Medical Device Link.

Originally Published MX July/August 2001

Advertsing, Distribution & Sales

Third-party validation programs can provide just the support that product managers need to put a dent in the healthcare marketplace.

Sandy Bodner and Jack Curran

In medical product marketing, the rewards of success often come to campaigns that are imbued with such characteristics as verve, luck, and know-how. Verve speaks for itself. Luck may be merely a matter of having great timing. Know-how is a double-edged sword: it implies a critically useful depth of experience while also suggesting a certain tendency toward dullness, toward falling back on the tried-and-true sameness of the past.

But more important than all of these factors combined is the element of thoughtful and thorough advance planning. In the big picture of a medical product marketing campaign, it is planning—or the absence of planning—that is most often responsible for success or failure. The influence of campaign planning is reflected in literally everything that is seen, felt, and heard about a company and its product offerings.

The tone, texture, and characterization of a product—as well as the image of the company as a whole—are shaped largely by planning in two seemingly unrelated disciplines: third-party validation and branding. Both third-party validation and branding have the potential to improve every contact with a customer. Orchestrating the synergies between third-party validation and branding during the planning stage of a product launch can expedite market adoption while building the kind of solid, sustainable market position that every company seeks for itself and its products.

Because they are two halves of a single story, third-party validation and branding are most powerful when they are integrated. Indeed, in today's competitive marketplace, marketers can jeopardize the success of a campaign if they separate the activities related to these disciplines.

With due regard for the contribution that branding makes to a successful marketing campaign, the planning of branding-related activities is a matter for another article. This article focuses on how medical product marketers can manage the pathway to product acceptance by leveraging third-party validation, and it reviews three scenarios for such validation.

Third-Party Validation Defined

In the context of a medical product marketing campaign, third-party validation involves communications among a company's customers and their peers about the company's product offering. The strength of such third-party messaging resides in its intrinsic honesty, which often conveys a level of credibility that money cannot buy.

Third-party validation doesn't depend on a particular delivery vehicle. It appears in multiple, highly individualized guises, including communications such as those of clinical and scientific advisory boards, peer-reviewed journals, and accredited continuing medical education (CME) seminars. Third-party validation that travels by word-of-mouth can often be surprisingly powerful. When the director of a major teaching hospital touts the effectiveness of a particular company's new device at a meeting of medical professionals, for example, that communication bestows a certain level of independent validation on the product. If that same director also supervised many of the company's customers during their medical residencies, the effectiveness of that validation may be increased dramatically. Clearly, that special type of imprimatur elevates the communication above others in a cluttered marketplace.

Tactically speaking, third-party communication can be directed—and leveraged—without compromising its integrity. It can help identify product improvements, convey an arresting story, build an audience, and create and sustain a product's momentum toward market penetration. When it functions as planned, third-party communication ultimately becomes third-party validation, offering a superb way for marketers to communicate sophisticated, complex positioning. It can move a company's product offering along the continuum of acceptance in a compelling, highly credible manner.

Guiding Questions

During the product approval process, the need to respond to regulatory demands often raises issues that can blur the marketing vision of industry novices and veterans alike. Such issues may have similarities to the questions of greatest importance to marketers, but they are not necessarily the same. Notwithstanding such regulatory concerns, three key questions should guide the journey along the pathway to product acceptance. They apply to any groundbreaking new product, whether a new device or a diagnostic tool. The first two questions reflect the buyer's ultimate concerns.

• Where does the product fit in the continuum of care?
• What data exist to support the manufacturer's claims about the utility of the product?

These questions arise every day, and their answers are often inextricably intertwined. Although it is critically important how these questions are answered, it is usually who answers them that determines whether the information is considered authoritative. For a company's responses to be credible, its answers should be driven by—or validated by—a third party. Frequently such third parties are the medical investigators performing clinical trials. Ideally, they are also known in their fields or are officers of professional medical societies. Because third-party authorities have an implicit understanding of current gaps in the continuum of care, they can provide an invaluable understanding of unmet medical needs.

Product managers sometimes make the mistake of using third-party vehicles merely to validate what the company already knows. This misguided approach often includes the use of spokespeople that the company is familiar with and who will tell the company what it wants to hear.

A better and more meaningful approach is to leverage the views of independent third parties to help provide credible answers to the really hard fit and data questions. Such authoritative vehicles may include advisory boards, accredited CME seminars, or speakers bureaus. Balanced, open forums can identify supporters—and potential partnerships—that can help generate the evidence needed to persuade the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to affirmatively answer the third question.

• Will the technology be reimbursed?

When considering the application of a product for a coverage or payment decision, CMS will explore a wide variety of issues—including the cost and effectiveness of the new device in comparison with other treatment alternatives. The most credible arguments in favor of reimbursement will be those backed or provided by knowledgeable third parties.

The Pathway to Acceptance

The most powerful responses to each of the three questions discussed above are those that carry the weight and authority of independent experts in the field. By seeking out opportunities to attain third-party validation of a product's attributes in each of these key areas, product marketers can build a strong base of support for their other marketing activities.

The strategies that can be adopted to attain third-party validation are as varied as the key questions they address and as numerous as the products they support. Following are just three examples of how third-party validation can work to address the most important issues faced by marketing staff.

Where does the product fit in the continuum of care? Too often, the response of knowledgeable clinicians to this question is noncommittal. Typical are comments such as "it's cool technology but I'm not ready to buy it." Such a view reflects the reluctance of mainstream clinical practitioners to adopt any technology that they perceive as involving risk.

Ideally, marketers should be able to counter such objections more by doing than by saying. For example, one manufacturer addressed the question of fit by turning the tables on its potential customers, pharmaceutical companies that were reluctant to commit to an innovative electronic data-collection technology. The manufacturer faced the classic marketing challenge of differentiating itself in a marketplace in which many companies were perceived to be doing the same thing. From an engineering point of view, however, the manufacturer believed that its product offered tremendous advantages.

The manufacturer aspired to create a strong presence at the major trade show for its sector. To do so, it devised a product demonstration that involved staging a mock clinical trial. By placing its electronic data-collection tool in the hands of highly qualified pharmaceutical customers for 24 hours during a major meeting, the manufacturer enabled those customers to develop their own highly personalized answers to the question of fit. In effect, this demonstration made potential customers supply their own independent validation on behalf of the product.

What data exist to support the manufacturer's claims about the utility of the product? Confronted with this question, inexperienced marketers frequently attempt to sidestep the issue by responding that the data speak for themselves. While it might be nice if this were the case, it never is.

The collection, recording, and analysis of experimental and clinical data are subject to extremely strict standards. The elements of a study's protocol can influence the shape of its resulting data in ways that cannot be understood without detailed explanation. Moreover, study data frequently carry with them implications that may go unrecognized unless they are subjected to careful, expert interpretation. And this can be especially true for data generated by the most rigorous types of clinical trials, the full impact of which may require years to absorb and fully comprehend. In short, data presented in support of a manufacturer's claims about its product must never be taken for granted. Even highly compelling data should be presented in a way that emphasizes the honesty, integrity, and intelligence of the investigators and their results.

It can be difficult to stand out in a crowded marketplace by talking only about data. In reality, good data is merely the essential starting point. Next must come references and the all-important context that they provide for the data. One of the most common goals of third-party validation is to use professional sources and references to place the interpretation of product-related data into the big picture of the continuum of care. The messages conveyed by such sources and references help to explain how and where the company's product plays its essential role.

The credibility of such messages is inevitably influenced by the nature of the forums in which they are presented and the persons presenting them. Manufacturers can often influence these factors to their benefit. One recent case, for example, involved a company that had developed a technology to reduce the incidence of medication errors. The company enlisted a leading trade magazine to cosponsor a survey assessing reader awareness about the problem of medication errors. The magazine's participation lent the survey additional credibility. In addition, when the results of the survey were reported at a major trade show, a blue-ribbon panel featuring officials from the quality practices committee of a leading medical society reviewed the findings. Only after the panel review had taken place were the results reported in the trade magazine and the company's technology mentioned. Despite the fact that the entire project was crafted with special regard for the manufacturer's interest in medication error, the survey provided a highly credible forum in which to present key findings and showcase the manufacturer's product in a context designed to improve overall understanding of the issues.

Will the technology be reimbursed? For company executives—and the investors that support them—the typical answer to this question is that a product isn't worth anything unless third-party payers are willing to pay for it. Such a view of product development can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, compelling executives to kill off promising projects before they have explored all the alternatives that might bring about a favorable reimbursement decision.

However, there is a classic defense against such self-defeating logic: partnerships. Partnerships that are crafted to help all of the participants overcome common hurdles can result in extremely imaginative and vibrant strategies for marketing products.

In one such case, an array of public health officials and world-class scientists confirmed the value of a company's technology. Their comments were delivered during a series of accredited CME forums organized by a nonprofit association and funded by educational grants provided by the company. The common ground for this partnership was the nonprofit's concern that patients should have access to the company's life-saving, yet unapproved, medical technology.

All of the participants shared a keen interest in the overall healthcare of patients, in which the company's technology played a key part. For its part, the company took pains to ensure that it exerted no controlling influence over the presentations by health officials or scientists. At the end of the day, these presentations demonstrated that the company's technology could withstand close scrutiny, and even thrive under it. One and a half years after the program began, the medical necessity argument—brought forth by an authoritative group of advocates, public health officials, U.S. military research scientists, and clinicians—became part of a highly compelling body of data presented by public health advocates to the Health Care Financing Administration (now CMS) to support reimbursment for an unapproved lifesaving technology.

This partnership between a nonprofit and a commercial organization integrated the questions of fit and data, and also provided a dramatic response to the question of reimbursement. The CME sessions generated a powerful series of messages that explained how a product addressed a genuine marketplace need, and simultaneously conveyed independent third-party validation of the company's technology.

Conclusion

Product managers, often with limited resources, are challenged with shaping the market's perception of their company's offering. They will, of course, consider the traditional set of communication tools—advertising, direct marketing, sales collateral, trade show exhibits, and so on. As will their competitors.

But third-party validation programs can help such product managers to establish a meaningful, strategic point of differentiation between their products and those of their competitors. The foundation of effective validation programs is the identification, planning, and development of partnerships built on common interests; the creative selection of venues; the inventive solicitation of audiences; and the clarity and credibility of the voices that deliver a company's messages to the marketplace.

Such programs should not be seen as a replacement for traditional marketing tools, but as critical components of an integrated communications mix. Their power lies in their ability to establish a perception of credibility and legitimacy that traditional tools cannot.

Similarly, third-party validation programs should not be limited to the publishing of clinical trial results or the assembly of a scientific advisory board. Such programs can be useful at every stage of product or market development, and product marketers should explore every opportunity to take advantage of their potential.

Sandy Bodner is vice president for professional relations and Jack Curran is vice president for brand management at Lehman Millet (Boston), a medical marketing services agency.

Copyright ©2001 MX