The holy grail for any marketer is to create “brand advocates.”  This is especially important for pharmaceutical companies.  Piles of research have demonstrated that a brand advocate wields disproportionate influence over their peer group, serves to extend a company’s presence and humanize its image.  For healthcare companies where patient health is the central issue, a personal brand advocate is priceless.  Health is personal and patients seek the counsel of others that have had similar experiences.

This dynamic occurs fundamentally because of the presence of trust between the brand, brand advocate and “would be” customer.  Therefore, to secure brand advocates, the relationship must be built on trust.  It stands to reason then that marketing programs should be built on trust, not persuasion.

When people consider the purpose of marketing they generally think of a company attempting to convince a prospective customer that its product is the best available product on the market.  This is a relationship built on persuasion.  Relationships built on persuasion rarely result in cultivating brand advocates.  With such a disconnect, it is plain to see why converting customers to brand advocates remains the holy grail.

In Principles of Advertising & IMC, by Tom Duncan, the idea of securing brand advocates is described as a linear process.  The first step in that process is for a customer to have some level of awareness with the brand.  From there, you would like that customer to identify with the brand and then feel connected.  Once you achieve those three steps, the hard work begins.  If you have a customer that feels connected with the brand, you ideally want that person to feel like they belong to a community.  And of course, the last step is converting community members into brand advocates outside that community.  In a marketer’s world, an easy way to think about this might be within the context of the sales funnel.  A lot of your customers enter the “brand advocate” funnel based on awareness but only a few come out the other side as advocates.  The trick is figuring out how to widening the bottom of that funnel to allow for a higher conversion rate of brand advocates.

As part of this process, a marketer needs to start at the desired outcome and work backwards.  As mentioned earlier, this means forming relationships that are built on trust—not persuasion.  For the pharmaceutical industry, which has a checkered past with its customer base, this point cannot be understated.  Relationships built on persuasion always feel coercive at best and adversarial at worst.  Pharma companies certainly do not want an adversarial relationship with patients, doctors or insurance providers.  That simply won’t yield brand advocates.  But given the current marketing tactics in favor, won’t it be difficult to foster relationships built on trust that yield brand advocates?  BINGO!

The very nature of most marketing techniques is built on persuasion or convincing a customer.  This won’t work.  That’s not to say that traditional advertisements and other forms of marketing are ineffective.  It simply means that the ad in question should be developed not based on persuading a customer, but on demonstrating why you should be trusted as a brand.  It’s subtle difference and will include similar messages—but the delivery will ultimately be different.  In addition, marketers will need to judge the mix of their marketing budgets moving forward in the context of whether or not they are building trust (i.e. long-term customers) or merely twisting a customer’s arm (short-term buyers).

A story in MediaPost yesterday highlights a survey of marketers that indicates 66% expect their digital marketing efforts to increase.  Why?  There is no shortage of reasons but I would venture to guess that part of it is marketers are coming to an awareness that trust cannot be built on the shoulders of advertising alone.  Relationship marketing requires a much more intimate connection with the brand than is offered through mass media.

Widening that funnel is about trust at its core.  How you get there is still debatable but I can assure you that the companies that realize relationship marketing is a top priority will figure out the path sooner than others.

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