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Actionable Segmentation in Pharma

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May 8 2009

Whether marketing to consumers or Healthcare Practitioners (HCP's), many pharmaceutical companies have changed the way they segment.  HCP segmentation, for example, is no longer driven exclusively by specialty type and rearview mirror volume metrics such as NRx and TRx.  Instead most companies are becoming savvier and incorporating marketing and analytic best practices to build robust customer profiles and segmentation schemes that are based on customer need and value, interest, attitudes, and behaviors.  Integrating customer data from multiple data sources, appending records with commercially available data (census, demographic, interest/lifestyle, etc.) and surveying prospective and current customers to determine attitudes about the disease, treatment programs and tools, and the brand are all part of developing an effective data strategy to be able to tag customers to segments.  The challenge, however, is that newly created segments don't always manifest themselves to customer records that already reside in the database.  So how can you make your segmentation actionable and realize the benefits? 

Certainly leveraging typing tools and surveying registrants is a great way to get newly acquired consumers and HCP's into the appropriate segment and corresponding communication stream.  For existing prospects and customers, marketers should work closely with their customer analytics team to identify the data attributes that exist and serve as proxies, or indicators to associate customers with the newly defined segments.  This can either be done qualitatively or quantitatively depending on the confidence interval you require.  Once this is complete, the database team can tag each record with the appropriate segment identifier and enter them into the corresponding communication stream. 

This approach is pragmatic and less costly and time consuming than re-contacting all existing customers to determine which segment they fit into.  In a time when quick wins are needed, this is one way to immediately leverage existing data assets, make segmentation actionable and operational,  and treat customers differently.  Treating customers differently is, after all, why we segment in the first place. 

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