Perception is Reality

Posted by Scott Provost, Percepta

We see it over and over again.  Large bio-tools companies are often cited in surveys by market research participants as the suppliers of research products that they don’t even sell.  What is this telling us?  The cynical might think it means researchers are just clicking on buttons to get to the end of the survey - and we know that does sometimes happen.  But when all the other answers to all the other questions seem to make sense (i.e. not the pattern of random clicking) then it means something else is going on.  We at Percepta believe it is a function of brand awareness. 

Bio-tools companies that have very high brand awareness get more than their share of credit from the research community.  That is because these companies are “first to mind” for many researchers when making a mental list of who might have a specific product offering.  That perception may not even be accurate if the company does not sell that particular product, but brand awareness can bring potential customers to a web site before they even look at search engine results. 

So what’s a niche company to do?  You have the product the customer is looking for but they are looking on some big bio-tools company web site.  The error many smaller companies make is to focus too much on selling (tactics) and ignore completely brand.  That is because many people don’t understand the power of a brand platform.  The brand platform is the road-map to brand consistency.  It includes several important elements of your brand architecture and will guide all internal and external brand messages. Many may not remember when Invitrogen was a small and virtually unknown company - but 15 years ago that’s what they were.  They started a brand building campaign that began in the mid 90’s and continued to evolve as the company evolved.  Today as part of Life Technologies they are one of the most recognized brands in the industry.  Same story applies to the Qiagen brand.  They have consistently built on a brand platform that has allowed them to evolve but yet remain recognizable and true to their brand.

Unless your company has a plan to build a brand platform that will establish brand awareness, your cusotmers will continue to go to who they know.  In this game it’s not so much what or who you know - but rather who knows you?  If you want help building a brand platform for your biotools company, Percepta can help.   Your comments are welcome.

Bandwidth all tied up?

Posted by Scott Provost, Percepta

All of us at Percepta have cumulatively been involved in literally hundreds of biotools product launches in the course of our careers at various well known biotools companies.  Some of these products were fabulous successes and others were fantastic flops.  The flops failed for a variety of reasons but the successes all had one thing in common – they were fast out of the gate and delivered what they promised.

I remember one success particularly well.  I was responsible for introducing a new line of products for a major supplier.  The new portfolio  was a significant expansion of what was a minor product line for my employer at the time.  The launch was quite large with over 65 individual kits all focused on various aspects of a very common molecular biology application performed by more than 90% of life science labs.  There was a lot to worry about because we were late to market with this portfolio and we knew we were facing serious competition and an uphill battle to take share from them, yet we were confident that if we could get researchers to try the product we would be able to convert them.   Naturally, we had a sample program in place and the sales force had been trained and properly incentivized.  But there was one thing we did that I still believe made the difference between early post-launch success and trench warfare with the competition (and our sales force too).  We asked our existing customers a few simple questions.

I have always been a strong proponent of the bird-in-hand mentality, so for the sake of saving time and extending our thinly spread launch team we hired an outside marketing research consultant to poll our company customer list to identify researchers that were not all that happy with their current competing supplier for this common molecular biology application.  The goal was to prime the sales force pump, so to speak, with easy to reach customers that were predisposed to try our new products. 

It turned out that there were about 1,500 disgruntled researchers among those responding to our short survey that were receptive to  a new method/kit/supplier.  Best yet, we knew who and where they were and what they were unhappy about.

Putting this kind of information in the hands of a hungry sales force is a bit like throwing gasoline on a fire.  We decided to generate a one page profile on each of the receptive customers and divvy them up by sales territory to the respective sales rep.  The sales force really ate this up and to make a long story short the portfolio launch was the most successful revenue garneting product launch in the company’s (at the time 18 year) history!  It was fast out of the gate and just kept going.  It is still growing today.

It is a simple idea that any company can do with their own resources – but few if any try.  Why?  Because most marketing managers are too thinly spread already and have too much to do before any launch.  There is not enough bandwidth and so many internal hurdles to get over like  getting access to the customer mailing lists, writing and then setting up the survey, analyzing the data.  And who writes the one page reports and gets them sorted by sales territory?  In my experience it is almost always a matter of bandwidth and not” know how” that prevents companies from doing this at launch.

If this sounds familiar , take heart and remember that we hired a consultant to help -  and it was well worth it to do so.  Percepta’s Profile Program™ can do all the heavy lifting and help your next product launch with a minimum of your time.  We’re here when the time is right. 

As always, your comments are encouraged.  

Directed Evolution

There has certainly been a lot of content generated recently about the virtues of the “new marketing” and the focus on niche segments, consumer to consumer communication, and permission vs. interruption approaches.  Is it a real revolution or a fad?  The question we prefer is: what’s the difference?  So let’s see what your average dictionary says about these terms.

Revolution - noun: a sudden, complete or marked change in something

Fad – noun: a temporary fashion, notion, manner of conduct, etc., especially one followed enthusiastically by a group

Certainly there are elements of both definitions that are applicable to the new marketing.  It is relatively sudden but far from complete, and it is clearly followed enthusiastically by many but perhaps too early to call permanent (though we believe it is not likely to be temporary).  It is also a marked change from the tactics of decades of marketing, especially for the biotools industry.  While some industries have embraced the tools of the new marketing such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like, and have spent countless keystrokes of content on the boundless blogisphere, the biotools industry has been slow to embrace this new realm. Why is that?  Maybe it is a problem of evolution.

In Seth Godin’s nauseatingly titled, but insightful book Meatball Sundae, he points out the importance of embracing the “fashion and stories and permission and promises” of the new marketing because the old marketing is “caveman marketing”.  He has a point.  We all are saturated with in-your-face, look-at-me, push, push, push carpet bombing marketing campaigns, or as Godin calls it “interruption marketing”.   The web has made this type of marketing easier to do – but also easy to ignore.  After all a mouse click is easier than turning a page.  Last time I looked cavemen either evolved or lost out to natural selection.

So why not play to the web’s strength and let natural selection, a well understood biological paradigm, run its course?  As all life scientists understand, natural selection relies on countless random changes leading to an eventual and inevitable successful combination creating a competitive advantage.  But timing is everything.  We prefer to think of the new marketing as a healthy dose of directed evolution.

Adapt to the new environment.  That means changing. Translated to the biotools industry, Godin and other’s are actually saying you may need to change a lot about the way you try to get your customer’s attention.  Show them your cool new stuff but don’t interrupt them (in-your-face marketing) to do so.  Be confident the cool new stuff actually is going to help your customer because permission marketing is about the customer, not your products or services.  In fact, you may need to let go and just give away some value. If they like it they will want it and come back.  If they don’t like it then you learned something valuable. 

Maybe that is not such a huge change after all.  Successful biotools companies educate their customers (translation: provide relevant and informative content) and add value (translation: risk giving something valuable away because it will be useful to customers) and gain loyalty (translation: build trust by keeping promises).

Percepta can help you evolve when you are ready.

Directed Evolution