Info overload day:
Gist:- I met and presented our portfolio to four pharma product managers. They briefed me about two of their medicines and I encountered a lot of scientific terms. - When I got back in the office, we criticized and suggested revisions for a ready to drink beverage packaging design- After that, we brainstormed for the communication plan for a below the line campaign pitch. Squeezing out ideas on how to change consumers’ minds.
Meeting:I met with new pharma clients who would like to try out our services. They are into “ethical” pharma. From my own words and understanding, ethical pharma are brands and products which do not target mass consumers. Their target market are doctors. I was introduced to two brands — one is for hypertension and the other is a medicine that kills bacteria. If amoxicillin is a first generation antibiotic, this brand is already at the 3rd generation.
A bit of info about hypertension:I learned earlier that there are two types of hypertension: primary and secondary. Primary hypertension has no medical cause. It’s more of a psychological illness. Secondary hypertension is high blood pressure caused or triggered by a different illness such as heart or kidney diseases. According to the product manager in charge of the medicine for hypertension, it has no cure, and so hypertension medicines are used for maintenance.
Can we handle ethical brands?The prospective clients are quite skeptical if we can handle designs for ethical brands because our portfolio shows only designs for consumer brands. They fret that ethical brands are not our expertise because we only have a few ethical brand projects from our pharmaceutical clients Reckitt Benckiser and Boeringer Ingelheim. Their past and current creative suppliers specialize in pharma brands and we cater to different industries. I told them that each project that we deal with have different problems and objectives and we offer distinct creative solutions per project. For these ethical brands, all we have to do is to identify the communication problem. Afterwhich, we will study and observe the target market’s behavior and traits (demographics and psychographics). We will also research on their competitors and the top brands from the list of competitors, identify effective packaging and then we will determine how to improve the existing packaging visually based on current design trends + what is effective to the target market. We have to make sure that the key message is delivered loud and clear in the final material. They chose to try us out for the two brands. They commended the samples I showed them, and they would like to see how we can offer something new to the look of their roster of products.
What they need:The two brands need an effective catch cover or packaging to stand out from their many competitors. Doctors usually just get the sample medicines and throw away the cover. The challenge for us is to create a packaging attractive enough to be noticed and too nice to be thrown away. It also has to be very informative to the doctors. It should be something worth keeping.
Client: What if after you submit three designs, we still do not like any? I told the clients that there may be two possible reasons for this. One: The needs of the client were not properly addressed and understood therefore we did not get the correct instructions before executing. Second: We failed to follow the instructions or meet the objective. If possibility one is the case, then we have to re-align and identify which points were missed out or not addressed. To avoid this from happening everytime we deal with projects, we see to it that all instructions, needs analyses, and directions are clear. This should have a written creative/project brief for documentation purposes — so we have something to refer to in figuring out where things went wrong. If the second possibility is the case, then we will give another batch of studies until we present something that solves the communication problem. We will only charge additional costs if there are changes in directions. :-) Wish us luck!
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