In any business, telling your brand story is a critical part of building trust with your customers. It helps shape the views and perception of your audience and they start feeling and emotional connect with your brand. When the story is told right, there is no other tool as powerful as this to build a thriving brand. People buy or recommend a brand simply because they love what the brand stands for and the stories shared by brand managers.
Customer’s motivation to buy is hardly about owning stuff; it is about the meaning that product or service has for them. People buy because it fulfils their emotional needs or wants, and then they justify their decision logically. As a human being we prefer the anecdotes, ideas, opinions, and beliefs over facts and figures. We are hardwired to search for a story instead of numbers. Our quest is to unearth the story behind. Stories lead us to better understanding and build trust. With trust we are moved to take affirmative action and it results in buying and recommending the brand. Share what your brand is all about: your core values, purpose, beliefs, and mission.
In this insights article we share with you how to create and share content, to cultivate an active loyal community of doctors and patients and tell them the stories that matter to them.
The first step for Brand Managers is to introspect about impediments they have with storytelling:
- Brand managers think, speak, and live by data and graphics not by stories which doctors and patients are more willing to listen. Brand managers speak rationally to justify prescription of their brand, while their key audience: patients and doctors speak more emotionally and want to understand how it is going to make their life easier.
- Brand managers have a predisposition to argue their standpoints by putting forth facts and figures, while are looking for larger picture: How does it help doctors treat their patient well?
- Marketing campaign plans hardly read like novels. Brand managers are often preoccupied with clinical trials data, product monologues etc. and other numbers. Instead, it is about how facts, figures and features of the brand can be used to tell a compelling story.
So, How Pharma Brand Managers Can Tell a Compelling Brand Story?
- Keep Your Stories Simple: Science says that simple stories are better understood by everyone and our experience affirms it. Every simple story follows a three-part model that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. This model carries a natural progression:
- Beginning: Problem. Explain the problem that you set out to solve.
- Middle: Solution. Describe how you solved it.
- End: Success. Get excited about the success this produced
- Make Patients and Doctors Protagonist of your Story: Lets look at a specific story where a patient is facing a debilitating condition and it is affecting his day-to-day life. His symptoms and problems are explained. He meets few doctors for his treatment, but the problem persists. In the middle part of the story, the protagonist (i.e., doctor) diagnoses and identifies a treatment protocol for which a specific pharma offering appears to be a promising choice. The final part of the story talks about how further treatment with that product, the living condition of patient improves, and he/she is satisfied with the prognosis and thanks his doctor. Putting the patients and doctors at the center of the story as protagonist as opposed to putting the brand at the center ensures that the audience can relate to the story.
- Great Stories Make a Promise: A great brand story from Pharma should talk about a better future and better outcome for the patients. Only if the brand has a promise to offer to patients for a better clinical outcome, doctors and patients will give it attention. A story without a promise is not worth listening to”.
- The Story Must Be True and Believable: The story must be based on facts, but also be consistent and authentic in its message and narrative. Both patients and doctors are too good at sniffing out inconsistencies and the fake ones are guaranteed to backfire. The story should be weaved around supporting clinical trial data, graphics and other product details and substantiate the promise or claim made by the brand. Only then the story is convincing as well as engaging.
- Build A Common Narrative Over Campaign: The signature story that represents a brand are generally told over multiple stories in a marketing campaign. Brand managers should keep in mind that the individual pieces of the story are part of a broader narrative and must reinforce the signature story. A cohesive campaign build with multiple stories around a common signature story has a lasting impact on audience mind.
Storytelling is not intended to be a ‘selling’ tool in Pharma marketing. It is a method of building trust and emotional connect with HCPs and patient community and make them loyal followers of your brand. Your story identifies what your brand stands for and serves as the foundation for all your future marketing and content developments.
At MedSynapse, we have built a thriving community of 200,000+ verified doctors from Middle East and South East Asia. By working with us as partners, Pharma companies can tap immediately into the community and we help them leverage ‘The Art of Storytelling’ their Content Marketing Strategy. We not only provide the captive HCP audience through our platform as an audience for these contents but also offer end to end services including digital brand strategy, medical content creation, project management, media/creative services, moderation, pharmacovigilance, and analytics/reporting. We do the heavy lifting for our clients so that they focus on offering a great customer experience to their target HCPs.
