Abstract
There has never been a time of more rapid change in the scientific industry, signaling the need for more sophisticated marketing practices. How are life science marketers evolving their strategies and tactical mix during these times? We recently conducted a quantitative study of over 100 science marketers in order to understand their priorities and their budget expenditure, as well as their attitudes towards current topics such as demand generation, brand awareness and social media. In this report, we present the results and synthesize our findings.
Introduction
“Being equally as bad as my competitors isn’t of interest to me” an executive of an instrument manufacturer said to me during a breakfast meeting, as I tried to console him that the challenges he faces are not unique to his company.
He is right. The scientific products industry has become more sophisticated. The increased pressures from ongoing consolidation, combined with rapid maturation of many technologies require a new breed of marketing strategy. Yet the industry’s marketing practices have not kept pace with this need to evolve. Just where do science marketers focus their budgets, priorities and attention? This was the key question that we set to answer during our biannual survey of science marketing dynamics.
More specifically, we set out to test four specific hypotheses and to better understand the behaviors around each of our hypotheses:
First, we have experienced that many companies are taking an ever-narrower view of marketing, and only funding activities in lead generation, event marketing and sales collateral. We wondered whether this observation holds across the industry. We also set out to learn whether any other strategic initiatives are taking precedence over lead/demand generation, and how marketers determine the marketing mix, given their priorities.
Second, we believe that as industry consolidation continues, the brand dynamic between the acquirer, the acquired and the competition shifts. We set out to understand the extent which companies invest in or manage their brands, and specifically in which activities they engage to manage their brands.
Third, we were keen to understand the current state of marketing strategies. In 2009, many companies announced strategic initiatives to pursue applied markets. We wanted to understand how prevalent market “segment marketing” or “industry marketing” has become in the science industry, and to quantify the extent to which industry marketing is still a priority. We also wanted to better understand how industry marketing fits within the rest of the marketing organizations.
Lastly, we wanted to follow the rise of social media in science marketing, and to learn how companies are adopting social media.
With these four objectives, we conducted an online survey the results of which are shared in this issue of Linus Report. We sincerely hope that this information will empower science marketers to continue evolving and optimizing their marketing strategies.
Method
We created an online survey instrument using an enterprise research platform called Survey Analyticsi. Our survey consisted of 28 multiple-choice and matrix questions. The first four questions were designed to collect demographic information (role, department, company size and market).
To invite participation from science marketers, we used our internal email database ofLinus Report recipients and also broadcast the survey on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. As an incentive and a segmentation tool to attract the correct demographic of respondents, we offered to share the aggregate results with participants who completed the survey. In order to build integrity into the survey results, we separated the survey results from the contact information we collected by using a completely different survey tool for each task.
The survey was open from April 27, 2011 until May 10, 2011. In this time we collected 104 complete responses. The average time that our respondents took to complete the survey was 18 minutes.
When it comes to generating engaging content and coming up with a content startegy is there any resources anyone would reccomend going to first?
Do you regard the messages as generic for the whole industry? I mean are they equally applicable to product and services or are there some differences?
regards
Frank
Thank you for a very interesting report. One question though: how do you account for the differences in response, especially for “other” and “print direct mail”, between figures 3 and 4? Is it that figure 3 shows what is actually most used and figure 4 what is deemed most effective? I had a thought also regarding your remark that 68% claimed that “responsibilities between product marketing and industry market were not clearly defined”. 52% of your respondents are classified as small companies; I would expect that small companies don’t segment their work-force responsibilities that much. If Biotech Inc has 40 employees, sales and marketing could be 10 people or less. That they should better define and divide up the roles among them is another matter. :)
CheersErik
Great questions! First, the discrepancy between figures 3 and 4 are is due to the fact that figure 3 illustrates the response to people choosing all of the lead generation activities in which they routinely engage (checking all applicable answers without ranking), while figure 4 illustrates the respondents’ opinion for the single most effective channel for lead generation. In figure 4, you also see that ‘other’ is chosen quite often. We asked an open-ended follow-up question to those participants who chose ‘other’ and most of them indicated ‘trade-shows’ as being the single most effective lead generation channel. We had purposefully stated “Other than trade-shows” because we wanted to remove the signal-to-noise effects of trade-shows as being the dominant response.
Regarding your comment about small companies having less segmentation of the responsibility within their workforce, I agree with you. However is a prior question, we had segmented the companies who claim to not have any market-segment development activities. Small companies in particular should focus their talents by very clearly delineating roles, responsibilities, decision rights and expectations, don’t you think?Regarding the fig3/4 issue: that is more or less what I thought. So you had “other than trade shows” in the main question but this was not read properly? Shame. What was the second-most “other” for the Consultatives and what’s the percentage? Does it go down to the same figures as in figure 3? One might consider removing the trade-show-answers from the dataset… :)
Regarding segmentation, I do agree. However you write “department or function”, the latter being the most probable in a small company. Here segmentation can get quite muddled. An important aspect in my opinion is that a proper segmentation of functions is necessary, even if held by a single person (!), in order to be able to quantify and evaluate different marketing efforts.
BestErik
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