“Our customers are currently confronted with a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment. They have arrived in a time where daily challenges have significantly higher impact on their marketing success than long-term opportunities and growth potential.” Jürgen Gietl, Manager at BrandTrust. In these situations, we help our customers react to these challenges with the greatest possible agility, without losing their identities. The following paragraphs describe what role your brand can have in this context as an effective management tool for sustainable business success:
1. Greater marketing efficiency under increasing cost pressure
As if the challenges for our customers from their complex environment weren’t enough, they are also faced with new generations of customers, new marketing and sales technologies, tapping into new markets, acquisitions and new product developments. What we see frequently in our consulting projects are highly complex brand portfolios and the necessity for brand and marketing managers to create greater synergies and cost reduction potential by managing their brands. The reason we are asked for help in these cases is that what they get, rather than the desired synergies, is confusion among doctors, pharmacists and patients. The consequences are uncertainty in the buying decision, high willingness to switch brands and increasing price-sensitivity among customers.
In such situations, we support our customers with an easy to understand, well-structured brand architecture tool. The brand and marketing managers themselves assign all relevant brands the right place in the portfolio to create the greatest possible added value with the lowest possible marketing budget. To do this simply and at the same time expertly, the tool focuses on two key dimensions:
1. Significance: What is the role of the individual brand for the success of the whole portfolio?
2. Credibility: How credible do the individual brands in the portfolio fit with one another?
These two dimensions cover up to 12 individual, objective criteria which ensure that subjective assessments by those involved in the brand architecture process are put aside, and that everyone rallies behind a common idea. With this process, we have, for example, provided clarity for an international pharmaceuticals group on how their worldwide company brand can most profitably use the pharmacy brands already successfully established in the market. Within a very short time, the brand and marketing managers at headquarters and the managers responsible for the various markets had been set on the same track to operating in their markets as cost-efficiently and successfully as possible.
2. Attracting the best employees, despite a lack of qualified workers
The demands placed on companies by qualified workers have changed drastically. Our customers are currently experiencing what all the studies have predicted for years: an increasing battle to fill open positions with qualified people, while at the same time those people are placing greater and greater demands on employers.
Many pharma companies have not been in the habit of competing openly with their competitors to attract the best and most suitable employees, and to open up to potential employees in their marketing and communication.
In the future, they will have to focus much more on communicating their culture and the reasons why they are particularly attractive to the next generation, and above all what makes them different from other pharma companies.
