know them better as doctors in general, not just as doctors in relation to your brand or therapy area”.

For quantitative research, digital is also an opportunity to make the process more visually arresting than “the old-fashioned paper and pencil telephone stuff”, using techniques such as drag-and-drop, Forman observes. And WebEx software allows researchers to set up extended group interactions online, whether text- or video-based.

As Eade points out, a lot of these techniques draw on the principles of social media, “remembering that social media are about conversations and, arguably, a lot of the time about informality”.

So in adopting more community-orientated approaches, he suggests, market researchers need to ensure they are not constrained by the more structured styles of communication typical of traditional analogue research.

Unprompted discussions emerge

Another way in which digital media have widened access to customer opinion, is as a gateway to unprompted and unarbitrated discussions online, which may provide important insights into positive or negative perceptions of a product, brand or corporate image. Finding, collating, filtering and analysing these discussions is the speciality of another BOBI award winner, Artesian Solutions, a UK-based provider of sales intelligence/market surveillance software.

Artesian’s chief executive officer, Andrew Yates, identifies patient empowerment as a key driver in this process.

Relationships with doctors are tilting towards collaboration, with patients coming in forearmed with information about treatment options, he observes.

In turn, pharma needs to reconsider the traditional ‘influence’ model, whereby it would “go and see the clinical specialist in the regional health authority, or the GP or the pharmacist, say, we recommend that you prescribe this, and then wait a month or a quarter for the IMS data to pop out the other end”.

If patients are proactively asking for one drug or another - and may well get it - companies will want to know how the patient is forming that opinion.

Increasingly, Yates contends, the answer is likely to be found in dialogue conducted online.

Online adverse event reporting

The virality of web traffic can be a PR triumph or an uncontained disaster for companies caught up in it. Artesian’s partner in the BOBI project, Sanofi, has not been immune to these negative effects and their difficult implications for adverse drug reaction reporting.

The initiative uses Artesian Solutions Surveillance software to monitor individual conversations through media such as blogs or Twitter, tracking the emergence of relevant themes as well as the volume and value of discussion around them.

These insights serve as an early warning system of difficulties or trends ahead.

They allow Sanofi to engage with its audience if needed, or to feed the information back into product planning and marketing/communications strategies.

Yates likens the process to a ‘sausage machine’: the Artesian technology can harvest content from different online sources and ‘pipeline’ hundreds of gigabytes of data a day.

The company then uses algorithms to analyse this content through a combination of natural language processing and text mining, so it can “figure out what those words in a sentence mean, the emotions being expressed and if those words are proximate to the particular mention of a product or a company”, Yates says.

Artesian can create tag clouds referencing an ongoing discussion and can plot trends such as whether the volume of conversation on a particular topic is rising or falling, whether this conversation is company- or brand-specific, and whether a competitor is part of the discussion.

“Rather than 10,000 tweets, which isn’t particularly interesting, the marketer gets a visual check of what the aggregate of the intelligence tells them,” Yates notes. 

This is something consumer companies such as Dell have been doing quite actively for the last four or five years, he adds.

The next step for Sanofi will be to develop engagement strategies in response to the information gleaned online, as well as related key performance indicators - making a careful transition from web-listening to driving conversations with customers.

The value of immediacy

As Yates points out, it is the actuality of digital listening that gives it a particular edge. “Market research is a painstaking, some would say painful, slow process. The beauty of this is, you’re not directly engaging the client - although you certainly can.           

“They’re just freely talking to one another, and that’s where you get the real truth.”

Cooper also stresses the value of immediacy. While it may be a ‘simplistic’ distinction, digital basically “provides low-cost access to research which shows the state of play today; traditional methods tend to provide incredibly accurate high-cost detail on the state of play yesterday”, he says.

Why would “a client want to put in place the infrastructure and associated cost of a major study, for a topic where they require the answers to perhaps only a few time-critical questions?”, Cooper asks.

These major activities “typically produce results which - depending on the topic - are often out of date by the time the ink has dried on the report, so why do that when you can execute a small scale activity, turn it around in a fortnight and pay a fraction of the cost?”

Another, ‘perhaps less obvious’, advantage of digital market research is the absence of geographical boundaries dilutes the potential for ‘tainting’ of results, Cooper suggests.

“For example, using traditional methods might involve commissioning a study with a lead market rese agency that may then sub-contract elements of data acquisition to geographically spread affiliate offices or sub-contractors - to get the desired geographical response level.”

By contrast, a purely digital operation such as EPG Health Media can “quickly access doctors across Europe and beyond in a single shot without the need to involve other parties or agents”.

A place for face-to-face

Not that digital media are the death knell for traditional approaches to pharmaceutical market research.

Digital “provides an excellent market research solution given the right circumstance and need, but there will always remain a place for face-to-face traditional methods”, Cooper comments.

Forman agrees. “As well as asking for rational, logical responses to clinical information, a lot of our clients these days want us to dig a bit deeper with doctors as people, how they respond to a particular idea.

“And I think that actually a group discussion, provided you’ve got skilled moderators, will give you more of that motive.” That includes close attention to visual cues, body and verbal language, “all that group dynamic stuff”.

In Forman’s view, “we’re still at a stage where there’s little substitute for that face- to-face and indeed group discussion environment for really getting to understand the atmosphere, the energy, the process of the group.

“That reveals a lot non-verbally about how people respond to a particular situation in a particular context.”

But the important thing, Eade stresses, is to realise that digital and analogue approaches to pharmaceutical market research are not mutually exclusive.

“In some cases, and increasingly so,” he says, “the digital approaches are more about enhancing our traditional approaches so that we can get more out of them.”