Jack Health Blog
May 14th, 2024 By Jack Health
Have you invested in your Rx master brand? Jack Health’s Jamey Hardesty sat down with Kimberly Emrick-Bryan from Genuine and Laurie Warden from Jack Morton to discuss how building a strong Rx master brand can lead to above-brand benefits, like increased trust and awareness, and lower funnel benefits that trickle-down and drive success at the product level!
Video Transcript
Jamey Hardesty: My name is Jamey Hardesty, Head of Strategy at Jack Health, and we’re going to be discussing a bit on how healthcare companies and pharma brands can leverage their corporate master brand to establish trust and be a driving force for change and how companies and products are perceived by external audiences. So, thanks for being with us today, Kimberly and Laurie.
For our first question, we’ve seen the role of the master brand begin to show up in pharma more and more of late. Why do you think that’s happening? What are some of the reasons and benefits that would explain that trend and why we’re seeing it more, and why now?
Kimberly Emrick-Bryan: We’ve seen a shift in people going from not knowing which company made their treatment or the flu shot that they got, to actually talking about which type of vaccine did you get and then associating the pros and cons of each and having conversations about it.
So, I think a lot of the bigger companies are seeing the benefit of, okay, now we’re a household name. What do we do with that? But even smaller companies, I think, are appreciating that the corporate brand is where you establish your values. It’s where you develop that overarching promise.
And I think it matters even more if you’re a company that might be evolving, your business might be changing, and people might not know you and all that you do. So, if you’re trying to recruit or you’re trying to make sure that people know about certain treatments, you’re not getting the credit that you deserve because there is a perception issue.
Laurie Warden: What happens in the case that you’re newly introduced and now I need it, and I need to feel a feeling. And the feeling is trust. We know that trust overall brings a halo that’s important to that master brand. It impacts not only the core audiences who may be consuming those medicines, those prescriptions, and whatnot, but it also includes people who may want to work for you in the future.
Having that trust extends beyond a particular product need into a scalable, more global institution of feeling. There’s the rationale and the need, but then there’s the emotional, and the connectivity and trust play a critical factor.
Jamey Hardesty: Yeah, they expect you to communicate. You know your values, your mission, your purpose. And as we know, that’s incredibly hard to do at the product level. How would you recommend healthcare brands navigate those challenges, such as implementing a master brand that isn’t overly recognizable or has little equity today, to work more in lockstep across their organization?
Kimberly Emrick-Bryan: There’s a challenge in recognizing that the way that organizations are organized internally, those silos are perpetuating the problem because it’s a way that consumers are experiencing their brand out in the world is more of a continuum.
So, you might have different goals, different timelines, different ways of measuring performance, whether you’re focused on the brand or demand. Whereas if they were to really turn the lens and focus on the audiences they want to reach, work together to identify some of those touchpoints, where they show up, and how they’re showing up, they could create more efficiencies.
Laurie Warden: The importance of having a red thread that runs all the way from master brand down to specific needs and product-based marketing is there to ensure the consistency of that experience, no matter where that person is, is interacting or intercepting with that brand.
Brands that don’t have that master brand are missing a whole opportunity among people who may not be in that lower funnel demand action. When they do end up, or should they have a friend or someone else who’s a caregiver in that position, you don’t want to have to go back. You want to have some basis of understanding about that master brand at the point in time that begins to impact you and your loved ones’ lives.
Kimberly Emrick-Bryan: Additionally, when working in that integrated fashion, you reduce the amount of content that you need to produce. You know, you start to save not only time but also money on what you’re creating and what you’re sharing because you are working together to make sure that you have that united experience, that all ladders up to that brand and, and protects that trust. I think there’s this perception that it takes more work to do it. It’s really just having an internal cultural shift to understand and meet audiences where they are and then reap the benefits of it.
Jamey Hardesty: What would success look like as you begin to think about implementing a master brand, and how do you sort of navigate those internal headwinds that can feel like they’re pushing against you and in our, in the way of of moving this forward, to show that all areas of the funnel really do accelerate the road to building awareness, trust, loyalty, growth, for the entire organization.
Laurie Warden: You could argue that piloting now, in an instance when the business is doing well, is a way to be ready for if there becomes a time of downturn. For example, we could talk about a market or paired markets, and we want to build trust. And we know that audio, digital audio is something that the target is consuming more and more of. It’s become part of our cultural life today. Nothing shows but the uptrend and consumption of digital audio.
So maybe there’s a start with a produced radio ad or digital audio ad, and we run that in a market under tight parameters and have our measurement that needs to be separate and different from how you would measure lower gen efforts, lower funnel efforts. And we start there. And you claim a win along the victory path every mile. And it’s going to help in the time of need. And when that growth is desired, and there’s no way to really do that if you don’t make it a part of the discipline of the marketing strategy, to embrace that philosophy, that we need to try things that we don’t have as high of confidence in, in how it’s going to return to achieve that leapfrogging growth.
Kimberly Emrick-Bryan: I think there’s a hesitation to take away from R&D, to take away from the work that really matters. And there’s this perception that investing more in marketing is taking away from that. If you figure out how to do more of an integrated approach, you are saving money and not going back and reverse engineering anything. You’re not creating more risk out in the world. It actually helps the greater good, the greater cause, and the greater mission. It’s just not immediately obvious.
Jamey Hardesty: The more that you’re able to integrate these teams and have them working together, the better health you’re going to have across your marketing organization as a whole and be able to convert when it comes time, for patients to make choices about products.
It absolutely seems like the era of the master brand in healthcare is here. Thank you, Kimberly and Laurie, for your expert perspectives on the role of the master brand today. Have a great one.