This episode is not about strategy or tactics or building your marketing team, This week, it's about capabilities.
We're going way back to basics, to do a mindset reset on what marketing actually means. How can marketers know their customers better than they know themselves and solve problems for those customers all along their journey, not just with the products or services they sell?
Michele Benton has extensive experience in marketing leadership and transformational change at global pharma companies. She is now the founder and CEO at Lime where she is on a mission to put the “life” back into life sciences with skill-building programs, leadership and culture-shifting initiatives. What follows is a summary of our conversation mixed with my own thoughts.
Why are marketers 2nd class citizens?
It may be historical. In healthcare, it was sales-driven and I imagine probably the same for scientific equipment and services until the 2000s.
It's not that marketing isn't seen as central, but the reality is your leaders have been in this industry for decades, and most of them have grown up in sales themselves. Very few, have grown up in a very classic marketing environment and there are still biases and implicit things that drive instinct. And so I think that's a lot of what’s behind where marketing is perceived as sort of situated in companies.
What we mean by marketing
Marketing is more than content, campaigns and attribution metrics. It’s making sense of customers, and context. It’s identifying opportunities to solve problems and deliver value.
I think the biggest issue that life science companies have is they're not customer-oriented. And I know everyone will stop and say no, no.
Let me kind of unpack that a little bit. I say they're not customer-oriented. I believe that most companies care about customers, but they work from the inside out. Right? So they start with the company. They start with their products. They start with their therapy areas and then figure out how to, you know, from the inside out to the marketplace.
And when you see what great marketing is, it's just the opposite. They work from the outside in. They start with what the customer needs and brings that inward into the company.
…One of our big cornerstones is around customer obsession. It's being able to remove yourself from your stance and be able to shift and see the world from another. I mean, a lot of my early days, especially in marketing, you go to Walmart and you hang out and you see what people are doing and what are they shopping for.
What is the line like in the pharmacy and how are they talking and what conversations…. really being a student of popular culture, I'm a student of how everyday people are dealing with things and imagining the world where you don't have some of those options.
Why is marketing training so rare?
Many companies will invest a lot in sales training, but not marketing training. You might think it’s because you can get a degree in marketing, but not sales. Yet in the life science industry, few marketers come from a marketing background. They come from sales or R&D and maybe later get an MBA which may or may not emphasize marketing.
We would never dream of putting a sales representative in front of a customer without them going through weeks of mandatory training assessments, and skill validation, and then we'll let you go do your job.
…they take seasoned people and they put them through training and certify them before they go out in front of customers.
And we put marketers in front of million-dollar decisions about resources and messaging and strategy with no training. And if there's training, it's like it's optional.
Value propositions and moments that matter
I asked Michele about skills that she thought were missing. She thought it boiled down to relevant value props. To illustrate, she talked about YETI coolers.
They actually reframed the entire industry, for kind of sports gear and coolers and all of that. And what they did is they said, “Rather than get caught up on the cooler, let me look at the outcome that my customer segment wants to achieve.” And I think in this case, my take on it is, if you look at Yeti advertising, it's about reconnecting your soul with nature, right?
More importantly, Michele talked about her mom’s patient journey and the opportunities for improving the experience of going for treatment. She gave several examples of (theses are my words) poor ideas, executed well. Lots of good intentions but not really appropriate to the specific patient experience.
What can a marketer do within a large system?
The same way you eat an elephant. One bite at a time.
Michele encourages marketers to be an entrepreneur within your company. Look for solutions to those problems one at a time. That’s the outside-in, customer-obsessed approach.
Chat with Chris about content for demand generation.
Customer Obsession