For anyone who wasn’t quite sure how far and how fast social networking is influencing pharma, they need to look no further than foursquare, which has launched a “badge” so people can tell others that they have been tested for sexually transmitted diseases (STD).
Done in concert with local testing centers, and in conjunction with marketing trendsetter MTV, it is a great combination of advocacy, high tech and digital marketing.
The Wall St. Journal reported that Groupon now has 13 million users, $400m in revenues, 35,000 businesses waiting to be featured and 700 more adding to the list each day (wouldn’t we all like to have those numbers?). All because of something as simple and unsexy as local coupons.
But the lesson is how Groupon is making an old-fashioned experience like local coupons appear modern, by using all the modern tools. The most interesting item for pharma is the example one person “living off Groupon”, and while it’s a campaign like any other, it does offer a wonderful example of how all the new mediums pull together nicely to communicate in a modern way.
Full disclosure: we’re capitalists here at iQ.
Yes, we follow social, and, yes, we are all for the betterment of the world, but here is a story that caught our eye because it both did good and showed real results.
Fast Company has a great story about Causium and a business model that might make sense in a very practical way.
It raised $500,000 for the Room to Read charity (on its way now to $1m), but it’s the model that’s noteworthy. Because it raises the question, especially for pharma’s mega-brands: What if every customer had the opportunity to make a micro-donation to a cause that was specific to the therepautic category, or disease state?
So, cancer patients might support the American Cancer Society. Or diabetes patients might support American Diabetes Association (you get the idea).
Simply by the power of suggestion.
In this video, Pepsi SVP, Chief Consumer Engagement Officer, Frank Cooper, gives a brief description of how Pepsi used the $20m from the Super Bowl ad they didn’t run to start a grassroots effort. The concept can be found here on the Refresh Everything site.
Sure, the site has 5 million unique views and 20 million hits, but as he starts to talk about brand behavior, etc., he mentions all the items a marketing person would want to discuss — traffic, votes, reach, frequency, etc., — but listen for Pepsi’s goal: culture.
This weekend, one of P&G’s oldest brands — Old Spice — changed its image, practically over the weekend.
The campaign has been hailed as “The Archetype of a successful Social Media Campaign.”
People even wrote about how P&G was posting videos.
P&G allowed its ad agency to write real-time scripts using a character it created, then (and here is the key part) quickly react to input from the YouTube videos.
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