Insight Business

The elementary in emerging markets

2010-05-09T15:59:00.001-04:00

What categories have the most potential?

What kind of competition exists in these markets today?

What future competition will there be?

How do people behave and what is the best way to talk to them?

These all seem like fairly benign market entry questions; however, the paths of entry into emerging markets are strewn with the futile investments and broken branded bodies of initiatives who failed to fully heed the answers to these questions.

Knowing the questions is only half the battle. Getting the right answers is the other half of the fight.

Everyone knows the classic mistakes, like when Chevrolet launched a car in Mexico that meant Doesn’t Go (Nova) or when P&G launched soap in Japan that showed creamy bubbles in a tub (Camay) when Japanese bathers don’t put soap in their tubs.

You have to think that Chevrolet and P&G had on-the-ground partners who did the research and developed the campaigns that would help them enter in the market. But, nonetheless, they missed the linguistic and cultural train of successful entry.

For pharmaceutical companies looking to leave the slowly growing old world and enter the faster growing new markets, a different but still rigorous analysis is needed.

Here the questions involve matching the therapeutic areas of interest against a comprehensive profile of the market. It means understanding, in a given country,

• Disease burden

• Diagnosis

• Treatment algorithms and patient flow

• Prescription trends and availability of medicines

After starting to build a landscape of the market, a company needs to develop an understanding of the dynamism of the country. How is the country itself growing? Will the government invest in healthcare? Are the Ministries open to approval? Is reimbursement private or public and to what extent?

In order to get the background to these questions, it is important to interview government agents, regulators, payors, physicians, hospital and pharmacy directors, and trade bodies.

Then you can start to match the market against the company’s product portfolio and begin to make discreet choices.

It may sound elementary but it is anything but, dear Dr. Watson. Sherlock Holmes once said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” The goal here is to get to the truth of what will be the best course of action for a company, however improbable it may seem.

Emerging Markets: What Columbus Didn't Do

2010-04-17T11:20:00.000-04:00

EMERGING MARKERS CHECKLIST

Too often when companies enter into emerging markets, they frequently fail to fully characterize the value chain. Yes, those markets are growing. Yes, they represent a population with newly minted coins clinking in their pockets. Yes, the government is encouraging investment. Those Old Developed Markets look much like they looked to Columbus as he said good-bye to Spain and set for the New World.

Talent pool

When Christopher Columbus landed in America, he thought very little about the local talent pool. He assumed the locals knew little of the sophisticated technology that he was going to bring. But the question for Columbus was how much was he going to spend once he got there? How much of his R&D was going to be coming from the old world or was he going to invest adequate resources on the new ground?

When entering emerging markets it is important for companies to understand how much intellectual capital they are going to import and how much they are going to generate locally. There is always a certain amount of comfort in knowing that the home fires are being stoked and the fruits of the scientists from the main office will be coming into the new territories.

However, understanding and tapping into the local talent pool is often a valuable cost-effective of accessing smart lower-cost labor. Quite often local talent is hungry to get the imprimatur of a foreign capital company on their resume, and may be dissatisfied with the opportunities available in local companies.

Accessing this R&D talent pool is also an excellent way of gaining critical on-the ground understandings of the ins and outs of local regulations.

Collaboration with Universities/Research Centers

As real estate agents say, location, location, location. Accessing that local talent pool also goes to where facilities are located. The closer the location to major universities and other research operations, the easier it is to attract talent. This location fact is true whether a pharma company is planning to be in New Jersey or in China. Many of the big multi-national pharmaceutical companies, e.g. AstraZeneca, GSK, Novartis, Roche and Pfizer, have R&D centers located in Beijing and Shanghai where it is easy to attract local scientific talent. While these companies also have operations in other cities, the critical mass achieved around these two major cities.

Regulations

Understanding local regulations are critical to safe, sound, government-improved operations. What kinds of permits are required for laboratories? What kind of inspections need to be done to start and to maintain facilities on an on-going? The essence for operations is being able to comply with on-the-ground oversight, and this compliance can be even more challenging as local regulations evolve.

Patent Laws

Many companies shy away from establishing cutting edge research operations in emerging markets because of concern about loosely filed and loosely followed patent laws. Losing control and ownership of innovations that rightly belong to the company continue to be a major concern. One way that companies address these issues is by using R&D to make incremental improvements to existing compounds and products rather than developing something entirely new. In so doing, the risk is less because the products are generally protected elsewhere, and yet the development team can still contribute to the innovation of life cycle management process.

By understanding these critical components, companies can best maximize their allocation of scant resources and live more productivity off their new markets.

Indecent Exposure

2010-04-10T22:47:00.004-04:00

How do you feel about the security of your data in your Personal Health Record?

I heard a someone comment today on doctors dictating their work while performing an operation so they don't have to take notes later. The only problem is when the doctor says "the patient suffers from a contextual contusion" and it becomes "the patient suffers from sexual confusion." This comment goes into your Personal Health Record and someday you have to explain to an employer's insurer looking for pre-conditions or the Government Agency that is considering you for a Presidential appointment, you really had a hematoma and not an identify crisis.

When it ended its service, Revolution Health said that it will destroy all PHRs on file. If a patient has watched the television criminal dramas, NCIS or Law and Order, believing that electronic records are fully expunged is akin to believing that the Tooth Fairy aids good oral hygiene.

Credibility and security is crucial. One small, apparent success is the partnership between Google Health and the Cleveland Clinic. Doctors input patient data into PHRs that patients can import into their own secure Google Health account. Ideally, if patients move away from the Cleveland Clinic, they could take their health records with them. The issue of standardization for Health Care IT (HCIT) still remains. Like the infamous technical VHS vs. Betamax or more recent Blue-Ray vs. HD-DVD wars, aligning on a technical standard must Darwiningly happen.

For anyone interested, the opportunities for HCIT implementation are ensuring patient engagement, developing easy, time-saving but robust graphical user interfaces, and providing a common secure technical platform.

RIP Revolution Health

2010-04-03T14:16:00.000-04:00

The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) made available $26 billion for Health Care Information and Technology Systems (HCIT) and the advantages to companies in productivity and optimization of profitability are well recognized.

However, challenges come in exploiting this information to ensure better patient outcomes and to create engaged and enhanced physician-patient partnerships. What happens when the best technical finery is set up for the dance and the partners fail to fox trot?

The recent demise of Revolution Health is a good example of what happens when hundreds instead of millions of patients sign up to fill out their Personal Health Records (PHRs). Founded with great fanfare by Steve Case of AOL fame, the PHR aspect of Revolution Health failed to gain any patient traction. General Manager Marjorie Martin said that “most patient rely on their physicians to do their record-keeping. They don’t feel the need to make a change. And it is still a fairly laborious process.”

Facilitation of HCIT will also involve developing access portals that go beyond checking CPT (Current Procedural Terminology) diagnostic codes and utilizing cutting edge mobile hardware (viz. IPads and Smartphones). Educating physicians is also critical. According to the American Medical Association, 50% of US physicians are 55 years old or older and will be at retirement age in ten years. As these doctors age into retirement, the US could have 40,000 less doctors for, according to current demographics, a burgeoning population of 42 million more Americans. The burden is creating a system for that will enhance productivity for a smaller medical delivery cohort.

10 SMART Questions for Commercial Development

2010-03-28T21:07:00.001-04:00

Have you ever played “Truth or Dare?” The first player asks “truth or dare.” If the second player says “truth,” the first player asks a question, usually risky. If they reply “dare,” the questioner asks them to do something, also usually risky. In drug development, biotech and pharmaceutical companies alike play this game internally every day. Do we move this product into Phase III? How much is this market segment really worth? Will physicians use this product and, if so, how? Are the clinical endpoints meaningful enough for physicians to use the product vs. another standard of care? Will it be reimbursed? And no senior manager wants to take the risk of not having answers to these questions in front of the FDA, the Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee (P&T), a payer or even senior management.

All these questions need to be answered in a world of limited resources. No pharma company, no matter what its size, has an infinite amount of money and resources to stream all its assets through its pipeline. For individual compounds under development, the challenge is to identify early assets that will fail so resources can be reallocated as quickly as possible. For an entire portfolio, whether it is for a specific therapeutic area or an entire company, managers need to understand how their decisions to invest in one product versus another affect risk and value.

The challenge is to answer all the necessary questions to gain the human and financial resources that keep a project moving forward as well as answer all the necessary constituencies. No one gets a perfect SAT score here. No one has the time and the staff to even list them all, let alone, answer them all.

To assist with these kinds of analyses that help understand the Opportunity, the Market and the Value, Manu Bammi and I have developed 10 Smart Questions that must be asked in order to truly understand opportunities from a 360 degree perspective.

Would you be interested in an article like this? If so, please write me at mrovner@smartanalyst.com

Cell Phone App Convenience Is Not A Strategy

2010-02-28T09:35:00.002-05:00

I was in Barnes & Noble the other week shopping for books. Not a big deal, but I also have a Kindle and are an Amazon Prime member. Yes, there are some real paper books that don’t come on e-readers but that wasn’t the nature of my browsing.

I was interested in science fiction or a mystery, just kind of felt it after reading Moby Dick. As I had 30 minutes to kill before seeing Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart, I decided to browse. I saw a book by Henning Mankell. It sounded interesting. So I scanned the bar code with my Droid cell phone’s bar scanner and emailed the title to my RemembertheMilk.com task reminder account. There was Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. Scan, click, email. Now I had two new books on my reading list.

I felt bad for Barnes & Noble. They were providing me with a very pleasant in-store browsing shopping experience but they weren’t going to receive any of my commerce that day.

So what do you make of cell phone retailer buying applications? It is great if you are in Bloomingdale’s and they don’t have your size. You scan the bar code, go to the store’s web site and order the size you want while you are right in the store. The New York Times notes that Wal-Mart, Disney, Kerr Drug and Crate & Barrel are testing this technology.

IBM has developed Presence that detects the “presence” of signed-up shoppers as soon as they enter a store, which allows the store to immediately send promotions to their cell phone. Cisco has Mobile Concierge that allows you to locate items within a given store, a must-have app if you are browsing in a Wal-Mart Super-Center or a Target. And Motorola is developing a cell phone app that puts a net-connected loyalty card on your cell phone.

All these technologies are wonderful. They make the shopping experience easier and hopefully increase a customer’s shopping basket. And they well may do so, but only to a limited point.

As David Ogilvy rightly once said, convenience is not a strategy.

Consumers have to want the product first. They have to appreciate its features and benefits and recognize the value. And then they will buy.

A product’s sales can increase when you make the buying experience easier, provide more information about the product itself and facilitate the actual purchase process.

Just like that old promotional truism of placing a product at eye level on a store shelf does.

But ultimately that does not make a product winner.

That’s why understanding and identifying the real consumer insight is so important. Technology itself is not the end; it is one element of the means. And it cannot replace the fundamental basics of sound product development.

Now, excuse me, I have to go to a friend’s house for dinner and I don’t know which wine to bring so I am going to scan some bar codes on my cell phone at Zachys liquor store.

Now Really! Chasing out the horrors in oncology drug development

2010-02-15T09:00:00.007-05:00

In continuing to think about emerging issues in oncology, regulatory will play a critical and significant role.

In the UK, you just have to wonder what to do when the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) rejects Novaretis' Afinitor for second line therapy in renal cell carcinoma and recommends against using Novartis' Tasigna and BMS' Sprycel for the treatment of patients with chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) who are intolerant to Glivec. Why? There was that little thing about insufficient clinical evidence vs. other treatment options, but, oh by the way, if Novartis or BMS are willing to risk share and compensate for their price, well then, that's okay.

Oh, really? Now really! As Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler might say on Saturday Night Live. That's really NICE!

Just how long is it okay for any of us to live if it is too costly for the government? The next thing you know the NHS will be calling up the Inuit to buy some ice floes for cancer patients so they can push them off into the North Sea. Or maybe they can get that ice from Iceland which is in enough financial trouble as it is.

The basis point is that, for companies to succeed with regulators, Overall Survival (OS) and for how long life goes on remain the key endpoint.

All in all, a focused commercial development strategy in oncology requires a tightly defined Target Product Profile (TPP) in order to win with regulators and to aid physicians in understanding their treatment choices. This narrowed approach could enable companies to get their drug on the market faster, enabling oncologists to understand how they best may employ it along with other treatment options.

Of course, after you have figured out first what you are going after, a Life-Cycle Management (LCM) strategy needs to be built off that narrowed initial indication. Here it is helpful to complete all Phase I/II studies even prior to first approval with a full Phase III plan already in place.

As these plans are being developed, it is also important for companies to understand how this asset and its development plan aligns with other drug programs in the portfolio.

Many companies get caught up in the value of one particular drug programs without fully appreciating its value on everything else going on, a major point of understanding in a world of limited, expensive resources. A company needs to be able to value its "real" portfolio as opposed to making a decision about one stand-alone asset.

The key is to understand drug program inter-dependencies around technical, revenue and cost factors. An optimized portfolio that takes into account all these factors can actually yield significant economic benefits for a company over time vs. a stand-alone portfolio of individual assets. In an optimized oncology portfolio, a company can draw on identified synergies in research, clinical and targeted synergies to maximize the overall cost of commercial development and launch.

There are so many different considerations to be successful in oncology, it can make the head spin like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. However, by carefully and diligently, laying out basic strategies and developing an integrated series of approaches that involve not just one compound, but all the others in development, internally and competitively, oncology commercial development does not have to be a horror show. The demons can be exorcised, and a happy life can be lived by patients, physician and company managers.

Sound Strategies Needed in Oncology, Just As Much As In Smartphones

2010-02-06T14:39:00.004-05:00

Last week it was about sku management of smartphone applications. This week, it is how do you think the commercial implications of oncology commercial programs.

Oncology is the fastest growing therapeutic areas, going from $48 billion in 2008 to $80 billion in 2012. For the pharmaceutical industry, oncology is an intense area of activity with 1,000 clinical compounds in development and over 2,000 pre-clinical compounds being considered.

As in many other business areas, like smartphone apps and other fast moving consumer goods, the oncology disease space, spurred by new pathway discoveries, is becoming increasingly fragmented with the identification of different patient and disease sub-segments. It isn't just prostate cancer, it is six different variants of prostate cancer.

In targeting the commercial opportunity, companies can benefit from a differentiation strategy that goes after well-defined patient segments, with those definitions aided by the use of bio-markers to help call out cancer indication.

As a result, discovery is increasingly focused on targets vs. tumors, with the opportunity for the same compounds to address multiple different kinds of tumors. Then, with even greater success, in many instances, cancer treatment has the opportunity to evolve into a chronically managed disease, like diabetes and high cholesterol, with the use of adjuvant and maintenance drug therapies.

As these sub-segments develop, companies also have the possibility of facing less competition when they are focused on very narrowly defined indication sub-segment and lines of therapy. This focus could also allow the company to realize a premium for its drug given a lack of other efficacious and safe alternatives. Here, as in many product developments, early to market strategies are critical and novel partnerships may be required, especially given combination therapies.

That said, good sound commercial strategies, applicable across a broad range of industries, and understanding the target audience and the delivery process, are critical to success in the market, whether it is a cancer drug or a smartphone application.

Online SKU Management: Apt Stores for the App Stores

2010-01-31T19:10:00.008-05:00

So where do you go shopping for applications on your smartphones?

Apple of course has its App Store with over 140,000 apps.

Google has its Market with 20,000 apps and growing. So does Research In Motion for its Blackberry. And Nokia has its just launched Ovi Store with apps coming.

Now if you are the proprietor of these online supermarkets, how do you manage your sku's?

All good category managers on the manufacturer side are continually reviewing their assortment to match consumer needs, variety, profitability and shelf space. And they partner with retailers, who are concerned about similar issues, to offer an optimal assortment for the consumer. They discuss (argue?) number of sku's, placement, pricing, inventory, etc.

Unfortunately this discipline seems to be woefully absent online. You can make categories of apps. Offer free trial versions. Provide provide Private Label apps like Verizon does. This approach is particularly complicated when you have hundreds of small developers. Apple does exert control and supervision. But all in all, these marketers are missing a real apparent understanding of consumer needs and optimal profitability.

And if you are a consumer, how do you know which ones to sample and buy. Well, the free ones require only the time and effort to download. But there is a cost to that.

Consumers can use online reviews or watch the AndroidStats Market Place rankings to see what apps are going up and what are going down in regard to downloads.

Consumers can also look to see the number of downloads that a particular apps has and the number of star ratings (similar to what CNET also provides for its downloads).

But marketers are here dealing with a totally different type of sku experience and run the risk of really confusing consumers.

According to Flurry, a market research firm that tracks mobile phone trends, the average consumer only has 5-10 apps on their phone. And that is with +100,000 apps out there. The numbers between actual consumption and the wasted online space is huge. But I guess that is what the internet can do profit per space when space is limitless.

Apple says it makes money on its App store. But you have to believe that smartphone manufacturers are leaving money on the table because they are not actively managing the consumer experience and presentation.

Now there has to be an app for that.

To sleep, perchance to dream

2010-01-22T20:13:00.003-05:00

When Hamlet said that he was just echoing the fervent wish of millions of people around the globe.

Cephalon recognizes the issue, hence its application for Nuvigil as a pill for counter-acting jet lag. But what about the flip side. Diphenhydramine (nee Benadryl) certainly offers a safe, effective remedy but it does have some side effects.

But at what price does sleep come? In working with Nicholas Hall, I note the following critical facts:

Wide-Spread Prevalence and Rising

Insomnia is reported to affect 24%-65% of the population in the focus geographies. Since 2001, its prevalence has increased by 13% in the US alone. This rising prevalence translates into market growth for companies applying for Rx-to-OTC switches.

Consumer Preference for Self-Medication

Consumers in the focus countries are increasingly willing to self-medicate and have proven themselves to be responsible users in the past. Self-medication will only rise as health awareness among consumers increases, and this will benefit companies going for OTC switches.

Accident-Risk/Productivity Loss

Around 28% of automobile drivers in the US have fallen asleep while driving. Another study estimates 10,000 to 20,000 avoidable casualties due to accidents caused by drowsy driving in France annually. This risk to public health can be avoided by providing the public easier access to OTC insomnia drugs.

Financial Burden on National Systems

The annual cost of insomnia in the US is $42bn in direct and indirect costs. The corresponding cost for France was $1.4bn in 1999, and a similar financial burden is estimated in other countries. Easier access through OTC switching will make its prevention easier, resulting in reduced indirect burden.

Government Policy Could Reduce Its Cost Burden

Governments in developed nations have taken proactive measures to reduce the healthcare burden by switching prescription drugs available on insurance to OTC. The UK government has specifically pledged to double the number of switches in a year to ten.

The easy answer: Balanced well-regulated Rx to OTC switches. It would be great to be able to switch short-acting Ambien. Explore the possibilities of Lunesta or Rozerem.

However, the pharma and consumer healthcare would never derive the true benefits until regulatory agencies really get serious about switch. They worry about the cost burden to the government and understandably the safety aspect. But there are tools, programs and efforts that can be made. And yes, Virginia, there is an even a case for Viagra.

But, before we get active, let’s start with something we all need to function. A new, refreshing way to sleep.

Cleaning Up In Emerging Markets: Heinz and Unilever

2010-01-09T12:21:00.001-05:00

As we start the New Year, where else does one start but with emerging markets?

The math is simple. You go where there are more mouths to feed and more rising household incomes.

Before, those rich, developed markets of the US and Western Europe carried the coal for so many multi-national firms from the 1950’s even until the 1990’s, a tremendous forty year run.

But even those great commercial dynasties eventually run out of steam. Look what happened to the Soviet Union after 68 years.

Now every business worth its salt wants to sit at the top of the table and build a new house of business out of BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China). And a critical way to the feast is through product quality.

Take that humble condiment: ketchup.

Mexico consumes more ketchup in the world than eight other countries. Heinz used to have a less than 1% share of the Mexican market. Odd, yes? Especially since Heinz makes really good ketchup. So what does the company do?

It buys a private label supplier of ketchup to such outlets as Domino’s Pizza, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken, gains a toehold in the business and then goes on to demonstrate its product superiority. Most Mexican ketchups contain starch. So you go around doing a demo where you drop a drop of iodine on local ketchup and it turns black. Then you put a drop on Heinz ketchup and it stays red. No starch fillers. Quality wins. Heinz now has a 12% share of the market.

When I was marketing director for Unilever in Japan, we launched Domestos, the first bleach toilet cleaner. All the other toilet cleaners in Japan were acid cleaners. We did a side by side demo, running an acid cleaner down one side of a soiled tile and Domestos down the other side. The Domestos side was whiter than the streak down a skunk’s back. The other side, not so clean. Domestos became a market leader.

The lesson: The way to win in emerging markets is by demonstrating superior quality to markets hungry for better qualities of life.

A New Year's Toast To Brands

2010-01-01T12:03:00.011-05:00

Alas poor Saab, I knew it well,

an auto of infinite pleasure, of most excellent driving,

he hath borne me in its seats a thousand times;

and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!

My gorge rises at it. GM is to close down Saab.

When I lived in California, I used to drive my 900 Saab convertible car up into the Orange County hills and survey the David Hockney-lit valleys of opulence. I even bought my daughter the short-lived four-wheel 9-2X to navigate the frozen roads of Ann Arbor to Zingerman’s on a frigid Sunday morn.

How sad it is when a brand name dies. How many millions upon millions do companies put into the value of a name only to see it sometimes die on the vine of commerce?

In 2010, though, we will most likely see more and more value placed on brand names. Kettle Chips sells for $700 million. P&G pursues the freshening scent of Ambi Pur. Kraft looks to gorge itself on Cadbury chocolate, while Cadbury itself, like any lover of chocolate, longs for an even richer aficionado of its sweet sales.

Wherein lies the value of such names. Well, surely, a great deal of it lies in the goods it delivers, whether it is quirky driving, convenient air scenting, crispy potatoes and crème eggs. These elements go into the essence of the brand and help define it.

I was struck the other day by the comments of a friend of mine who is looking for a job. I asked what he had learned about flogging himself on the job search. He replied: be unique and be focused. A truer definition of branding has been rarely been stated. Now all that remains is for him to spend tireless energy on promotion and millions on advertising and he will land somewhere, as will Cadbury and, we hope, Saab. We feel emotional attachments to our brands, our friends, and their personalities. And that makes their value all the more dearer.

As we enter 2010, let’s hope it is a year in which brands and friends receive their just due, their well deserved value and the stewards of those brands have the wisdom and the money to carry them forward.

Social Media Heartburn

2009-11-15T19:24:00.003-05:00

The Novartis launch of Prevacid24HR is exciting. It is a great time (just before the holidays) and who can argue with 24HR relief, taking you right through Thanksgiving dinner and into shopping on Black Friday.

But as a marketer, here is what is missing: No link to the television campaign on the consumer web site or the healthcare professional web site, and an odd sense that HCP web site is actually a bit more engaging in terms of tonality than the consumer site. Also no Twitter.

Got the Facebook page with +1,500 fans. Go Novartis. The company and its launch team is doing a really good job.

But what is missing just indicates the continuing for brand launches to have a 360 social media check list to reach out to all its different constituencies.

And of course, there is is the issue of brand imagery. In the brand brief, is it consistent across all media? Check Facebook and the different web sites and you decide.

Heartburn is what you get when your sales trajectory doesn't match up with your launch plan. Here's wishing all the best for Prevacid24HR.

Moral Hazard and Healthcare

2009-11-07T20:20:00.004-05:00

I was at a meeting today with Charles Casparino of MSNBC, who just published his book The Sell-Out about the causes of the recent financial collapse. However, as you listen to Casparino tell it, it is a story that has been in the making for the last 30 years.

The arc of the debacle goes from Orange Country to Long-Term Capital Management to today + Lehman Brothers. In each of these instances, the US government bailed out the risk takers, eliminating any concern about consequences.

This is the moral hazard that we are all paying for now. The risk takers had no risk because the US Government was always there to provide a guarantee.
Now we also have the US Government taking on healthcare. Yes, the uninsured need to be helped. The personal consequences for them are obviously huge. The consequences for the healthcare system are equally large as more and more people use the emergency room like the waiting room of their general practitioner.

So what is the moral hazard here? Again the Government is willing to assume all the risk if it goes through with a public option plan. And we all know how that turns out, except we are now playing more directly with money and health.

Milton and Keats on Verizon's Droid Marketing Teaser Campaign

2009-10-24T10:20:00.008-04:00

IDon’t run simultaneous apps.

IDon’t have a real keyboard.

IDon’t allow open development.

IDon’t take night shots.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

It is the Droid formerly known as Tao or “The Path.”

What’s in a name? Gertrude Stein said a “rose is a rose is a rose.”

And Hamlet said, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

All of this poetry goes toward the definitions of identity.

And so Verizon, in its teaser campaign for the launch of its new Motorola Android Google phone has seemingly chosen to call its phone simply: Droid and defined itself as the anti-IPhone.

Now you have to wonder if by defining yourself as who you are not is really the best strategy for defining who you are.

Look what John Milton did for Satan. He gave Satan as much charisma as Mick Jagger strutting across the stage of Saturday Night Live. Here is Satan’s entrance from Paradise Lost:

Satan with his Powers
Far was advanced on winged speed, an host
Innumerable as the stars of night,
Or stars of morning, dew-drops which the sun
Impearls on every leaf and every flower.
Regions they passed, the mighty regencies
Of Seraphim and Potentates and Thrones
In their triple degrees and regions to which
All thy dominion, Adam, is no more
Than what this garden is to all the earth
And all the sea.

Now that boy knows how to make an entrance just as much as Steve Jobs strutted the IPhone out there and made a new tao or path for mobile broadband interconnectivity.

Like Satan’s minions, the 85,000 apps that populate the web store ennobled the appeal of the IPhone and helped drive sales. Positive capability yielding positive responses and positive sales.

You have to wonder if Verizon’s negative definition of itself is the best way to drive initial interest in a meaningful long-term way.

That Bright Star, John Keats, in his definition of “negative capability” wrote: “Negative Capability is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

While there can be a lot of appeal in dark attraction, people more forcefully respond to the positive in marketing. The current Verizon teaser campaign can leave you wanting with its negative capability.

One can hope that when Verizon launches its new Droid later this month, the brand building will be a positive one. A true positive relationship such as the one formed between Luke Skywalker and R2D2 that will bring net access and mobile freedom to Verizon subscribers. In effect, Verizon could give its subscribers the true path or positive tao that they forsook in terms of negative imagery.

Otherwise, the sales risk, to paraphrase Percy Bysshe Shelley, will be for Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon’s CEO, to say, “I fall upon the thorns of marketing. I bleed.”

How Much Is That Compound In The Window?

2009-10-04T13:22:00.003-04:00

THE VALUE

In the end, it all comes down to understanding the value of your pharma asset. There are two elements to Value in the SMART questions that you must ask: What are the revenues and how do you mitigate risk and preserve and realize the maximum value.

IX. What Are The Potential Revenues Associated With This Opportunity?

In developing the revenue forecast, the answers to the questions defined earlier come together to support the financial projections of a given product assessment. This information can be broken up into four key buckets:

Target Patients (Epidemiology, Diagnosed, Treated, Access)
Volume (Persistence, Compliance, Dosing)
Share (Analogs, Attributes, Adoption, Penetration, Cannibalization)
Game Changers (Event Impact Analysis, e.g. generic entry, new launches, lifecycle management).

All come together to form the under-pinning of value. Only by diligently assessing and answering the questions noted earlier lead from a well-defined set of parameters to a well-defined forecast.

These estimates can be developed using either a top-down market forecast, which is relatively easy to generate, or a more diligent bottom-up patient based forecast that requires the diligence outlined in the previous key questions.

Once the basic revenue forecast has been generated, the forecast is further adjusted to determine the risk adjusted revenue and the risk adjusted net present value (rNPV). Probabilities of success or failure are determined based on the clinical development phase of the modeled compound and probabilities are further adjusted based on the modeled compound’s Mechanism of Action (MoA) and targeted therapeutic area. The probabilities generated are applied to the revenue forecast to reflect the risk adjusted revenue.

The most well-developed and transparent set of assumptions lead to the best accepted forecast. All forecasts are wrong, the question is to which degree are they wrong. In an opportunity assessment and a product development process that can easily involve a decade, decisions are made and values accepted on the basis of assumptions and not on the numbers themselves. That’s why transparency in terms of research and results drive the acceptance of assumptions and the subsequent statement of value.

X. How Can Risk Be Managed, Value Preserved and Resources Allocated In An Optimal Way?

Once the value is defined, the recognition of risk and the optimization of resources and increase in value begin to define the on-going process of development. In an ironic byplay of development, pharma companies look to fail earlier faster in order to distribute their limited resource allocations (resources are always limited, aren’t they?) behind products that have the best chance of succeeding in the market. At any given point of time, decisions need to be made to defer, expand, contract or abandon a project. Risk mitigation also involves identifying possible partnerships, options assessments, follow-on products and portfolio synergies – all of which need to be assessed together to preserve individual project and total value for the corporation.

Sometimes, in making investment decisions, low risk projects incorrectly get precedence over “high” risk projects simply because they appear more achievable. Yet low risk projects, in unto themselves, rarely break any innovation barriers in the market. Thus, understanding how to optimize both a given product and a portfolio’s development path becomes a crucial element in decision-making.

A key element in this analysis is laying out the clinical development uncertainty measured through asset specific probabilities of technical and regulatory success (PTRS). Unfortunately, pure financial measures penalize early assets due to huge technical and commercial uncertainty, and there is no simple financial measure to directly address this issue. That’s why it is important for companies to set optimal goals to maintain viable and healthy pharmaceutical portfolio.

A useful approach to making these kinds of decisions is developing a trade-off analysis among assets in order to identify optimal optimized portfolio scenarios. This approach moves behind stand-alone valuations that are rolled up into a single portfolio of a given value. Instead, the true value of the company’s portfolio is optimized by providing an understanding of the effect of asset interdependencies on the total value of the portfolio. It is also necessary to recognize that these values are ever-changing and dynamic as events happen, and thus, portfolio values require consistent monitoring. By adopting this approach, companies can maximize and monitor movements in portfolio value and shareholder return. In so doing, the company can optimize resource allocation across portfolio assets to maximize return and minimize risk for a given level of risk aversion. This approach will also minimize future portfolio value volatility.

80% of Success Is Just Showing Up

2009-09-26T15:08:00.003-04:00

THE MARKET

Continuing on with the 10 SMART questions, pharma companies need to ask, after defining an overall market opportunity, a pharmaceutical company needs to understand the prescribers, the competition and the regulatory environment in which it will be operating.

V. Who Are The Prescribers And What Do They Think?

With a defined patient pool, it is much easier to get a handle on the prescribers and the settings in which they operate. As product development focuses on more targeted indications, understanding the prescribers in terms of who they treat and how they treat is critical to the development of a compound. KOLs are called Key Opinion Leaders for a reason; they help shape and design evolving treatment guidelines. And practicing physicians do what they do best: they practice. Through both qualitative discussions and quantitative surveys, being able to get at those professional medical practitioner insights underlie the successful development and ultimate adoption of a given product.

VI. Competitive intensity

According to Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel, only the paranoid survive. This is as true in pharmaceuticals as it is in computer chip-making. Clean slates are set up to keep score. Clean rooms are the battle grounds of competition. And clean hands are needed for fair fights. In an industry driven by innovation, mass production and evolving needs, the competitive intensity of existing and future markets will either unleash or damper the potential of a given product. What looks good in the current market may look less attractive in the future given competitive activities.

Like macromolecular crowding, indication opportunities appear and then narrow depending on competitive products emerging in a therapeutic space at any given point in time. This crowding results in opportunities changing in radical ways, and not always to the good. Identification of those emerging market entrants make an impact analysis necessary for defining the evolving opportunity and assessing how the commercial opportunity could possibly be reduced.
The product landscape of the future needs to be defined in terms of both direct and indirect competition. While it is important to quantify the potential impact and order of entry of competitive pipelines, it is just as important to value the impact of indirect competition, particularly in the treatment algorithm.

For example, what impact could a novel treatment for pre-diabetic patients have on the reduction of patients progressing to diabetes or what happens to second line cancer treatment therapies when a new first line treatment becomes available? Or how do you think about the diagnosis and treatment of a disease when a new test or a new bio-marker shows high degrees of correlation?

The continuing emergence of bio-markers and companion diagnostics will also revolutionize the use and the application of assets in development. As more and more companies focus on personalized medicine, they will be seeking and using biomarkers to diagnose disease risk in individual patients and appropriate companion diagnostics to assess the safety and efficacy of drugs in specific patient sub-populations. In effect, adopting the Wayne Gretsky hockey quote of skating to where the puck is going to be not where it is.

VII. What Is The Optimal Clinical Development Path and Associated Regulatory Hurdles?

As the market is being defined in terms of patients, prescribers and competitors, just getting the product on the market requires an additional level of analysis. The clinical development path in terms of defining the market differentiation based on meaningful endpoints affects acceptance by prescribers, payers as well as regulators. The analysis shapes the delta in end points that make or break a product in terms of intent to use as well as intent to prove.

Woody Allen said that 80% of success is just showing up. The regulatory pathway becomes a hurdle to just showing in the medical market space. Increased demands on safety and improved efficacy, as regulators become more conservative and shy away from risk, is significantly reducing the number of drug approvals annually. What is the thought process and guidelines will regulators use? How will the gauntlet of advisory boards be addressed? Defining that shining path through becomes an important light at the end of the development tunnel.

But Woody Allen, while a clinician of universal angst, was never a clinician who had to make life or death treatment decisions. He also said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.” Just getting regulatory approval is not enough. It is important, starting all the way back in the clinical development process, to target the endpoints that will demonstrate clinically meaningful differentiation.

And what happens if the light grows dim? Clinical development needs to also include contingency options. The various decision paths a drug can follow depends on the outcomes realized at different milestones. It is important for companies to think through and plan the various options as early as possible in clinical development to contain intrinsic value and to mitigate risk.

VIII. How Do Payers, Market Access, Pricing and Reimbursement Affect The Opportunity?

Defining the impact of market access parameters on the target patient pool and the willingness of payers to pay is not always neat nor is it nice. Whether it is the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in the UK or the various US private and public payers, the payer algorithm needs to be tightly defined and aligned with the treatment algorithm to understand product coverage, acceptance and pricing. How do these payers think? What analogs will provide a guide to that thinking? How do they value the differentiation of the science behind the product and the needs the product is seeking to address?

As if answering these questions weren’t tough enough, pricing goes into a whole new level of complexity. What should the reference price be? What is the relationship between price, formulary status, access and eventually market share? What is the optimal pharmacoeconomic value of a drug? These elements of value affect the ability to price in the market and the access available to that target patient pool depending on reimbursement.

Whether the health system is private insurance as in the US or Government as with the NHS in the UK or different governments in the EU or self-pay in emerging markets, the ability for patients to bear the cost burden is directly and crucially related to the amount of money they have available for treatment.

This issue becomes particularly complex in emerging markets where there are large patient populations that are rapidly shrunk when self-pay is taken into account. In contrast to other kinds of questions where differentiated relationships can be fairly straightforward, payers, access and reimbursement has its own unique set of complexities.

Pharma Opportunites Lie In the Eyes of the Marketer

2009-09-20T21:39:00.002-04:00

UNDERSTANDING THE OPPORTUNITY FOR NEW DRUG COMPOUNDS

In the beginning, there is an opportunity. The challenge is figuring out how big that pie is and then how big a slice can be cut out. Providing more more thoughts on key Pharma questions that must be asked when you want to understand how big the opportunity:

I. What are the recognized and unrecognized medical needs?
In any given therapeutic area, there are a host of needs that are both known and unknown. An unmet recognized need could be associated with inadequacies associated with the current Standard of Care, offering an opportunity that could be addressed through improvements based on specific clinical endpoints. Unrecognized, unmet needs can be gleaned through conversations with stakeholders (patients, doctors, payers) and can lead to a paradigm shift in the treatment of the disease that is different from the current Standard of Care.

II. How Can We Best Address The Unmet Need?
Identifying the medical need is one thing; the ability to address that need is another. Opportunities can be on many different sides of the care equation, for example, improved efficacy in terms of ameliorating symptoms or being curative, better safety and tolerability or more convenient forms of dose administration. All of these elements factor into better initiation, compliance and adherence. Just because there is a need does not mean there is an opportunity. It is critical for companies to clearly define where and how they want to play.

III. Is the Science To Address the Unmet Needs Differentiated in a Clinically Relevant Way?
Following the characterization of the need is the science. Does the company’s science support the improved efficacy, safety or dosing truly differentiated. Over the last decade, the pharma industry has been criticized for developing me-too follow-on compounds designed to stand on the shoulders of patent expiries of blockbuster compounds and offering little in the way of true differentiation. The most powerful advantage in any business, pharmaceutical or otherwise, is the advantage of innovation. For pharma companies, innovation lies in the differentiation of the science.
There has been and will continue to be a tectonic shift from small molecules to large molecules as the science and the solution for disease cure and management becomes increasingly less productive in small molecule development. Targeting and scientific developments no longer keep pace with the commercial pressures required for success and growth in the marketplace. As a result, companies need to carefully assess how their science stacks up in the marketplace vs. existing and emerging competition.

IV. Who Is The Target Patient Pool?
Of course, there is the patient, who is waiting for the relief or the cure. Who are they? How many are there? In assessing target patient populations, both product and commercial developers many times identify a patient population that is too large, leading to over-optimistic commercial objectives and possible misappropriation of resources. The key here is to truly match the medical need with the appropriate patient pool by identifying the underlying symptoms or disease manifestations to as precise a level as possible. This accurate definition and identification of patient populations is critical to many other aspects of commercial development, e.g. clinical trials and physician targeting and messaging. When a company understands the real sub-population for a given indication and need, it is better able to accurately define the commercial opportunity.

10 SMART Commercial Pharma Questions

2009-09-12T10:24:00.004-04:00

Have you ever played “Truth or Dare?” The first player asks “truth or dare.” If the responder says “truth,” the first player asks a question, usually embarrassing. If they reply “dare,” the questioner asks them to do something, also usually embarrassing.

In the cycle of drug development, biotech and pharmaceutical companies alike play this game internally every day. Do we move this product into Phase 3? How much is this market segment really worth? Will physicians use this product and, if so, how? Are the clinical endpoints meaningful enough for physicians to use the product vs. another standard of care? And, critically, will it be reimbursed.

Then, of course, we work in a world of limited resources. No pharma company, no matter what its size, has an infinite amount of money and resources to water through its pipeline. For individual compounds under development, they challenge is to fail early and fail fast so resources can be reallocated as quickly as possible. In addition, for an entire portfolio, whether it is for a specific therapeutic area or an entire company, management needs to understand how its decision to invest in one product vs. another affects its risk and its value.

Time and again, we have seen both big and small companies ask these questions internally. And frequently the answers are inadequate and, when confronted by the CEO, embarrassing.

It is not that the players want to be embarrassed. For them, the game is real. There are patients waiting, stockholders looking for investment returns, fellow employees rooting for a success and payrolls to be met. Most importantly, these players are smart. They have developed a drug that has real potential.

The challenge is being able to answer all the necessary questions to gain the human and financial resources to keep the project moving forward. No one owns a perfect 2400 SAT score for answering all the questions here. No one has the time and the staff to even list them all, let alone, answer them all.

When topics range from epidemiology to disease characteristics to treatment algorithms to perceptions by physicians and payers, the ability to assemble, synthesize and develop critical observations and insights can challenge the skills of any Merit Scholar.

In order to assist companies with these kinds of analyses, toward understanding the Opportunity, the Market and the Value, Manu Bammi and I have developed 10 Smart Questions that must be asked in order to truly understand opportunities and win the game.

THE OPPORTUNITY
In the beginning, there is an opportunity. The challenge is figuring out how big that pie is and then how big a slice can be cut out.
I. What are the recognized and unrecognized medical needs?
II. How Can We Best Address The Unmet Need?
III. Is the Science To Address the Unmet Needs Differentiated in a Clinically Relevant Way?
IV. Who Is The Target Patient Pool?

THE MARKET
After defining the pie, a company needs to ask itself if who is going to serve the pie and who are they going to have to fight with to get their fair share of that pie.
V. Who Are The Prescribers And What Do They Think?
VI. What Is The Competitive intensity?
VII. What Is The Optimal Clinical Development Path and Associated Regulatory Hurdles?
VIII. How Do Payers, Market Access, Pricing and Reimbursement Affect The Opportunity?

THE VALUE
There are two elements to Value in the SMART questions that you must ask: What are the revenues and how do you mitigate risk and preserve and realize the maximum value.
IX. What Are The Potential Revenues Associated With This Opportunity?
X. How Can Risk Be Managed, Value Preserved and Resources Allocated In An Optimal Way?

THE END-GAME
To paraphrase Dr. Seuss, oh the places you will go and the things you will see by seeking to answer these ten questions. By understanding the Opportunity, the Market and the Value in this kind of a rigorous and diligent way, companies can adapt the best industry practices that have proven to be successful. From the simple questions to the mature play of truth or dare, answering these questions are a game that major pharmaceutical and biotech companies cannot afford to lose.

Invective Is As American As Apple Pie

2009-08-30T15:25:00.000-04:00

Invective is as American as apple pie.

Early in September, the Supreme Court looks to hear new arguments about its decision to overrule the 1990 decision of Austin vs. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, a decision which upheld corporate restrictions on corporate spending to support of oppose political candidates. The issue is how far campaign finance laws, including McCain-Feingold, can go in regulating campaign spending by corporations.

The current case involves a negative documentary about Hillary Clinton called: Hillary, the Movie. The movie was funded by a conservative group that lost a lawsuit with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) when it wanted to distribute the movie on video-on-demand. (The movie is available on the internet and on DVD.) A lower court supported by the FEC.

What’s the current tempest in this judicial teacup? Well, McCain-Feingold focused on broadcast transmissions and did not include “old media” such as books. If this movie is banned from the air, what’s to say that books can’t be banned as well – a logical extension, no?

Whether or not you agree with the points made in the movie about Hillary Clinton is not the issue. The issue remains the First Amendment right of Free Speech, a point that is as old as the US republic.

Thomas Jefferson, an eminent Federalist wrote, was “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, fathered by a Virginia mulatto father.” Of course, no one challenged Barack Obama’s lineage and birth place during his recent election campaign (as ridiculous as those charges may have been).

John Binns, a Philadelphia editor, published the “Coffin Bill” which accused Andrew Jackson, during his first presidential campaign, of having recklessly killed six soldiers who were supposedly deserting. The handbill featured six individual coffins. Nothing on the Swift Boat group that attacked John Kerry here.
And how did Andrew Jackson manage such situations. He brought Francis Blair in from Kentucky to edit the Washington Globe and support Jackson’s own policies.

If you want more fuel to add to the historical fire you can read Paul Boller Junior’s book on presidential campaigns. But the point is throughout American history, powerful well-monied groups have tried to influence politics by spending money in the media.

While it will be fascinating to see how the Supreme Court decides, the issue itself is chilling.

We continually advocate for free speech in our media and in our communications and in our advertising and in our efforts to understand and communicate with consumers and patients.

Any attempt to restrict absolute freedom of communications is an absolute restriction of a basic American freedom and infringement of an American right to access, knowledge, information and free decision-making.

Whether what was said was right or not, Jefferson did well, Jackson got elected, as did Obama and Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State. Democracy and freedom of information does win out in the end, whether it is new media or old.

Mad Men in the Caves of Lescaux

2009-08-22T14:28:00.004-04:00

There are no fat people in Egyptian hieroglyphics making the walls of the Pyramids the first editions of Vanity Fair. The Caves of Lescaux feature 364 horses, a veritable car lot for prehistoric transportation.

So simple even a Caveman can buy Geico insurance. Or from a Gecko. Or from Kash, the googly-eyes sitting on a band of money.

Let’s hand it to the Mad Men at the Martin Agency.

And let’s remember Leo Burnett, at whose eponymous agency were developed the Jolly Green Giant, the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Marlboro Man and Tony the Tiger.

Visual icons have been compelling sales for centuries.

Like those three hung spheres of the pawn broker that originated from the Renaissance House of Lombard.

This then is the real legacy of Don Draper, not the haunted childhood of a Depression-era birth that led to the development of line extensions for London Fog given the saturated American market for rain coats.

Advertising symbols and iconography have been with us since the dawn of commerce.

A show like Mad Men taps into the modern sensibility of irony of both the commercial and home work place as well as the creation of advertising commerce. This sense of irony is centuries old. My former professor, Wayne Booth, at the University of Chicago, published A Rhetoric of Irony that illustrated this skein of observation and characterization, even those sometimes those ironies lack a stable referent.

However, for predecessors of the modern anguish and anxieties of Geico’s caveman, you don’t have to look any further than Tony the Tiger or the Jolly Green Giant.

In 1956, Burnett said that advertising did its best work by impression, and he encouraged his staff to identify those symbols, those visual archetypes, that would leave consumers with a "brand picture engraved on their consciousness."

Now, if we really want to go further back to when the Jolly Green Giants and Tigers roamed the earth, we can rest in the Caves of Lescaux, where like Plato’s Cave, horses were hawked like Fords on Friday Nights.

Le plsu c’est meme, le plus c’est change. The way in which you view the world may change, but the way of the world doesn’t. Let’s all enjoy a new season of Mad Men and pay tribute to a commercial nature that has never gone out of fashion.

A Text From Last Night.Com

2009-08-15T10:42:00.006-04:00

I have received a lot of feedback on my post about monetizing my mother. People wrote asking if she was really on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Well, the answer is no. She is not. As I noted, it was just a dream. But the reality and the number of responses I received are not a dream.

Many people were struck by the idea of using social networking to build their business. Well, yes, of course, that is the point.

Social networking, all the online points of contact available, are ways of making mass marketing even more one-on-one communications. The best point is that these are true conversations.

Your customers can twitter you their ideas (and their complaints) and you can twitter them back your acknowledgment of their issue. You can even follow-up with them. Test new ideas and products with them and receive immediate feedback.

There used to a truism that for every complaint letter you got about your product, there were seven other unsatisfied people. With all the tools at our disposal now, you can talk to all eight.

If the humorous x-rated reality of textsfromlastnight.com is the zeitgeist of the 17-29 year old demographic, marketers still have a lot of catching up to do in terms of developing "real" dialogues. I won't tell you what Windex is really good at cleaning, but the product placement is priceless.

All this back and forth is so much more intimate and immediate than focus groups, snail mail and even web sites.

The challenge, as always, is in building the tools and the tonality. Here, tonality is critical because the conversation is so immediate. So it is the marriage of voice and insight. It was the same creative challenge as presented in the sixties (viz. Mad Men). But I don't think marketers have fully recognized the opportunity yet.

And oh, by the way, my Mom does have a cell phone. Need I say more?

Lessons of The Dormouse, Tide Detergent and Grace Slick

2009-08-08T13:09:00.007-04:00

Unilever's second quarter earnings report shows volumes up and profits down due to a reported combination of lower margins, higher finance and tax costs and an increase in pension costs.

New CEO Paul Polman (formerly of P&G) has reversed the former strategy of raising prices of former old Unilever CEO Patrick Cescau. Good move just in advance of a recession. I wonder if Pat also goes surfing just before the tsunami comes in.

So what are we doing here? Buying share? Fighting private label?

Unilever's brands are Ben & Jerry's ice cream, Dove soap, Lipton tea and Hellman's mayonnaise (all staples in my house). These brands are quality stuff and Polman's move marks a return to getting these well-branded goods back into the global pantry.

When I was at Unilever we always sold things a little cheaper because they weren't quite as good performance-wise as P&G's products (with the exception of Wisk and Dove), but they were certainly better than Private Label. Hopefully, these moves by Polman and his team only mark a short-term move to get momentum back into the business because those power brands now form the foundation of the Unilever business are The Goods.

(I should also note that all those brands I mentioned, except for Lipton Tea, were acquisitions. What happened to the Unilever detergent business? Sold.)

The Wall Street Journal notes that, in South Africa (a critical revenue-generating country for Unilever), the local company launched a lower-priced version of Surf laundry detergent to compete against a low-priced local competitor.

Meanwhile, in the US, P&G has rolled out Tide Basic, a lower performing version of Tide that costs 20% less.

Ouch. Those actions are two moves guaranteed to make your Brand Equity look dingier.

Over the long run, the best way to compete with Private Label is to keep innovating on performance, ensuring that consumers really understand the value proposition of what they are buying. At SmartAnalyst, we are in the process of conducting a series of consumer surveys on attitudes toward Private Label and, guess what, people like brands.

Let's hope that, for P&G and Unilever, the Innovation Cupboard isn't bare. In Lynne Banks The Indian in the Cupboard, there was always a new magic trick to save the day until the Indian and the Cowboy had to go back in time.

Maybe those two great companies can still pull a white (not a dingy) rabbit out of their respective hats. Otherwise, they may be joining Grace Slick in a chorus of

When logic and proportion are sloppy dead,
and the white knight is talking backwards
and the red queen's off her head,
Remember what the dormouse said,
Feed your head, Feed your head.

That is where insight yields innovation.

Will Someone Please Monetize My Mother

2009-08-01T09:10:00.005-04:00

Will someone please monetize my mother?

Now here's the dream: My mother is on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, iGoogle, telling everyone where she is going, who she is seeing, what is wrong with Obama and figuring how much she will really save by splitting her pills to stretch the bucks and to still get some medical benefit.

What a goldmine she is.

If Medtronic or somebody else would just insert a GPS in her neural network in addition to her insulin pump, they would receive such a wealth of information: Not just her glucose levels and A1Cs, but what she is doing, where she is going and how it is affecting her.

We could sensor her life.

The future of understanding our patients/consumers belongs to both the physical sensors of the home (what cabinets are being opened, what doors are being closed and what pills are being taken) and the communication tools available for talking with and to those same people.

If all of my mom's health suppliers, from the pharmaceutical manufacturers to the device suppliers to the media tunnels, banded together, they could all more efficiently monetize my mother's needs and give her a healthy, preventative, treated life.

Now that is evidence-based medicine.

New Kindling For The Fires of Healthcare

2009-07-25T20:16:00.005-04:00

I love my Kindle. It has changed how I read -- in fact, I read faster, in more places, with a greater diversity of topics.

The ability to download and carry a small New York Public library of books is amazing.

On Metro-North I read War and Peace (the new translation) one-handed while standing (try that, even in paperback). At the car repair shop, while getting my Subaru tuned, I was able to fine tune my thoughts about Andrew Jackson's presidency. And, sitting by the pool, I basked in the sun while exploring Bleak House.

The device is far more friendly to read from than my net book. And, though the internet browser is not very robust, the 3G reception is excellent.

Now what if everyone had such a device. How much easier would it be to carry around your health records, research different health states, even reach out and touch a medical professional?

Maybe webmd or Pfizer or Aetna could offer a free Kindle to everyone to help manage and answer their healthcare issues.

Okay, I confess, I was also reading Chris Anderson's Free, which I downloaded free on my Kindle.

Wouldn't a Kindle be a great freemium for healh care.

I need to ask my doctor about this.

As the cost of health care continues to rise and the government and private enterprise seeks to manage it, let's let the information and the patient devices be fee and allow the procedures and the drugs to cost what they need to cost. The more you know, I bet the more judicious the use will be.

Now that's some kindling to light the fire of healthcare.

One piece of birthday cake too many

2009-07-18T14:45:00.018-04:00

Ever have a parent or a friend end up in the emergency room with a heart attack?

In the US, chronic diseases account for more than 75 cents of every dollar spent on healthcare, and are the #1 cause of death and disability.

Yet the amount spent in the US on prevention is $10 per person. That is about the cost of my monthly no-frills gym membership.

An ounce of prevention here is worth a pound of cure.

We can only hope that the new healthcare bill wending its way through the halls of Congress will put more of an incentive behind prevention and wellness.

As we see, the best way of moderating the cost of interventional healthcare is not to use it at all.

According to the Almanac of Chronic Disease, 4 out of 5 Americans would rather spend on preventive measures than on treating diseases after detection. Then how come my gym wasn't very crowded today? I bet there were more people at the local ER than on the elliptical this afternoon.

Let's hope that Congress gets the message and allocates more money to improve the health literacy and the coverage of the average American.

There are 46 million good reasons (the number of uninsured in America) to give more people coverage and that gym membership.

Sonia Sotomayor: Please Free the iPhone

2009-07-12T08:35:00.005-04:00

Back in 1984, oh, all of 25 years ago (which is about the age of many iPhone users), Stewart Brand, at the first Hacker’s Convention, said, information wants to be free.

That truism has continued to be borne out over the intervening years, as company after company struggling to monetize their information and web sites. The foamy successes of some web-based successes (I will include Google, FaceBook, Wall Street Journal here) lord it over the wet troughs filled with so many failures (just too many to list).

So what about that lovely iPhone, the newly classical kouros of mobile phones?

Why is it stilled tied to one carrier? Because that was the deal that Apple made with AT&T.

Now consider the irony here:

Part of the marvelous success of the iPhone is its software architecture that allows so many applications to be created for it. The monetized Apple store is a cornucopia of creative uses digitized to mobile broad band.

But the iPhone itself? Tied to one carrier in the US. (But not overseas).

Where are the FTC and FCC when you really need them?

Capitalism is a wonderful thing in that here some manufacturers can decide what they want to sell and how they want to sell it.

I am sure that Apple knows it will sell more devices if it adds additional carriers like say my carrier, Verizon (hint, hint).

Mobile broadband will be the Next Big Thing. And if mobile broadband devices are to be truly successful than they need to be free to follow the airwaves like a bird.

(Come to think of it, how come there are now mobile phones named after birds?)

If the US government can own General Motors, why doesn’t it just take over Apple and free the iPhone? Oh yeah, Apple is making money. Well, then what are the FTC and FCC good for? What about Supreme Court decisions on Interstate Commerce?

I just got Sonia Sotomayor’s iPhone cell number. I think I will give her a ring just before her hearings.

Science advances one funeral at a time

2009-07-05T14:43:00.003-04:00

I am going to with Max Planck and James Montier of the Financial Times.

Planck said that “science advances one funeral at a time.”

So we can now safely see that the Efficient Market Theory is dead. As we know, the EMH theory postulated that all information is reflected in current market prices. Well, as we slog our way through this financial meltdown with economic lava pulling at our heels and ankles, we recognize that the EMH theory holds less water than my grandmother’s sieve.

Hmmn, now what about clinical trials? We all would hesitate to say that science advances one funeral at a time, even though that is what sometimes happens. Max never worked at a pharmaceutical company nor was he a clinical investigator. However, his view reflects the dark underside of participating in a clinical trial.

I have recently been ruminating on rheumatoid arthritis for a client. The variability of results for the clinical trials for different drugs is astounding and confounding. As a result, it is critical to evaluate each Randomized Clinical Trial in the context of demographic and baseline disease characteristics of each population as no two trials have similar patient populations, even with similar designs.

Unfortunately, there is still a lot of suffering out there in RA. There are 4.5 million cases of RA in the US, EU and Japan, with 200,000 new cases diagnosed every year. Treatment goals in RA are reduction in signs and symptoms, prevention of structural damage, and induction of remission. Nothing is going to stop the pain, but, with the drugs currently available, methotrexate, Enbrel, Remicade, Humira, etc., sufferers can still enjoy a reasonably good of quality of life.

The other good news is that the pipeline of new drugs is very active with some promising new drugs.

The challenge, though, is that there is no efficient market theory. Even with all the information available, the heterogeneity of the disease itself and the diverse patient population and their individual sufferings indicate that there is no one drug cures all.

Chewing on The Cost of Living

2009-06-07T09:13:00.009-04:00

The numbers don’t jibe with the vitriol.

Pharmaceutical companies are the general public policy whipping boy of choice for rising healthcare costs, even though drugs represent only 10% of the country’s national health care bill.

Yet, according to a Dartmouth Medical School's Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, 76% of Americans blame the drug makers for the high costs. Oh, by the way, that is after those drug makers have spent over $1 billion to bring a single drug to market according to all the guidelines and “suggestions” made by the FDA.

And what about doctors and hospitals who account for 52 percent of all national health spending? Just 59% of respondents named hospitals, and 47% percent named doctors as major spending culprits. (Percentages add up to more than 100% because respondents could select as many factors as they wanted.)

There is a real disconnect between the perception of who is increasing costs and those who are actually doing it.

It is kind of like going to grocery store and complaining about rising food prices. After you go to the pharmacy, oay for those pills and then put them in your mouth, you are chewing on the cost of living.

It is so much harder to criticize or revile the costs of the doctor who is managing your chronic diabetes or high blood pressure or the hospital who is taking care of you after your angioplasty or appendectomy.

Those people who are working at Pfizer, BMS, Merck, GSK et.al do not get a free pass. And this point of perception is precisely where pharmaceutical marketing communications break down. When you need Valtrex or Flomax or Lipitor, those DTC ads are great motivators. But when you want to communicate the overall value proposition of prescription products or the industry, life sciences still struggle in developing the consumer/patient insights necessary to represent value. Here, a spoonful of the right sugar would help make the medical expenses go down.

The challenge is translating those needs and insights into getting consumers to understand the cost/ratio benefits of development and consequent patient relief or mitigation or survival.

Evidence-based medicine, costly procedures and interventions, quality of life. The actuarial buzzwords can chill the spine as fast as an epidural.

It is important, though, to spend much more time on the marketing related to get consumers/patients to understand the cost of chewing on living.

Where Niches Fear To Tread

2009-05-25T19:52:00.006-04:00

I recently spoke at the Nicholas Hall OTC conference in Venice on the importance of knowing your customer.

At the conference, I cited three successful innovations where marketers took the brands into even more focused niches:

· Listerine mouthwash launched Listerine Pocketpaks for on-the-go oral care,
· Tylenol Extended Relief was renamed Tylenol Arthritis Pain,
· K-Y Jelly launched K-Y Massage Oil.

In all three cases, the key success factors were

· Identifying an unmet consumer need related to the main brand,
· Capitalizing on that specific and focused need,
· Leveraging the emotional connection associated with the parent brand,
· Utilizing a clear product name that identified the line extension’s usage,
· Supporting the launches with strong advertising and promotional support.

The main virtue here was sterling consumer research work that uncovered these insights and translating them into focused executions.

Now just imagine how they all combine into the same usage occasion. Hmmmnn.

The human element in Nostradmus

2009-05-16T21:33:00.007-04:00

This past week I was speaking on how approaches to forecasting pharmaceutical compounds at CBI's Early Commercialization and Forecasting conference, and, before I spoke, I asked the audience what their most concerning issues were in forecasting.

I half-joked that our approach was called Nostradmus and I was half-right about the relational side of accurate forecasting.

The three key issues I was asked about were:

Addressing regulatory matters
Understanding competitive pipelines of drugs in development
Internal alignment.

Issues 1 and 2 require the same kind of effort, namely staying on top of what is going on. In terms of regulatory, it is a matter of paying attention to FDA approvals and comments, understanding how the agency's views and considerations of clinical end points are changing.

The same diligence is necessary in tracking pipelines. However, there it is not just a matter of tracking published results. It is also important to understand the different kinds of MOAs in development, what they are targeting, how are they working, to deeply appreciate what is novel and what is just me-too.

In understanding these kinds of evolving issues, you can better track game-changers and make more accurate risk-adjusted forecasts.

However, for me, the key question was alignment. You can have the absolute best checklist of approach but, if you don't have internal alignment around and support for your assumptions, it does not make a difference what you do.

That is the human element. It is not the science, not the modeling, not the data.

It is that very human relational issue that can spell success or failure in the development of a drug.

The best way to meet this issue head on is to make your assumptions as transparent as possible, and discuss them thoroughly internally so everyone precisely understands and agrees to those assumptions. In that way, you get the best minds providing their best thoughts on the best outcome.

In that way, even if it is a forecast, you will be roughly right, not just in the data but in the agreements to move forward.

Pearls Before Swine Flu

2009-05-10T17:17:00.003-04:00

I was recently quoted by Morningstar and Medical News Today on the critical lack of information and communication to the general public on the treatment options for the current H1N1 flu, also known as the misnamed "Swine Flu" outbreak.

The most basic misconception is that, unlike influenza vaccines which are preventative, medications recommended to combat the current flu outbreak, Tamiflu by Roche and Relenza by GSK are used for symptom control. This treatment means that these medications manage the symptoms and offer relief more rapidly than if the virus is left untreated. However, neither of these medications are designed to prevent or cure the illness.

In a public health emergency, people don't take the time to understand the distinctions between treatment and prevention."

In addition, while these medications are designed for symptom relief and control, their effectiveness varies in accordance with the strain of influenza. This "swine flu" is a type of Influenza A, which is an H1N1 virus strain. Therefore, treatment options should be sought out that will most effectively manage this virus.

In December 2008, The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released a special advisory noting potential resistance to Tamiflu during the initial phase of the 2008/2009 influenza season. This advisory was based on the fact that there are various strains of influenza which could require treatment specific to their composition. 98% of Influenza A virus strains showed resistance to Tamiflu this season (2008/2009) compared to only 11% last year (2007/2008). With each flu season, viruses change and mutate, therefore the effectiveness of each drug treatment varies greatly.

There is never one vaccine that fits all outbreaks. Strains are always changing, and sometimes, when you formulate a vaccine for a seasonal outbreak, it is often easy to miss all the strains. It is like the Heisenberg Principle in vaccine formulation. The attempts to create cures can cause changes themselves over time.

Like that Heisenberg Principle, you got to stay on your toes to make sure you are hitting the right targets.

Real Shareholder Value vs. Opportunistic Value

2009-04-12T13:41:00.002-04:00

Bristol-Myers Squibb continues to work on getting right.

CEO James Cornelius said this week that, with $9 billion on hand, BMS would continue to seek to build its pipeline through strategic acquisitions and to remain viable as an independent mid-size biopharma company.

Since 2007, following it "String of Pearls" strategy, has bought or licensed or partnered with seven different companies on developing compounds.

On one hand, those deals in unto themselves represent a good independence strategy. Look at the gyrations that the Merck/Schering-Plough deal is going through with J&J over Remicade. With so many deals done, any acquirer of BMS would find it challenging, to say the least, to unwind a host of promising partnerships. After all, a key challenge in biopharma is assigning appropriate value to promises.

The key here, though, is increasing real shareholder value vs. opportunistic shareholder value. If you do a comparison in pharma of shareholder value between companies that grew through acquisition vs. companies that grew through organic developments, you will see that mergers significantly under-performed organically developed and launched growth.

Wy-Pfi says it is all about shareholder value. But in the short term that value will be balanced on the backs of all the employees turned out onto the street. Yes, it gives Pfizer more irons to keep hot in vaccines and biologics, something Pfizer was sorely missing. But growing Pfizer value through acquisitions has not been a sustaining value strategy except for Lipitor acquired via the Warner Lambert acquisition.

All these CEOs are really smart. But for the moment James Cornelius and his strategy goes to the head of class for truly growing the company and its pipeline with a steady product-based stratgy.

Tolstoy and Pharma Mergers

2009-03-28T18:22:00.002-04:00

As he gives the order not to defend Moscow against Napoleon’s troops and to retreat behind the city, General Kutuzov in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, keeps gnawing on the same bone of a thought: At what point, at what decision, was it already determined that Moscow had to be abandoned. Prior events simply led up to this moment and the actual decision of abandonment had been made long before.

In a very similar way it has been probably like that for Merck’s acquisition of Schering-Plough and Pfizer’s acquisition of Wyeth. Only now are those acquisitions seen as inevitable.

For years, as Pfizer struggled under loss of patents and a dearth of new products from a pipeline that looked something a sluice in the Mojave desert, the company was missing major opportunities in vaccines and biologics. Pfizer knew eight years ago that today would come, in a much sharper clarity than that afforded General Kutuzov. But still the company stuck to its knitting. And the threads separated, the fabric became coming apart. And in one action, Pfizer has jumped into two critical areas that it was never in before. As for Wyeth, it had little coming for it and so, for the sake of shareholder value, it has now run into the arms of a suitor with deeper pockets.

As for Merck, it has done a great job in recent years, overcoming the issues associated with Vioxx. However, even so, the internal growth engine were not enough. And, as for Schering, well that was just a sale waiting to happen. Merck will realize efficiencies by capturing the fullest value of Vytorin, its co-promoted drug with Schering. But that may not be enough.

Look at Pfizer’s lesson. Pfizer acquired Warner-Lambert and got the full rights to Lipitor (which held the ship steady for a number of years) and then acquired Pharmacia to get the full rights to Celebrex (well, that didn’t turn out quite the way it was hoped).

For Merck, Schering may only be a temporary stay until it gets going with something more.

In pharma, the development cycle is long but in an age when blockbusters are just as past as old Russian generals, survival is now couched in more totalitarian terms. The Putins will thrive for awhile and terrorize everyone else in the neighborhood. But until someone expands the playing field of science, delivery and treatment, the industry will continue chewing on that same bone wondering what decision was made years ago that led them to this inevitable moment.

Why is pain such a pain for P&G?

2008-07-19T10:12:00.003-04:00

Why is pain such a pain for P&G?

This month brings the news that P&G is selling to Wyeth Thermacare, a product that established a whole new sub-segment of topical pain relief. When P&G launched Thermacare it had all the hallmarks that anyone looked for in a new brand: new technology, new name, “relatively” unmet consumer need. But, only six short years later, the brand was put on the block and jettisoned due to under-performance and a desire for brand portfolio rationalization.

For such a savvy marketer, P&G has a long inglorious history of finding pain painful as a product category.

P&G entered OTCs in 1982 by acquiring Norwich Eaton and marketing enteric-coated aspirin. Never went anywhere.

Then it teamed up with Syntex to launch naprosyn in the OTC analgesics market under the name Aleve. Much fanfare. Ballyhooed $100 million launch spend. Sold to Roche/Bayer.

Okay, so maybe systemic analgesics were too tough for this smart marketer.

Detergents, oral care, cosmetics – all deal with external structure and function claims. P&G is brilliant there.

Thermacare is external. Kind of like an OTC. Competes against Chattem’s Icy Hot and Pfizer’s (now J&J) Bengay. Maybe P&G would do well there. Nope. Sold to Wyeth, which has an extensive pain portfolio led by Advil.

Maybe P&G just doesn’t get consumer healthcare.

Pepto-Bismol, Metamucil, Vicks? All under-performers.

And you heard it here first: Someday soon P&G will sell Prilosec.

Consumer healthcare requires a different kind of sensitivity to the magic bullets that drive OTCs vs. consumer products. In OTCs, marketers sell active ingredients that actually do something to the health and wellness of the body.

These products don’t just thrive on new colors and new flavors. They live by claims supported with relevant line extensions and forays into a category adjacency. The ultimate promotion is the professional marketing of OTCs where a company markets its products to doctors based on claims derived from clinical trials published in a peer-review journals. That isn’t Home Made Simple as promoted in P&G’s online and offline magazine.

P&G knows this; it is very smart. The company regularly accomplishes feats of derring-do with Tide and Crest and Pampers.

But when it comes to products that require a higher level of scientific and regulatory understanding, P&G never gets it quite right. Prilosec was a year late because P&G hadn’t truly aligned its claims to its clinical trials.

There is a subtle difference between OTC and consumer products. OTCs demand that you really and truly understand the difference between what you do and what you say and how it affects the health of your brands and your consumers.

A Wii bit of medical advice: Try mABs

2008-07-12T16:25:00.009-04:00

I am not going to get the Nobel Prize for this, but, I believe I have made a major scientific discovery: Wii-mABs.

Ordinarily, mABs or monoclonocal antibodies are monospecific antibodies that are identical to each other as they come from one type of immune cell that are all clones of a single parent cell. Since you can create monoclonal antibodies that specifically bind to most substances, they can then serve to detect or purify that substance. mABs are used in treatments for such diseases as rheumatoid arthritis, leukemia, and lymphoma.

So I got to thinking what I could do to help fight Wii-itis or inflammation of the elbow. I thought this would be a particularly important disease to fight given the Nintendo’s mission to turn couch potatoes into fried potatoes through the use of its motion sensitive game remote and the recent launch of its exercise-focused Wii-Fit board.

I posit that the Wii-itis or Wii elbow is a common affliction of Wii users. This injury is also common among tennis players and represents an inflammation of the elbow joint. I think it is probably under-diagnosed among Wii-ites, indicating a seriously under-treated population given the popularity of the game and a true unmet medical need.

However, upon further research, I also uncovered several other diseases associated with the Wii:

TNF-α factors, also known as, They Never Fail, which afflicts alpha males who are determined to win these games at all costs.

B cells: Small committed groups of users who try to bowl a 300 every time.

T cells: Similar to the bowlers, this group of tennis players never settles for love.

RSV proteins: These users are infected by Repeated Swinging Values caused by their single-minded desire to over and over again try to win their games.

Others have noticed a similar issue, and I would like to build on their research. In a past issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Julio Bonis reported awakening with a sore shoulder. He was puzzled since he hadn't played any so-called sports recently, but he had played several long sessions of Wii tennis.

In the past, gamer joysticks have been known to cause arthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome, ganglion cysts and tenosynovitis.

Now, many patients can benefit from a Wii bit of exercise. The Wii console burns more calories than classic game consoles. For an average weekly use of 13 hours, 1,840 calories would be burned, that is 40 percent more than classic consoles. Plus the new Wii Fit offers ways to do yoga, balance games, aerobics and strength training.

So what is the solution: like so many sports injuries and people who suffer from such co-morbid conditions as diabetes, coronary heart disease and hypercholesterolemia, the best recommendation is changes to one’s lifestyle. In this case it is important to pursue those mABs, moderately active body breaks. In order to ensure that players get the most out of their mABs, they should actually consider reading something. Personally I am reading the new translation of War and Peace by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and it is fantastic.

If you don’t take my recommendation, then please note that the august British Chiropractic Association (BCA) has advised that a Wii player to take breaks every 20-20 minutes. The BCA also says that gamers should treat a 'Wii session' like any form of exercise and warm-up adequately beforehand to prevent stiffness and possible injuries." The Association has a five-point "Wii warm-up" for the shoulders, wrists, arms, neck and back that can be downloaded from its web site at www.chiropractic-uk.co.uk.

Now excuse me, I have to return to Rock Band. I believe I have nailed Blitzkrieg Bop.

Nothing Is More Natural Than Artificial Beauty

2008-07-06T12:11:00.005-04:00

Nothing is more natural than artificial beauty.

Are you really reducing your carbon footprint (and your wallet) when you purchase natural cosmetics from Dr. Hauschka?

According to Mark Landler in The New York Times, stars like Julia Roberts, Jennifer Aniston, Richard Gere and Robert Downey Jr. use and advocate the use of Dr. Hauschka.

Now who can argue with this A-list who, by association, have helped WALA Heilmittel the maker of Dr. Hauschka, double sales to over $150 million in the last five years. Can these stars even pronounce the name of the brand?

WALA stands for Warmth, Ashes, Light and Ashes and is based on an early 20th-century European philosophy called anthroposophy developed by Rudolf Steiner that postulates the existence of a spiritual world that can be accessed by the human intellect. The practical aspect of this philosophy was organic farming, hence the natural production of natural ingredients.

This gets even better: natural, spiritual, expensive – a trifecta for beauty. You simply can’t refuse this offer if you worry about your looks, have money to burn and want to be trendy.

I do not believe that these stars are accounting for all this sales growth. Surely there are some less beautiful people buying into this product line.

So, in the end, we have class cosmetic marketing. A cosmetic brand supported by a reason why (in this case, natural ingredients) that is promoted by glamorous stars and riding a trend.

Decade after decade, year after year, this formula works.

Or maybe I should say millennia after millennia.

After all, look at the Egyptian hieroglyphics. You won’t see any overweight, unglamorous people depicted there. Those Egyptians really looked good on their People magazine pyramid walls.

And all they ever used was natural cosmetics; probably well along the line promoted by Rudolf Steiner.

I guess the formula works. But wouldn’t it be interesting to try something truly different.

Bill Clinton - Pump Head

2008-06-22T20:01:00.003-04:00

When I attended my daughter’s graduation from the University of Michigan last year, there was great excitement among the audience. It was just about the pride of seeing your son or daughter on their university commencement day. It was also about the fact that former president Bill Clinton was going to give the commencement address. Not a bad gig for the husband of the woman was fighting for the presidential nomination in this battleground state (remember this was when, not now).

A great applause greeted his step to the podium. Then he began to speak. The sentiments and ideas about going out into the world and making a contribution toward a better world were fairly stock commencement sentiments nicely worded.

Surprisingly, though, they weren’t nicely said. Clinton hesitated, paused over phrases, stammered. I was wondering where was the fluidity of speech, the eloquence of man known as a great campaigner and speaker. I recalled his State of the Union speeches. He didn’t sound like this then.

And this past year, as the campaign continued, there was a whole series of remarks that seemed out of context and personal attacks against former friends and supporters that didn’t ring right.

As reported by Melinda Beck in the Wall Street Journal, aides to Bill Clinton last week denied speculation that the former president's intemperate remarks on the campaign trail were due to mild cognitive damage from his quadruple-bypass surgery in 2004.

"This theory is false and is flatly rejected by President Clinton's doctors, who say he is in excellent shape...." the statement said.

But the condition dubbed "pump head" or "bypass brain" is well known to doctors but few warn patients about it.

Symptoms include short-term memory loss, slowed responses, trouble concentrating and emotional instability. As noted by Beck, in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2001, researchers at Duke University Medical Center tested 261 patients before and after bypass surgery and found that 53% of them had significant cognitive decline when they were discharged -- and 42% still suffered from it five years later.

One explanation is that when a patient's blood is pumped through a heart-lung machine during bypass, tiny air bubbles, fat globules and other particles may enter the bloodstream. The pump can also damage platelets, which form clumps, and clamping the aorta loosens bits of plaque. That debris can travel to the brain and clog tiny capillaries, forming microscopic strokes.

So we may fix the heart, but, at the same, endanger the head. Surgery is always a risk, and it helps to really understand all the complications that occur.

The best answer lies in the prevention of coronary artery disease (CAD). There are approximately 30 million people in the US and top five EU countries who suffer from CAD. And, although, mortality rates are declining due to better therapies, it still remains one of the leading causes of death in the developed countries.

Lifestyle change and the use of drug therapies like statins clearly help, and, by aggressively managing against those initial symptoms of trouble and family history, patients can defer what used to be inevitable.

It is clearly better now to prime the heart pump into good long-term health than pay the consequences later. Yet while many patients think the surgery is a great fix (which it is), there are still many other risks that affect not just the heart but also the brain. There is no bypass there.

Get me some amoxicillin and yogurt, stat

2008-05-24T14:07:00.001-04:00

Who doesn’t want fast, convenient, inexpensive healthcare?

So what a great idea in-store health clinics are. Big benefit to consumers/patients. Perfect sales alignment for retailers between their pharmacy counters and OTC aisles.

The number of clinics boomed in the last three years from 125 clinics to 963.

In the cosmetic business, you count distribution by how many doors you are in. The more doors, the more sales potential, filling the rack and offering access.

Think about that for health clinics. More access for sore throats, colds, rashes, blood pressure monitoring, diabetes supplies. With great convenience.

But now growth is slowing. The Wall Street Journal reports that Shopko, Meijer, and Wal-Mart and Cardinal Health’s Medicine Shoppe is actually closing units. Maybe as much as 70 clinics. And CVS is talking about scaling back their expansion plans.

Why?

Oh, it something as simple as estimating the break-even on your investment.

According to Tom Charland, for VP for Strategy at Minute Clinic, “The big mistake was for people to think they could break-even in six months. People are learning this is an 18-24-month process to get to break-even.”

Now how many product launches do you know of that break-even in six months?

Now think of how many capital-based retail fixture-based store-based assets break-even in six months?

Maybe those hard plastic theft prevention boxes that protect Gillette’s Fusion razor blades from thieves with wide and deep-sleeved coats, but not much else.

Now reality is settling in. The financial teams are making their lists and checking them twice trying to figure out what clinics have been naughty and which have been nice.

Business reality and metrics here are necessary and good.

However, they will not ultimately slow down the need for people to have access to fast and easy health care.

Compare these clinics to the current distribution of general medical practice:

Call for the appointment
Set in the waiting room for thirty minutes
Speak to the doctor for 20 minutes
Drive to the drug store to get the prescription filled
Wait for the prescription.

One stop health care for minor ailments is a need that is here and will continue to grow.

The challenge for the retailers is to get their economics right and for drug and consumer healthcare manufacturers to get their targeting and merchandising right to help their retail partners succeed.

The patient is waiting.

The Other Guy Blinked, Part IIA

2008-05-03T17:01:00.001-04:00

It is just a matter of time before the Rice Riots affecting developing markets turn into the Water Riots. Though I expect that that was something Noah already knew.

Those “bad” guys keep banging on the doors of the ark, seeking imitative ways to profitable salvation.

Last week, PepsiCo acquired Britain's V water to protect its European flank from Coke.

V water states that it is made from spring water, comes in different flavors and includes additives like vitamin C, zinc and ginseng.

Can anybody spell vitaminwater? The same US brand that Coca-Cola paid $4 billion to Glaceau for last year and is planning to launch overseas in such countries as, surprise, surprise, the UK.

After all, when you buy a regional brand, the easiest way to make money on your shiny new brand asset is to launch it in new geographies. The launch pipelines are pure incremental money and whatever sales you get are gravy against that expensive roast beef you purchased.

How rare is success? Actually quite frequent as long as you get the local temperature right.

The main challenge? Of yeah, when the competition is there ahead of you. Like what Pepsi just did to Coke. Nothing like landing on a foreign shore and seeing that someone was there before, like the Vikings welcoming Christopher Columbus to the new world.

This kind of strategy/counter-strategy cuts across consumer categories. Reckitt-Benckiser buys Mucinex in the US and is “banking” on rolling it out globally. What they really bought was not a unique decongestant (as guaifenesin is as old as the hills) but an advertising property called Mr. Mucinex that they better hope will play as well in Sao Paulo as it does in San Diego.

In the mean time both Coca-Cola and Pepsico are trying to defend their “water substitutes” against contamination and resource defoliation in India, as Nestle tries to gain control of new water access points in the US Pacific Northwest.

Pepsi, already owns SoBe Life Water, Gatorade sports drink and Aquafina bottled water.

The question will be do they truly believe that they can grow V water or are they just trying to pick Coke’s pocket, leaving the company with less money to invest.

Water polo anyone?

The Donnybrook Fair: Apple, Blackberry and Google

2008-04-27T10:08:00.004-04:00

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,
That all, with one consent, praise new-born gauds.
And give to dust that is a little gilt
More laud than gilt o’er dusted;
The present eye praises the present object.

Troilus and Cressida, William Shapespeare

The emerging battle between RIM, Apple's iPhone and Google Android have all the classic hallmarks and of a true marketing melee. That’s great to see and instructive for all.

RIM’s Blackberry, for years, has made the market for smartphones, being the corporate darling for its ease of email use. How many times have you sat in a meeting, suddenly see the flashing light on your Blackberry go from green to red and feel the need to know and to answer?

Oh, and who did Blackberry pass on its leg around the track? Palm, which came late to smartphones. While Blackberry software and third party apps were not as robust as Palm and even though Palm had a huge installed base of users tracking their calendars, the functionality of its email system and the alignment with corporations won that race thumbs down, even though its first devices were black-and-white and clunky.

Now we have the iPhone, a cooler piece of hardware and software than the Blackberry. But not the winner out of the gate. The functionality and ease of use (my thumbs are just too big for the accurate and fast touch screen typing) do not match the Blackberry, limiting its ability to gain a broad base of users. Who bought the iPhone first? Consumers, the bedrock of Apple users.

Now it is getting interesting:

· Apple is preparing to launch a 3G iPhone and use Microsoft corporate email technology, a needed move to get corporate IT departments to sign on to iPhones.

o But you have to wonder how much this pains the purist in Steve Jobs?

· Blackberry is also preparing a 3G version and a better piece of hardware (bigger screen, better processor with a better browser).

· Google is licensing its Android operating system, based on Linux, to gain “screen share” on cell phones globally.

Google is operating under a totally different business model, fighting on only one battlefield. They are hardware-agnostic, freeing themselves of tactical hardware tactics, desiring share of eyeballs for its many apps. Google margins should be better. Their design focused on the visual look and click-throughs as they eschew plastic, metal and processors, leaving Nokia, LG, Motorola etc to the battle of the tiny boxes.

So the battle of flanks and enfilade goes to Blackberry and iPhone as they strive to win the minds and thumbs of both consumers and corporate users. The Blackberry Pearl and Curve are okay consumer phones, but they ain’t no iPhone.

When all things about performance are equal, great design wins. In a world of parity claims about superiority, whether it is soap or cosmetics or furniture or drugs, the cool-ness factor can win. Just ask Ideo.

The real and complex battleground here will go to the winner who must strive for superiority on both hardware and software. That is not an easy task. There are a thousand different cell phone sku’s in the mobile telephone category, but few offer truly differentiated in performance. Design becomes key. Remember the success of flip phones vs. candy bars? The first Razrs vs. everything else? Even the StarTAC. What makes this new evolution so interesting between iPhone and Blackberry is that it requires a skillful combination of both performance and design.

In the thirteenth century, King John gave a license to hold an annual fair in Donnybrook, outside Dublin. By the eighteenth century, it had become a huge two-week assembly for horse dealers, fortune-tellers, beggars, wrestlers, dancers, fiddlers, and food sellers. It was known for its rowdiness and noise, particularly for the whiskey-fueled fighting that went on after dark. The traditional advice for an Irishman going to the fair was, “Wherever you see a head, hit it.” Eventually the fair was closed by the Irish government in 1855.

I don’t know if you can combine the idea of a donnybrook with a Smartphone (since smart and donnybrook seem antithetical), but that it what this category is re-shaping itself to be.

Saving Winston Churchill's Chilly Heart

2008-04-05T10:55:00.004-04:00

Lady Nancy Astor: Winston, if you were my husband, I'd poison your tea.
Winston Churchill: Nancy, if I were your husband, I'd drink it.

Having a defibrillator at home does not protect heart attack survivors against a cardiac arrest any better than having someone at home with good cardiopulmonary resuscitation training.

Dr. Gust Bardy of the Seattle Institute of Cardiac Research and colleagues studied 7,001 people at moderate risk of sudden cardiac arrest, each of whom had a spouse or home companion willing and able to perform CPR and use an AED. He presented the results of the study of automated external defibrillators or AEDs used in the home at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology in Chicago.

In public places such as airports, AEDs have helped people survive sudden cardiac arrest, when the heart stops pumping blood. Without immediate treatment with a defibrillator or a bystander who knows CPR, most die within minutes.

As about 80 percent of sudden cardiac arrests occur at home, researchers wanted to see if putting defibrillators in the home could save lives.

One group was told to call an ambulance and perform CPR, while the other group was told to use the defibrillator first, then seek emergency help. They were followed for three years.

What a gamble to participate in this study? Will I live because I depended on skill vs. a device? What’s my risk for sudden cardiac arrest anyway? What’s the book in Vegas on my chances of the big bang and then surviving it.

Wait a moment. Wow. How much faith does it take to trust that your spouse knows enough CPR to save you vs. having the AED in your home. Or that she'll even make the attempt at all. Basically, if she fails, it is okay because it was only a clinical trial that didn't work.

Now that’s love. As you lie there on the floor, clutching your chest, you look up with pleading eyes that say save me.

And then she (oh yes, we assume it is a she) remembers all the garbage you didn’t take out, the beer on your breath when you came home at 2 am, the mess your buds made after the Giants won the Super Bowl and a thousand other slings and arrows that outrageous fortune rained down on her because of you.

"There was no mortality benefit," said Dr. Gust Bardy of the Seattle Institute of Cardiac Research, whose study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

No benefit? Someone still lived.

Out of 123 arrests, just 63 of those were witnessed and a defibrillator was used in just 32 people. The device, which can assess a patient's rhythm, called for a shock to be delivered in just 14 patients, and only four survived long enough to be discharged from the hospital.

Bardy told reporters the rate of cardiac arrests occurring at home was lower than expected, and many occurred when the victim was alone.

And he noted that patients' spouses and companions in the control group had been well educated in how to respond to a heart-stopping event, something that could have improved survival in the group that did not have an AED.

Interestingly, the devices were also used by neighbors who borrowed one of the defibrillators to revive a family member. Two out of 7 of those people survived. Bardy said whenever the devices were used, they worked well.

AEDs for use at home cost $1,200 to $2,000 per unit. AEDs used in the study were made by Philips Medical Systems, a unit of Royal Philips Electronics, which are the only AEDs available without a prescription.

Bardy said most of the devices are purchased by the "worried well," and confessed to personally owning four.

Global Walgreen-ing

2008-03-29T16:20:00.002-04:00

Whatever is the world coming to but the Walgreen-ing of the global mass market retail drug store distribution channel.

Global OTC manufacturers need to start thinking hard and smart about playing with global retail chain drug stores. The death knell of decline is starting to sound for independent pharmacies, and, when you couple this change in the retail distribution channel with General Sales Ledger (GSL) and Pharmacy (P) brands that provide consumers with easier access, you can start to count on

· Improved public health benefits

· Lower prices

· Great business opportunities

Nicholas Hall is a very smart and astute observer of consumer healthcare and the retail pharmacy.

Here are four data points from his latest OTC newsflash:

1. According to local press reports, the Spanish government risks being taken to the European Court in the next couple of months, in a move to change its pharmacy model to reflect EU legislation guaranteeing the freedom to set up European-wide businesses.

2. Meanwhile, a report by Dutch audit company Ecorys and the University of Maastricht, defending liberalization and deregulation, concludes that the elimination of all rules that regulate pharmacies would provide significant economic savings. The report suggests deregulation of pharmacies could improve their productivity by one-third and reduce prices by 30-40%.

3. In Japan, Drugstore chains Welcia, which has 95 stores in Shizuoka and Kanagawa, and Tokyo-based Takada are in talks to merge later this year. The merger will create Japan's ninth-largest drugstore chain, with sales of about Y130bn (US$1.2bn) and around 395 stores.

4. Speaking at a retail sector conference this week, Alliance Boots executive chairman Stefano Pessina announced that the roll-out of the Boots name in Europe. Although the Boots brand is very powerful in the UK and known elsewhere, it has not been exploited advantageously in international markets. Pessina said the brand will be developed in Europe over time, starting with Norway, where 7 of its Alliance Apotek pharmacies have been rebranded under the Boots the Chemist format, with all 125 Norwegian stores set to follow suit.

This man knows what he sees.

Now it is up to OTC manufacturers to also see these beacons of change and convert them into cogent sales, branding and distribution strategies. The pain of Wal-Mart has already been well felt in the US. Similar distribution and pricing are emerging in Europe, while, similar opportunities loom large in emerging markets like China (viz. Nep-Star) and India. The challenge will be capitalizing on this emerging wave of drug store capitalism.

Life-Profiles: The Patient Is Waiting

2008-03-22T09:37:00.001-04:00

All of us are so similar in our differences.

It’s the Jordache, L.L. Bean, Gap, Gloria Vanderbilt, Calvin Klein and, of course, Humanity approach.

In the Wall Street Journal, Robert Lee Hotz neatly summarizes the impact and non-impact of variations in our DNA.

The Max Planck Institute reported that any one of 11 variations in a single gene can make it harder for common anti-depressants to adjust serotonin.

The University of Alabama reports that any one of 9 variations in another gene can double the risk of lupus.

The US, China and the UK have jointly launched the 1000 Genomes Project in which scientists will exhaustively detail the DNA of 1000 people from around the world, producing 60 times as much genetic detail in the three years than all of that produced in the previous 25 years.

In her book, The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt defines vita active (active life) as composed of labor, work and action in the political, social, public and private worlds.

In his book, The Human Comedy, William Saroyan illustrates how the grounded-ness of a well-rounded human support system of Homer Macauley enables him to live a full and fulfilled life

With all this data about who we intrinsically are, physically, socially and spiritually, the challenge remains on understanding and developing pills, products and ideas to continue to help us survive and thrive.

At SmartAnalyst, we are evolving an approach called Life-Profiles ™ where we can combine the best of consumer/patient, scientific and commercial research to provide pharmaceutical and consumer healthcare companies with an understanding of their ultimate target, us.

At Warner-Lambert, we used to have a saying that The Patient Is Waiting. The world is waiting for help with better vaccines, better courses of therapy and better care.

Understanding the complexities of genes and psychologies is so critical to this success that Life-Profiles is designed to help shine a light on who we are, creating a real blend of both scientific and psychological insight.

In his The Actor’s Studio, Lee Strasberg refined and taught method acting as way in which actors would recall real, personal emotions to help them get inside the personalities of their characters.

Life-Profiles is all about getting inside the life of our patients, both physically and emotionally. That is our motivation.

Thinking Your Way Through A Recession

2008-03-09T17:19:00.002-04:00

Sorry for not posting sooner, but I have been working in India for the last couple of weeks and am just catching up.

Last week I saw that Barnes & Noble Inc warned of "recessionary pressures" and estimated that 2008 earnings would be well below Wall Street estimates.

As reported in Reuters, the world's largest book retailer already faced a high sales hurdle in comparison with a boost last year from the last Harry Potter book. The company said it had a weak holiday season despite generous discounts aimed at cash-strapped consumers. Also, Barnes & Noble saw its share of the music business pressured by online offerings like iTunes.

Okay, so clearly no one has a monopoly on knowledge, but think about the damage if a recession can make stagger your acquisition of knowledge because you can’t afford books.

But Barnes & Noble is more than just books. It is music, magazines, Starbucks coffee, calendars, and knick-knacks. B&N is also an easy of source for gift-carding when your knowledge of the recipient exceeds your capacity to think of a gift and you desperately hope that the person you are buying a gift for knows how to read. Given this recessionary pressures, reading and amusement are going down the tubes.

But look what Americans have learned in the last six months: Continual growth and investment in home equity is no sure thing and “Guaranteed” as-good-as-cash investments are subject to auctions.

What we learned is that we live in an “e-bay” world, where everything is an auction and you are either a buyer or a seller – and you always need a partner. These partners assign a certain value to your asset, and it may not be a value you like. This is the efficiency of markets coming home to roost.

To quote the sagacious Yogi Berra, it is déjà vous all over again. It is tulipomania all over again, from the passion for buying and selling tulips bulb in 17^th century Holland. A good tulip bulb could cost thousand times the average Dutch salary.

More recently we had internet stocks. Now we have something even more pernicious, the roof over your head, the foundation and the driver for much of recent US economic growth.

I love Anthony Powell, and, in his twelve-novel sequence called A Dance to the Music of Time, his tenth novel is called Books Do Furnish A Room. Now, according to Barnes and Noble, it looks like our shelves will be as a thread-bare as our home investments. If we don’t learn from the lessons of history, we are doomed to repeat them. Okay, for ten points and your next best investment, who said that?

Keeping Your Head When Those All Around You Are Losing Theirs

2008-02-03T17:59:00.001-05:00

Kudoes to J&J's Rogaine. Sales are reported to be up 25% following the launch of Rogaine mousse foam.

Form does follow function.

Before the launch of the foam, Rogaine was oily, didn't necessarily stay on the top of your head and didn't leave hair looking shiny and free.

So what did J&J do? They reformulated the product into a more consumer friendly version and sales shot up.

The Minoxidil active didn't change. Just the way the product was delivered to the consumer.

In the consumer healthcare operating space, you rarely get novel new actives unless you are switching a compound from Rx to OTC status, such as GSK successfully did with its alli, the weight-loss product formerly known as Xenical (orlistat).

So what you can in consumer healthcare is a lot of development effort put behind forms, flavors and condition-specific indications. That's a lot of effort and most of the time all it does is keep your market share in place and add mopre sku's to your product line-up.

But when you can truly introduce a form that improves your product's consumer-friendly usage you have a real winner.

I only hope pharmaceutical marketers begin to understand more deeply the roles than form can play with product adherence. Using Rogain everyday really is all about compliance and adherence.

Why can't we say the same for statins or blood pressure meds?

Beauty Is the Eye of the Beholder for Allergan and Estee Lauder

2008-01-27T19:58:00.000-05:00

How perfect is the deal between Estee Lauder and Allergan to develop an upscale skin-care line in dermatology offices?

All too often pharma companies forget about the role of patient/consumer decision-making in their product development.

And you wonder why 30% of prescriptions go unfilled? That is a dire lack of compliance.

Allergan gets the consumer side of marketing better than many pharma companies. From Botx and to Refresh, they appreciate how to speak with consumers.

Now they have a brilliant tie-up with a premier premium marketer in Estee Lauder.

The new line will carry a variation on the Clinique name and may be priced at a premium over Clinique's retail-store brand as well as Allergan's existing physician-dispensed skin-care products, including Prevage MD, M.D. Forté and Vivité. Some new products will be created to complement and speed recovery from aesthetics procedures, such as laser treatments and microdermabrasion. The products may include medical-grade ingredients that tend to add to the cost and the effectiveness of skin-care products.

This deal also works for Estee Lauder, giving them a new premium channel to see upscale beauty.

And, of course, the physicians win as well with new more patient-friendly lines to sell.

If only more pharma companies thought this way about their products.

Celebrity Skin: Childhood Leukemia Discovery

2008-01-18T23:02:00.000-05:00

Cells don’t take a holiday. Your body keeps moving. Cells in the laboratory continue to need care. What do you do when you are born with “pre-leukemic cells?”

“Oh, make me over
I’m all I want to be
A walking study
In demonology.

Hey, so glad you could make it
Yeah, now you really made it
Hey, so glad you could make it now.”

According to a press release from the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), a group from the Medical Research Council Molecular Haematology Unit at Oxford, studying four-year old twin girls in Bromley, UK, has identified a rogue cell that is the root cause of childhood leukemia. Both twins had “pre-leukemic” cells but, to date, only one has developed leukemia.

http://www.ich.ucl.ac.uk/pressoffice/pressrelease_00598

“Oh, look at my face
My name is might have been
My name is never was
My names forgotten

Hey, so glad you could make it
Yeah, now you really made it
Hey, there’s only us left now.”

It is believed that it takes another genetic mutation, possibly caused by an infection, and is required to create the disease. Leukemia occurs when large numbers of white blood cells take over bone marrow and the body is unable to produce enough normal blood cells. 1% of the population is believed to contain “pre-leukemic” cells and of this population, 1% has the second mutation occur and get cancer.

“When I wake up in my makeup
It’s too early for that dress
Wilted and faded somewhere in Hollywood
I’m glad I came here
With your pound of flesh.
No second billing cause you’re a star now
Oh, Cinderella
They aren’t sluts like you
Beautiful garbage, beautiful dresses
Can you stand up or will you just fall down.

You better watch out
What you wish for
It better be worth it
So much to die for.”

One of the twins has now developed acute lymphoblastic leukemia, but the other twin is healthy. Doctors are continually testing the healthy twin, and they believe that when she reaches adolescence, the rogue cells will disappear.

“Hey, so glad you could make it
Yeah, now you really made it
Hey, there’s only us left now.

When I wake up in my makeup
Have you ever felt so used up as this?
It’s all so sugarless
Hooker/waitress/model/actress
Oh, just go nameless
Honeysuckle, she’s full of poison
She obliterated everything she kissed
Now she’s fading
Somewhere in Hollywood
I’m glad I came here
With your pound of flesh.”

Current treatments are too aggressive to eradicate the “pre-leukemic” cells, so screening is not likely, according to doctors. Study leader Professor Tariq Enver has been quoted as saying that now that doctors know about the cell, they hope to some day find a way of targeting the disease.

According to Dr. Phil Ancliff of the Great Ormond Street Hospital (where my son was treated for his eyes and the hospital to which J.M. Barrie donated the royalties from Peter Pan), 90% of children survive leukemia because of intensive chemotherapy. However, that therapy can come at a price. The treated twin has lost sight in one eye.

Such is the kind of research that kinds us all one step closer to cures.

“You want a part of me
Well, I’m not selling cheap
No, I’m not selling cheap.”

Song lyrics from Celebrity Skin, written by Courtney Love of Hole.

Exotic Juices Free Radical Marketing

2008-01-13T20:29:00.000-05:00

How about some exotic juices for some exotic pricing?

Snapple has Noni Berry from Polynesia, which is naturally bad-smelling with a nasty taste. But Snapple makes it with other juices to create a better taste.

Snapple does the same thing with Acai. I bought Snapple Acai but when I read the label there was barely any Acai there. Just other juices. Bossa Nova also has an Acai drink, but mixes it with raspberries.

Then there are drinks with yang-mei fruit from China, and Goji berries from Asia. None which taste particularly good.

And this started with pomegranate juice. When you drink POM straight (known as POM Wonderful), it doesn’t taste very wonderful at all. POM Tea tastes better, barely.

I think that what this really tastes like is money.

In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby tells his friend, Nick, that Daisy’s voice sounds like money. Surely that’s what these manufacturers must be hearing when they put these exotic juices into bottles. And why, do they do so?

Novelty, trendiness, jumping on the health bandwagon.

Why? To provide anti-oxidants that fight the free radicals. I wonder what the Weathermen and the Baader-Meinhof gang would think of this. Now those people were free radicals.

Antioxidants are substances that may protect your cells against the effects of free radicals. Free radicals are molecules produced when your body breaks down food, or by environmental exposures like tobacco smoke and radiation. Free radicals can damage cells, and may play a role in heart disease, cancer and other diseases.

Do you get this from these juices? No. As a matter of fact, whatever vitamins or anti-oxidants there are in these juices passes through your body so fast few healthy ingredients ever escape the chutes and ladders of your digestion.

The biggest benefit is hydration from the water in the juice.

It can’t be the taste. And it can’t be the desire to throw good money after poor health.

There is no benefit here that you can’t get from eating nine fruits and vegetables a day.

Talk about SKU proliferation, even at a premium. This isn’t good marketing or good health. All those free radicals really do come at a cost to the marketer and the consumer.

The Zen Koan of Cancer and Lab Testing

2008-01-05T15:02:00.000-05:00

How do you study for a test where you are never asked a question?

Sounds like a zen koan.

Koans are a method of training the mind in order to achieve the state of Satori or enlightenment into the nature of reality.

That's great. But what if you are getting a cancer diagnosis?

The Wall Street Journal on January 4 had an article about how thousands of breast-cancer patients may be getting the wrong treatment because of lab test errors.

Sounds scary. Talk about the nature of reality.

The tests are used to determine if women with invasive breast cancer will receive Herceptin, Tykerb, Arimidex, Faslodex or generic tamoxifen.

Not exactly the kind of test you want to fail.

Insurers generally assume that every test is done right, and they pay accordingly. More critically for patients, many of them will also pay for second-opinion breast cancer tests.

But many doctors don’t order them.

In 2007, ~178,000 patients are expected to be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in the US, according to the American cancer Society, and the tests that these patients will require are not straightforward lab procedures. These tests require pathologists to make judgment calls after looking at a tissue through a microscope. That ain’t a simple yes or no.

Oversight in this area is as demanding as one might think. While the FDA must approve every drug, it allows laboratories more freedom in the designing tests. Even when the FDA does approve a test, the lab can still tweak it.

If the pharmaceutical, government and clinical laboratory industries are going to get this right, then a greater emphasis on standardization and review is critical.

How much goes for naught if a pharmaceutical or a biotech spends $1 billion to design and test the drug, and then it doesn’t get into the right person.

Last week, I talked about the power of micro-trends. If more and more people ask questions and request second-opinions and more and more companies focus on improved testing protocols, we can have a very powerful trend that will only be for the better.

This is a move for enlightenment. This is how you study for a test where you are the question and you really want and you really need the right answer.

Microtrends, Orphan Drugs & Evidence-Based Medicines

2008-01-01T14:50:00.000-05:00

Here’s a political statement for the new year:

Mark Penn, Hilary Clinton’s campaign strategist, has a book in which he identifies the power of Microtrends to start a political movement or launch a movement. Penn says you only need three million people or one percent of the population. His premise is that by detecting small changes in behavior has a large impact on business, politics and political lives. www.microtrending.com

Okay, now what about orphan diseases. Talk about Microtrends. Orphan diseases affect less than 200,000 people in the US or less than 5 people in a community of 10,000.

Some of the diseases include various types of cancer, TB, cystic fibrosis, Karposi’s sarcoma, Huntington disease, smallpox, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, lupus.

Not a bad list, not a good list. Depends on how you look at it from a public health need, disaster, commercial opportunity or roll the dice for yourself, your loved one or your pharmaceutical company.

Sure soccer moms, according to Penn, can be a potent voting block. Others include extreme commuters (90+ minutes to work), Protestant Latinos, Caffeine Crazies.

Now think about some of the people suffering from these orphan diseases.

The granting of the orphan drug status by the FDA and the EU is to encourage the development of drugs to address these diseases, but, normally, these drug developments would be prohibitively expensive/un-profitable to develop under normal circumstances. www.fda.gov/orphan/oda.htm

The idea behind the US Orphan Drug Act is to encourage companies to invest money in research. Under the act many drugs have been developed, including drugs to treat glioma, multiple myeloma, cystic fibrosis, phenylketonuria and snake venom. In the US, from January 1983 to June 2004, a total of 1,129 different orphan drug designations have been granted by the Office of Orphan Products Development (OOPD) and 249 orphan drugs have received marketing authorization in the US. In contrast, the decade prior to 1983 saw fewer than ten such products come to market.

Leading orphan drugs include Amgen’s Erythropoietin and Novartis’ Gleevec. And these products aren’t cheap.

According to a 2003 article in the British Journal of Cancer, Gleevec® (imatinib mesilate), a tyrosine kinase inhibitior, emerged as the most effective non-transplant treatment available for patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML).

Yet researchers in the United Kingdom reported that the costs per quality adjusted life year (QALY) is approximately $40,000 more than conventional therapy for patients treated in accelerated phase and almost $60,000 more for patients treated in blast crisis.

Gleevec® has been evaluated as salvage therapy for patients in the accelerated or blast phase of CML., and studies determined that initial treatment of CML patients with Gleevec® is superior to treatment with alfa interferon plus chemotherapy.

Yet paying for Gleevec is expensive. Researchers in England compared the economic impact of Gleevec® compared to standard chemotherapy for the treatment of patients in accelerated or blast phase of CML. They used a computer model which took into account 5 years of treatment from the start of treatment. They estimated that a patient in accelerated phase would accrue an additional 2.09 QALYs with Gleevec® compared to conventional therapies, while patients in blast crisis will accrue an additional 0.58 QALY.

They also report that this improvement comes with a price, approximately $40,000 per additional QALY more than conventional treatment for patients in accelerated phase. For patients in blast phase, the cost was almost $60,000 more per additional QALY. These projected costs were highly dependent on the price of Gleevec®, improvements in quality of life, and duration of haematological response.

Now if you REALLY want to think about microtrends. Think about the impact of the really beneficial use of this drug. And then think about its impact on patients, their families, their doctors, their governments, their payors.

What we talk about when we talk about evidence-based medicines is really this.

And no political candidate, let alone pharmaceutical company or payor or legislator is fully undertaking the challenge of addressing these issues. The government recognizes the need. The law is there. But the research and the issues are still being addressed on an ad hoc basis.

The evidence is there and it is continuing to emerge and evolve. The basis for a sound policy and a sound strategy still needs to be developed.

Why Are Baby Boomers Hiding Their Smile?

2007-12-24T14:55:00.000-05:00

I wonder if we got it all wrong and just simply forgot what is important about taking care of teeth.

I was recently looking at the data for global growth trends in oral care, and I was struck by how flat the market is trending, in low single digits.

The companies themselves aren't doing badly. P&G's share is up signficantly because it bought Gillette and Oral-B. J&J jumped with its acquisition of Listerine and Rembrandt. Over the years, the Gaba acquisition has been good for Colgate.

But what about the consumers? Emerging markets like China and Brazil and Mexico are up as more and more people find toothpaste they can use everyday becoming increasingly affordable.

But I wonder if those companies have missed a beat with those marvelous baby boomers in the more developed markets who are discovering that their mouths are changing with the rest of their bodies.

In America, for example, Baby Boomers, when younger, were taught to brush after every meal or at least twice day and to see their dentist at least twice a year. Good stuff. And fluoride rinses help too. My children don't have any cavities.

But I am not a child nor are those millions of Baby Boomers in North America, Western Europe and Japan. Our mouths are not the same as when we were kids. Aging mouths generate lots of different issues, more gum disease, tooth loss, dry mouth, oral cancer, etc.

Yet I bet the vast majority of baby boomers still follow the same oral care regimen they followed as teenagers (without the Binaca).

If the senior managers in those major oral care players were wondering how they could gin up their businesses in the developing markets, they might not have to look any further than their own mirror. Or, at least, have a series of really good conversations with their consumers and their dentists. As for me, I jst bought more dental floss.

Helping Hands for the Public Benefit of OTCs

2007-12-15T12:48:00.000-05:00

Well, an FDA advisory panel this week rejected Merck's third application bid for a Rx-to-OTC switch of Mevacor (lovastatin) because, in Merck's studies on how consumers would respond the proposed labeling, a significant group of people, for whom taking Mevacor was a wrong decision, decided to take the drug.

Okay, I won't make a flip remark about how people frequently make wrong decisions about taking drugs. But I will note that we, in the US, are missing a major public health benefit, by not giving consumers/patients more access to these life-lengthening medicines.

Almost everywhere outside of our 50 united states, consumers/patients have the opportunity to seek advice from their pharmacists about some of their ills and those pharmacists have the ability to dispense medicines to them that were once prescription-only.

Are US pharmacists any less trained than those in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Australia or Japan? I don't think so.

We already have a de facto third class of medicines in the US. That's what we have done by placing Nicotine-Replacement Therapy, Pseudoephedrine and Plan-B behind the counter. And we have done this without congressional legislation and with FDA approval.

If the pharmaceutical and consumer healthcare companies, public health advocates and the appropriate associations really cared for consumers and for the ability to provide life-lengthening medicines to the general populace surely a solution can be developed.

The precedents have already been established in the US. I have seen research that clearly demonstrates that, by lowering the existing barriers to access, consumers would welcome the opportunity to engage with their physicians and their pharmacists and to be more compliant and adherent with their medicines if they had easier ways to purchase their medicines.

Think about it: lower cholesterol, lower blood pressure, fewer severe migraines. Longer, more productive lives. If we can truly create the will, we can easily define and implement the way.

The Morning After is when you can buy your medicine yourself

2007-08-31T16:59:00.001-04:00

Barr Pharmaceuticals recently announced that sales of the Plan B “morning-after” pill nearly doubled last year, exceeding its expectations, vs. its previous Rx-only annual sales.

Morality issues aside, Plan B's sales growth indicates the power of the patient (read: consumer) to seek out clinically proven drugs when they are given freer access to them

Look at nicotine replacement therapy. Doubled after the patches went OTC from Rx. Look at the recent brilliant success that GSK is having with alli (read: Orlistat/Xenical).

By reducing barriers to access, patients and consumers are able to take control of their own health needs.

Weight management. Unwanted pregnancy. Smoking cessation.

The public health benefits for these “lifestyle” issues are tremendous.

Pharmaceutical companies spend millions upon millions of dollars addressing physician writing of their medicines. But look what happens when you remove the Rx/Physician barrier. Greater use. Greater compliance. Better results.

More and more pharmaceutical and consumer healthcare companies need to understand the barriers and the drivers to compliance. The results can be better sales, better compliance, better health.

Viagra - Brains over Blood

2007-08-26T20:47:00.001-04:00

Many people say that men think with their (blank) and not their brain when it comes to women.

Well, now a new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Viagra indicates that the drug may do both.

Viagra, known generically as sildenafil, raised levels of the hormone oxytocin in rats. This hormone is involved in nursing and childbirth, but also in orgasm and feelings of sexual pleasure.

Viagra inhibits the phosphodiesterase type 5 enzyme which breaks down other compounds. This action increases blood flow in the muscles and the posterior pituitary. This, in turn, boosts oxytocin, at least in the rats.

All those late-night comedian and water cooler jokes about Viagra tend to focus on a man’s needs or desire. However, when you get down to it and you are not a kid anymore, it is really about mutual satisfaction.

If pharmaceutical companies can do more to capture the mental aspect of why and how patients should take their medicines, they will trigger the real needs and desires of compliance. Unfortunately, most pharma companies focus their marketing development on physicians and use those 30 second direct-to-consumers ads to encourage presentation – but not to ensure compliance.

They miss the real links between motivation and desire and realizing the real and long-term benefits of medicine for their patients. In the case of Viagra, the link between brain and blood may really be real. If a pharma can make that link, for other “lifestyle” drugs that address hypertension, diabetes and lipid management, that will be a break-through.

Pharma Bolt-Ons

2007-08-18T15:10:00.000-04:00

How should we think about bolt-on mergers for Big Pharma?

Recent deals have included Schering-Plough's pending buyout of Akzo Nobel's Organon BioSciences unit for $14.4 billion, AstraZeneca's pending acquisition of MedImmune for $15.6 billion, and Mylan Laboratories' pending takeover of Merck KGaA's generics business for $6.7 billion.

It is really pretty simple. It is all about filling portfolio gaps and adding new products and capabilities without all the hassles associated with major acquisitions.

Less dilutive, less complex, more complimentary.

This approach is sound from both an asset management and asset acquisition point of view.

This approach isn't new. Warner-Lambert acquired Agouron in 1999 to get its eye business and library of compounds, a nice simple complimentary acquisition.

Then Pfizer, to preserve its access to Lipitor, bought Warner-Lambert and then, to preserve its access to Celebrex, Pharmacia. Ouch, indigestion that even Nexium couldn't fix. Getting Lipitor has buoyed Pfizer for years, but Celebrex ran into problems and millions of dollars in shed expenses and thousands of lost jobs, hasn't been able to salve the Pfizer stock prize or offset the rising tide of patent expirations.

Making more strategic bolt-on acquisitions over recent years could have added more products to maintain and to ultimately grow the company's product portfolio. Witness what Pfizer is now doing in vaccines.

Pfizer Vaccines Research is a new area of research committed to the belief that biotherapeutics, including vaccines, will grow to form 20 percent of the Pfizer portfolio, leading to the launch of one biotherapeutic product a year, every year, by 2016.

Here is a strategically sound bolt-on combination of small and large molecules.

Look for more of these kind of acquisitions in the future across the industry. The pressures of the marketplace demand it.

Facebook jumps into the internet marketing souk

2007-05-27T14:47:00.000-04:00

Look at the brilliance of build it they will come.

The internet field of dreams represents the power of appealing to and talking with and selling to millions of people -- in a space, on a platform through a way that simply did not exist several years ago.

What do I mean? From Reuters, I saw that Facebook.com at f8 just announced this past week plans to allow it to become a software operating system for all sorts of Internet media and said it has signed up 65 partners, including Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc., to build Web applications within Facebook.

The company is transforming itself from a Web site into a "platform" that will allow developers to build services that work both inside Facebook's site and on their own independent sites.

"Until now, social networks have been closed platforms. Today, we're going to end that," Zuckerberg, Facebook's 23-year-old CEO, told a gathering of software developers. Half of Facebook users, or 12 million people daily check the site to see what their friends are saying and doing.

Facebook can become a central clearinghouse for software developers, borrowing a few pages from the decades-old strategy playbooks of Microsoft or IBM, while retaining the flexibility of the new generation of Web-delivered services.

The Palo Alto, California-based company has created a new Web programming language of its own called Facebook Markup, a variant of the basic Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) coding that underlies all Web pages, with a few special features. Independent developers can sell ads or incorporate tools for conducting online transactions and keep all the resulting revenue.

The marketing souk just got bigger. The ability to capture proprietary sales got deeper.

Also, clothing sales just surpassed electronic sales on the web.

When we talk about the power of word of mouth, Facebook just kicked this approach into hyper-drive for its partners and for people who talk to people they like and trust. That's real warp speed.

Occam's Razor Cuts Through Marketing

2007-05-20T16:54:00.000-04:00

Occam's razor (sometimes spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating, or "shaving off," those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae ("law of parsimony" or "law of succinctness").

This is often paraphrased as "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one." In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest hypothetical entities. It is in this sense that Occam's razor is usually understood.

Now apply that to marketing complex products.

Roger Dooley reviews the research in this area on the Marketing and Strategy Innovation blog, and applies it to the purchase HDTV sets. Think about the complexity involved here. Evolving technologies, evolving features, a multitude of feature variables -- how can anyone begin to construct an internal conjoint analysis about what to buy.

As for me, I use CNET. Not necessarily the best source, but it helps. The same for my Ipod. I use ilounge.

The internet is a great resource for getting advice and direction. Mossberg does this for readers of the Wall Street Journal and Wildstrom does it at Business Week.

But this need goes begging everyday for marketers. The challenge is to distill down what consumers really want out of your product and get it into your advertising brief.

The Elmer's Glue of Gumption

2007-05-06T18:35:00.000-04:00

Dan Heath, the Director of Duke Corporation Education, lists out:

6 Principles of Sticky Ideas

Simplicity: Isolate your core message and convey it succinctly.
Unexpectedness: Surprise and intrigue with leaps of thought.
Concreteness: Make it real and recognizable.
Credibility: Use details that symbolize and support your core idea.
Emotions: Evoke feelings about what matters.
Stories: Connect the dots with proverb-like arcs.

How many times have you made a presentation and delivered an absolutely brilliant strategic observation -- but no one knows what to do with it?

How many times have you read a company's mission statement only to recognize the gobbledy-gook of corporate-speak slathered over a good idea that is meant to inspire people?

In many companies, I have been struck by what I saw on their walls. I saw offers to taste products in development, literature about the company's focus on diversity in the work force, pictures of global leaders meant to inspire and slogans meant to lead.

I wondered about how sincere these messages came across. They were placed in all good intention. But when you are having reductions in head count, watching products stuck in the middle of a market share battle that rivaled the World War One Battle of the Somme for casualties and futility and fielding more calls on the Employee Assistance Social Work Program than the switchboard can handle, you have to wonder about the best way of escaping the entropy of the maelstrom.

Great thoughts come easy.
Great expressions are tougher.
Implementation can be tougher still.

Taking those thoughts and making them sticky can go a look way to nailing the task to your wall of accomplishment.

Genie In A Bottle

2007-04-21T10:46:00.000-04:00

Aladdin, when he rubbed his magic lamp, had a genie appear who granted his wishes.

Ever try that with the bottle that your prescription medicine comes in?

You're looking for magic and what you get is an amber translucent plastic tube given to you by the pharmacist behind the counter at Walgreen's.

That ain't magic.

Then the pill comes out, maybe it's shaped kind of funny, has an odd color, a company name and number engraved on it. My dog tags look better than this.

And it is supposed to cure me? And my doctor thinks this pill is a good recommendation? And it costs me $25 a dose? And this drug represents $1 billion for the pharmaceutical company in sales?

And does this really motivate to comply and stay on my meds?

I wonder if this is really good marketing practice for the Rx value chain.

In contrast, I love my Ipod. I got excited when I bought it. I loved unwrapping it and taking it out of the package. I enjoyed what it did for me. And I thought the premium was worth it.

Why can't we do the same for the delivery of prescription medicines. Target tried with their redesigned dispensing bottle, but the focus on that bottle was communication of information.

I want to delight in my health as much as I delight in my music.

If we could develop a true partnership in medicine delivery from a marketing perspective, I bet we could have more delighted, compliant patients who recognize the value of their medicines. But when we put those medicines in that plain bottle, the message we convey is that we don't care that much about you and whether you take this pill or not. Good luck, it's your life.

Here is where marketing can contribute to responsibility and to encouragement of compliance. That can be the genie and the genius of marketing.

Brain Freeze

2007-04-11T13:16:00.000-04:00

I was listening to an e-briefing today jointly sponsored by the Strategic Decisions Group and Stanford University on tapping creativity for profit, and I was struck by how frozen companies can get when it comes to innovation.

All too often it comes down to the right brain/left brain disconnect where people and businesses have a hard time getting creativity and business discipline to come together.

When this happens executional frost-bitten results in entropy. In Information Theory, Entropy is the measure of the rate of transfer of information in [that] message. If you don't believe, just read The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon.

What the briefing pointed out is that Creativity is all about
- customer experience
- "wow" factors
- excitement
- but no evaluation by "controllers."

while Value Discipline is about
- share-holder value
- analysis
- number crunching
- but creativity is only a "nice-to-have" after financial targets are met.

Yet there are examples of success: A.G. Lafley at P&G, Jim McNerney at 3M and Steve Jobs at Apple. All three drove share-holder value by combining design and creativity with value/business discipline.

The proposed model from the e-briefing is flip back and forth between applied creativity and value significance, recognizing that sometimes you think one way and sometimes you think another.

Yeah, well, F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that the mark of a genius was the ability to hold two thoughts in one head at the same time. However, no one ever called Fitzgerald a genius. A great writer, yes. But no smarty pants.

The way to accomplish this is to combine creativity and value significance into one compelling mission statement. When I was put in charge of Listerine Pocketpaks, I told the team that our goal was to be product of the year in Business Week. Everyone, marketers and scientists and financial analysts, all got it. We achieved that goal.

Creating a compelling mission is the way to avoid brain freeze in an organization.

The CPG Flat Stanley Project

2007-04-04T12:50:00.000-04:00

If you ever asked where in the world was Waldo, the answer should have been that he was hanging out with Flat Stanley, understanding the life he led and how to participate in his adventures instead of just trying to get that scroll from Wizard Whitebeard.

From Wikipedia, The Flat Stanley Project, created by Canadian school teacher Dale Hubert to facilitate student learning and writing, provides an opportunity for students to make connections with students of other member schools who've signed up with the project. Students begin by reading the book, Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown, a story of a boy flattened by a falling bulletin board who emerges fine but flat and then embarks on a series of adventures.

Students make paper "Flat Stanleys" (or pictures of the Stanley Lambchop character) and keep a journal, documenting the places and activities in which Flat Stanley is involved. The Flat Stanley and the journal are mailed to others who are asked to treat the figure as a visiting guest add to his journal, and return them both to the other student.

Students find it fun to plot Flat Stanley's travels on maps and share the contents of the journal. Often, a Flat Stanley returns with a photo or postcard from his visit. Some teachers may prefer to use email. In 2005, 6,000 classrooms in 47 countries participated in the project.

The Flat Stanley project exemplifies a great two-dimensional viral way of communicating with and educating young people globally.

So how can marketers take advantage of this concept? Well, it is a given that global brands have and represent great tangible and intangible assets.

But think for a moment:
Do we always recognize how our brands fit into people's lives?
Do we always recognize how to make the best connection with consumers, particularly in emerging markets?
Do we recognize the best way to educate potential consumers?

Everybody in Marketing and their mother (who gets the call center question routed to Mumbai) is living Thomas Friedman's version of The World is Flat, but they may not be extending that living connection to their brands.

In a NY Times article on India becoming a more complex market (April 3, 2007), Michael Cannon-Brookes of IBM comments that India is "one of the world's two biggest pools of high value skills, which we want to leverage both to help clients in the domestic marketplace and to help clients globally."

Which domestic marketplace: India or the US? If you are selling chocolate or bottled water or detergent, can they be the same?

In fact, thinking about global education can make them the same.

In that same article, Anand Giridharadas writes that Indian IT firm Infosys Technologies spends $65 of every $1,000 in revenue training its employees; in contrast, IBM spends $6.56.

I would be targeting those Infosys employees. They are going to be smarter and have more money to buy my Nespresso machine and my Dasani water.

The key, though, is that Infosys recognizes the value of education. That is a critical component of any Flat Stanley consumer marketing campaign. Yes, you have to get the pricing, the packaging and the positioning right.

But you also have to show how the product fits into people's lives.

In this same NY Times issue, Richard Lenny of the Hershey Company announced that Hershey is forming a joint venture in India with Godrej Beverages and Foods to manufacture and sell, confections, snacks and beverages.

Now we really know that the world can be as flat as a Hershey bar and still just as tasty, and that knowledge is what's key to our market and brand development.

Apple TV Buys Google, Announces New Channel

2007-03-23T08:06:00.000-04:00

Apple TV doesn't try to do everything. It can't receive or record cable or satellite TV, so it isn't meant as a replacement for your cable or satellite box, or for a digital video recorder like a TiVo. It can't play DVDs, so it doesn't replace the DVD player. Its sole function is to bring to the TV digital content stored on your computer or drawn from the Internet. Like a DVD player, it uses its own separate input on your TV set, and you have to change inputs using your TV remote to use it.

Just like the Ipod, Apple TV is all about simple, elegant -- err, I mean, cool (as cool is the new elegant) technology that delivers media content ("software for your life") for your personal entertainment.

Now what could better fill that delivery system than YouTube? Hours and hours of personal and professional videos streamed to your TV by the Apple TV.

Much as Sony sought movie studios, we will probably see Apple setting up a more sophisticated Itunes video capability. However, what Apple will realize is that, when it comes to video, the studios aren't as poor and desperate as the record industry was when to comes to selling their content.

In a now brilliant move, to be announced in five years, Steve Jobs will buy Google, allowing him to use I-Thou Tube (renamed in honor of Martin Buber) as a streaming device for video content for paid and unpaid media.

In addition, as an extension to the personal MacBooks, which will be the size of a paperback and fit into your messenger bag or cargo pants pocket, Apple will rebrand Google as IGoogle and launch a new personal search service that will allow you to go back and rebrand your life, from your birth certificate through those embarrassing movies your parents took of you in the elementary school chorus until the present day -- framing your personal biography for posterity and allowing at the same time to share your experiences with millions of other people, while accessing the world's stored information for your personal use.

And St. Augustine asks how many angels could dance on a pin? Now it's how many lives can dance on an HDMI connection.

GPS Shopping: Seek and Ye Shall Find

2007-03-16T20:11:00.000-04:00

Luke Chapter 11: Verse 9 - And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

If Mammon represents a significant deified aspect of the internet, then Nearby Now and GPShopper have the tools for you. These companies are developing mobile Internet applications that allow shoppers to use their cellphones or PDAs to search the inventory and prices at local malls, reducing the expeditions to Sawgrass and Palisades to focused forays.

Just think no more Lewis & Clark treks through the Mall of America, using strollers for portage and swatting at the gnats of hawkers who hold empty promises of bargains.

Now, after you've seen it online or heard about it from that neighbor, you can journey to the cathedrals of commerce and know that your effort will not be wasted, your shoe leather shall not be worn and neither shall you want anymore.

According to the New York Times, NearbyNow tested its application at the Eastridge mall in San Jose. After shoppers signed on, they received a message listing sales in progress and asking users to type in the brand or product they were seeking. Jeans showed 90 stores. Levi 501's showed 14.

With these tools, when K-Mart wants to advertise a blue light special, you can have a thousand shoppers stampeding from all over the mall to the store.

Unfortunately, retailers do not have a good enough handle on their inventories to be always able to reflect what they have in stock. So, yes, there will be some disappointments.

But if you are looking to drive traffic, these tools can be a godsend.

In many categories, retail stores are more and more becoming showrooms. Consumers search for it online, then they go into the store to touch it and try it, and then they go home to buy it online. What a great expense those fancy retail environments are quickly becoming.

However, these technologies can revitalize stores, helping to move merchandise, motivate browsers and attract shoppers who ARE ALREADY IN THE MARKET.

You won't need truffles for these applications. What retailers do need, though, is the desire and the know-how to buy the technology coming down the pike. It is not enough to make the store fun to shop. You need to also help make people want to buy. If I were a marketer at retail chain, I would want to drag my IT person into the chair next to me and start partnering on the future of shopping. That's a faith they both need to believe in.

Pop-Up Stores: This Year's Nano Promotion

2007-03-04T16:46:00.000-05:00

Whatever happened to test markets? Once upon a time, you could test your new product in a whole self-contained city. Based on consumer reactions in Dallas and Houston, at Lever Brothers, we knew that Surf laundry detergent was going to be hit with its revolutionary odor-inhibiting perfume. P&G even fired its Texas sales team because our test market blew them away.

Following the need for more privacy, we soon began using BehaviorScan test markets in even smaller cities (Indianapolis) where you could partition different ad messages to different consumers, know the different dollar rings at different chains and tailor your promotions.

But city-wide test markets became too expensive. Confidentiality and Speed became ever more important to both you and your competitors – who can knock you off faster than a regional rollout from Kansas City to St. Louis. P&G thought they had a huge winner with soft chew cookies (and they did) but the competition copied them quickly and knocked them off at the knees before they crossed the Mississippi. In this instant message age, you can forget about keeping anything a secret.

Then everyone went black box with Nielsen (and still do). No one knew what you were testing or thinking (including most consumers) and millions of dollars were spent on complex algorithms that were as clear as the Eurythmics singing Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This).

Now, in this time of nano-testing, we have “pop-up stores.” What could be more brilliant: flash testing new products in flash stores. Faster than a jump drive. Both Product and Retail Format are here and gone in the blink of an eye.

When Malcolm Gladwell and everyone who ever took an instant dislike to someone they just met or a bit of food they just tasted formulated their own arbitration of taste, we get the ultimate marketing boost.

In Chicago, Kraft is testing its DiGiorno Ultimate pizza in a pop-up story on Michigan Avenue, which was, in its immediate previous incarnation, a pop-up store for Lexus. Now that's a Universal Serial Bus everyone can jump on. Or, in the case of Kraft, Universal Cereal Bus.

In the town of deep-pan pizza, the Augie March chutzpah of Kraft to go head-to-head with Pizza Uno in the Loop is great. What a wonderful in-your-face exercise in test-marketing the pizza and gaining notable publicity – all at a relatively modest cost.

I just hope that the Kraft urban ethnographers are in the store, extra napkins in hand for the patrons, recording the reactions for future innovations and modifications for line extensions (e.g. freeze-dried pineapple).

One of the first pop-up stores was Target’s boat off Chelsea Piers in 2002. If Target was using a destroyer, I bet Wal-Mart was planning a battleship for plowing its way into New York. Now the Behemoth of Bentonville is set for the New York B&T (Bridge and Tunnel) crowd. New York City will give Target the space they wouldn’t grant Wal-Mart. Hubert Humphrey Minnesota values vs. Arkansas Land-Grant imperialism – okay, you choose.

Meanwhile, Target launched its Isaac Mizrahi women's clothing collection with a pop-up store at Rockefeller Center in New York. If imitation is the sincerest form of mid-market taste, we saw J.C. Penney do it at Rockefeller Center when it introduced its Chris Madden home collection in 2004. Meanwhile Fila introduced a new sportswear line on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles in 2005, and Nike popped up in New York's SoHo neighborhood when it launched a special edition basketball shoe named after LeBron James.

With more and more companies exploring nano-stores, think of the promotional possibilities inside super-centers and club stores. Costco and Wal-Mart could carve out a whole free-standing section of real estate and rent it out to major CPG manufacturers for big-time nano/pop-up promotions.

Come visit the Kraft Store in Wal-Mart and assemble your own meal and buy the week’s groceries. Try Kroger’s Unilever Laundromat where you can do your wash with Wisk and fill your cleaning bucket. Chill at Costco in the Sony Concept Store where you can buy LCDs, music, stereos and DVDs.

The question is whether or not this transient marketing approach builds brands. It’s great for excitement and publicity but that’s strictly short-term.

Like all promotions, pop-up stores are good for a spike. However, they cannot be as good as building imagery and value over time.

I would still want to be sure that I had the right position, the right communication of benefits and an excellent integrated marketing plan that covered the basics of brand building. And that the pop-up stores was only one facet of my marketing efforts.

That way I could cover myself in this nano-test, knowing I was not only securing my present but also planning for my future. Oh, and pass the napkin because the pizza wasn’t half-bad.

Blink: You're A Chart. He's A Sail.

2007-02-24T18:34:00.000-05:00

Malcolm Gladwell in Blink makes a book out of how people create instant impressions of others.

That's great. But what do you do with the information?

My team recently had great success and great fun with the Topsail Personality Profile created by Steve Norcia and Alex Szabo.

In our roles in new product development, we are constantly meeting inventors, licensees, teams of corporate types, sales people -- you know all those who represent a lot of your business transactions.

Our challenge always is how do you quickly decide what someone is like and establish a good relationship. The Topsail Personality Profile let us do that in a blink of an eye.

The personality profile divides people into four types:

Chart: Low Assertive, High Responsive
Sail: High Assertive, Low Responsive
Keel: Low Assertive, Low Responsive
Signal: High Assertive, High Responsive

These tools let you assess the personalities in order to quickly establish good relationships.

What this means is that

Sails give you 90 seconds to explain your business results.
Signals give you 5-10 minutes to establish a personal, social relationship.
Keels give you 20 minutes to establish a personal, loyal relationship.
Charts give you 5 minutes to detail your business experience.

The indicators are fun even when you apply them to voices on the telephone, e.g. tone of voice, verbal inflections, speech pace and message.

Which is more important after all: good understanding of the facts and great chemistry or good chemistry and a great understanding of the facts.

If you want to play "let's make a deal," I would choose the chemistry first.

Vegas Show Girls Strip Tesco

2007-02-16T22:55:00.000-05:00

Religiously, in England, every Sunday after Sunday school, my daughters demanded to go to the High Wycombe Tesco for tea (the village pub being closed, of course, until later). Then, after they had their scones and darjeeling, we filled the trolley with our weekly necessities.

Now, I read that Las Vegas is going to get its Tesco. So Vegas show girls will soon have their own opportunities to stop for crumpets and coffee after a long Saturday eve. And it's not just Vegas. Clearly, Tesco sees the wild American West as their manifest destiny. Stores are planned for Phoenix, San Diego and Los Angeles.

Edward Kelly, an analyst at Credit Suisse, said that he believes Tesco's U.S. stores will be a hybrid, bridging the gap between traditional grocers, such as Kroger Co. and specialty supermarkets such as Whole Foods Market Inc. and privately held Trader Joe's, while adding the appeal of mass market stores, such as Costco Wholesale Corp., Target Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Well, Mr. Kelly has managed to squeeze every single notable retailing format into a single observation. But surely Tesco cannot fill that gap, whether it is as big as the Grand Canyon or as narrow as Jerusalem's proverbial Eye of the Needle gate.

Tesco confirmed last week that its stores would be just 10,000 square feet, making them much smaller than a traditional 45,000 square-foot grocery store. The stores, which are smaller than supermarkets or mass market stores, are to start opening later this year. Hmmnn, sounds similar to the Tesco Metro format in the UK.

How can you be successful in this kind of format? Focus. Focus on what the customers in your geographic really need and really would love to have. Tesco's house has many mansions, and you can bet that, like any very smart builder, they will tailor their offerings. Take a look at Tesco's web site (www.Tesco.com). They sell everything. Their challenge is ensuring they have the right things in their small format. Here is where CPG manufacturers can provide a value-added benefit to their retailing partner, demonstrating their own savvy.

Last September, I wrote about CPG manufacturers letting drug retailers control the shopping souk, pointing out that meeting consumer demand trumps promotions and the use of merchandising forces to supplement poor retail executions on the part of retailers.

I doubt that Tesco will suffer poor execution. I can't see Tesco lurching around the American West and making, at once, both naive and egotistical mistakes like the larger-than-comic-life English Berrybender family in Larry McMurty's eponymous trilogy. Though Tasmin Berrybender is hotter and smarter and tougher than any Vegas showgirl.

Tesco's challenge to CPG manufacturers is for those manufacturers to be able to recommend the right sku's are in the right geography (both in town and on the shelf) for Tesco. Data on placement, turns and inventory won't be enough. CPG manufacturers need to think about the shopper, the shelf and their leadership. In this case, strategy is a plan for resource allocation decisions that will determine the nature of success on the shelf.

I would recommend that manufacturers take the time to study and to develop shopper insights and cogent strategies for working with Tesco. In that way, a real relationship that can build into a real mutually beneficial partnership can be established with the chain and its future shoppers.

This would also provide a wonderful reason to do store checks in the UK in advance of meeting with Tesco's US management. But not for me. I am heading for Las Vegas. After all, Tesco (at this point) is calling its new U.S. stores the "Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market."

Moses' Management Consultant

2007-02-10T12:40:00.001-05:00

The other week I commented on the snake's role in the Garden of Eden in regard to addressing his target audience: women.

This week, I got an email from Rabbi Matthew Berkowitz of the Jewish Theological Seminary, commenting on Moses' management consultant. Rabbi Berkowitz writes that, Moses' father-in-law, watches his son dispensing judgment for the Israelites while they are in the desert after leaving Egypt for Canaan. He sees that Moses has established himself as a true leader amongst the Israelites, and he has become the victim of his own success. As a result of failing to establish clear and workable boundaries for himself, he opens himself to the potential for prophetic “burn-out.”

Now Jethro, the “corporate consultant,” helps Moses to change the dynamic. He quietly observed his son-in-law at work, then he issued his critique in the form of a question: “What is this thing that you are doing to the people?” (Exodus 18:14). Jethro’s question forces Moses to be reflective. Moses recognizes the burden before him, namely that the people are coming to him to seek God, and he is their judge for both large and small decisions. After hearing this response, Jethro wisely proposes a plan for success: Moses will appoint "good" (and I do mean "good," after all this is the Bible) assistants who will judge the common cases while Moses will continue adjudicating the major disputes.

The lessons from this story are to be (1) open to the work of knowledgeable consultants, (2) deliberate and sensitive in our critiques, and (3) like Moses, open to the possibility of change and innovation.

Maybe McKinsey, Booz Allen Hamilton, BCG, et al can adopt Jethro as their patron saint.

Dr. Spock Rides To The SuperBowl on Colts and Bears

2007-02-03T15:33:00.000-05:00

There have been a number of good articles about the management styles of Tony Dungy, coach of the Indianapolis Colts, and Lovie Smith, coach of the Chicago Bears.

(Public disclosure: I went to the University of Chicago, so I'm rooting for Da Bears.)

It is noteworthy that both of these coaches are African-American, guaranteeing that this year an African-American football coach will win the SuperBowl for the first time (don't you love these win-win scenarios).

Also noteworthy, as my wife points out, is their management styles. We have two coaches (with Smith an offshoot of Dungy's coaching tree, having worked for Dungy in Tampa Bay) who are not chest-thumping, tough-guy screamers. Both men believe that they can direct, lead and motivate their team by calmly giving directions and treating players with respect.

That's like Nelson standing at the Battle of Trafalgar, taking a cannon shot and still leading the navy to victory.

Football players are smart, operate well within systems, make fast decisions and move to close on a point with speed. They seek to differentiate themselves and gain competitive advantage. So, is there really a need to verbally or physically slap these guys upside their heads? Or isn't more effective to get into their heads in the same way that this generation of athletes and executives was raised?

Remember that pediatrician who coached your mom on how to raise you? Dr. Benjamin Spock was the first pediatrician to use psychoanalysis to understand children's needs and family dynamics. To crip from Wikipedia, his ideas about childcare influenced several generations of parents to be more flexible and affectionate with their children, and to treat them as individuals.

Mmmnnn. Sounds like Dungy and Smith. Sounds like good managers who have empathy, know what is right, try to understand their employees' needs, direct them with the best strategies for success and provide appropriate goals and measures. And a good situational leader will change their style and approach depending on the readiness of individual employees.

For a generation of professional football coaches and senior managers raised on Dr. Spock, the lessons their parents brought to the crib are the same lessons that can elevate the performance of the team. Now internalized, those lessons remain some of the best ways of improving productivity, creating a prosperous work place and realizing success.

As I have led my teams and worked with them to achieve our goals, I have seen the personal and real value of listening, respect, dialogue, strategy and result. What seems new in these coaches is what we have been instructed and coached on since the nursery. And if we can bring those lessons into the workplace, we will have achieved a true work-life balance.

Which Stage, Coach?

2007-01-26T18:10:00.000-05:00

What a brilliant ride Coach is having.

According to Reuters, Coach Inc. reported better-than-expected quarterly earnings on Tuesday, helped by higher full-priced sales of its handbags during the holiday season, and raised its full-year earnings and sales outlook.

Coach, which sells its signature leather handbags, accessories, shoes and jewelry in department stores and its own stores, said net income for the fiscal second quarter, ended Dec. 30, rose 30.6 percent to $227.5 million, or 61 cents per share, from $174.2 million, or 45 cents per share, in the year-ago period. Analysts, on average, had been expecting 58 cents per share, according to Reuters Estimates.

Lew Frankfort, Coach's chairman and chief executive officer, said the latest results were helped by better conversion, meaning that more of its store's visitors bought merchandise. Together with more customer traffic and higher average transaction prices, quarterly sales jumped 29 percent to $836.4 million. Analysts were expecting sales of $800.1 million.

Check out that wonderful statement on better conversation: more store visitors bought merchandise. Why? Let's break down the components because this Coach is riding with a team of great horses:

- Range of price points

- Excellent design

- Line extensions using different, less costly materials combined with great design supporting that range of price points

- Expanded distribution through new retail stores.

Just think of that -- less costly materials, wider range of price points, more items, and still Coach maintained the integrity of its name.

Contrast that with Tiffany's, which has seen a deterioration in its financial situation because it has been pulling back on its cheaper silver jewelry (you know those bracelets and necklaces that every 14-year-old fashionista had to have) to protect its name and to better serve that truly upmarket customer.

Coach has truly steered itself down the right path. Kudos to management.

But this is the same ride, the same reins, that everyone uses. Why did Coach do it better?

Because they weren't afraid when it came to design. They didn't fear pay-for-lower price materials. They smartly managed line extensions, discontinuing skus when they reached their sell-by date. And they made leaps in their innovations.

That's a road that really successful marketers travel down.

The Snake Knew His Target Audience

2007-01-24T16:54:00.000-05:00

Out to create a little trouble? Out to sell a product? Want to distribute product information? Decided that sampling is the better way to gain trial and purchase?

Yes, I bet that was what the snake was thinking in the Garden of Eve when he saw Eve coming his way. He got his target market right. He got the first sale. And Mankind lost the Garden of Eden and it has been the world of commerce ever since.

So why is taking marketers so long to wake up and the smell the primroses?

According to Martha Barletta, author of Marketing To Women, women control or influence 80% of all purchases of both consumer and business goods and services. They have joint or sole ownership of 87% of homes and buy 61% of major home-improvement products. They account for 66% of all home computer purchases and 80% of all health care services. They carry 76 million credit cards, and they start 70% of all new businesses.

Now I hate to be a snake in the grass, but I don't think I would waste a lot of my time talking to men if I was trying to figure out how to move major product purchases.

Particularly in healthcare. Not only do women consume a significant amount of health-related goods and services, they are also the gatekeeping purchasers for their male "wards" and for the seniors above them and the children below them.

When I was recently looking at the 50+ market, it hit me like a pan in the face. Forget about men. For anything, spend a lot of time with women, understand their frustrations, their hopes, their needs, their dreams. Isn't that how good relationships grow?

Tailor your products to those desires. And get them talking about it.

If you don't understand the woman consumer first, nothing else matters. It's not sociological. It's not anthropological. It's biblical.

Now That Other Guy Blinked

2007-01-15T19:45:00.000-05:00

Some people may remember when Coca-Cola changed its flavor profile to match Pepsi and embarked on the disastrous launch of New Coke. That was when Pepsi took out full page ads that damningly said, The Other Guy Blinked.

Well, I guess it's Pepsi's turn now to be rescued from its glaucoma.

Changing the design of its cans for a new look every three to four weeks?
To attract teens who are always looking for something new?

You've got to be kidding me. What happened to CPG Marketing 101 about the sanctity of packaging design? Did those marketing geniuses at Pepsi get brain freeze at the Dairy Queen?

When I was brand manager of Wisk laundry detergent for Unilever, we agonized over changing the red on the label. Look at the Tide bulls-eye, still there. Same for Dove.

Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) move through the minds of teenagers at nano speed. They will forget that Pepsi can faster than their next sip of Mountain Dew.

Brands are supposed to gain value over time (look what J&J paid for 120-year-old Listerine) and their packages are what helps them stand the test of time. Otherwise, how do you really know what's inside?

Those teens will be adults some day. Do you think they will still remember that cool Pepsi can from 20 years ago. The best antidote for Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) isn't Aricept. It's branding.

Guess which brand tops the BusinessWeek/Interbrand survey: Coca-Cola.
Guess which brand isn't in the top 20: Pepsi.
Hmmmnnnn.

The issue isn't the package. The issue is the type and quality of product you deliver consistently over time to meet consumer needs. The package is the signpost, the flag, kind of like those flags the samurai warriors follow in the Akira Kurosawa movies.

The risk for Pepsi is that, next month and for the next decades to come, they have those teens mindlessly running all over the place, occasionally bumping into Pepsi, occasionally bumping into other things. That's what teens do anyway -- until they grow up. And then they buy the brands they know and trust. The brands that have always consistently been there.

Okay, Coke, now YOU can say the other guy blinked.

Match Points: A Real Work/Life Balance

2007-01-07T21:59:00.001-05:00

Many of colleagues from Pfizer are currently looking for new positions due to J&J's recent acquisition of Pfizer Consumer Healthcare. While I will reserve comments about the sale and the value of acquiring brand assets and getting healthy ROIs through synergistic cost cuts, I do want to put one note out there about the recruiting and searching process.

I was re-reading George Bradt's The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan, and I was struck by his opening comments about looking for a job. I want to replay them for my friends who I know are reading this blog.

Bradt writes that there are only three real interview questions:

Can you do the job?
Will you love the job?
Can I stand working for you?

Or, alternatively,

Strengths
Motivation
Fit

That's what it comes down to. My Pfizer friends are looking for new jobs in marketing and sales, but they are also looking at consulting, teaching, social work and nursing. Go for it. As I wrote in my last post, don't enervate. Leap.

For recruiters, their clients deserve the best they can hire. For my friends, they deserve to be the best they can be: using their skills, waking every morning loving what they do and enjoying who they are working with.

In a way, it can be a lot simpler than life or work ever is.

And yes, this may be another way we talk about work/life balance.

Enough for now. The next post is back to Marketing and Management.

This New Year: Don't Enervate. Leap.

2006-12-28T14:32:00.000-05:00

In beginning Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes, "What is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations?"

A great word, enervate. It means the opposite of what it sounds like. It means: deplete.

What fails for Thoreau is the flaccidity of thought in his world. Once, for him, it meant that: "To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically."

That same flaccidity of thought is what affects current consumer product thinking about innovation. Every CPG company worth its salt or soap or detergent or food or cosmetic touts its Innovation Initiatives.

Thousands of employees are marched through innovation processes and told they too possesses the innovative capabilities that led Edison to invent the light bulb or DaVinci to codify his many inventions or took Franklin out into a rainstorm of brilliance with a kite and a key.

What flattery. What brilliant chest-beating. But now here's a true innovator's dilemma. No, not what Prof. Christensen described as the pressure for continual innovation. This innovation dilemma is more insidious. It is enervating because it really depletes the ability and the desire and the realization of true innovation. It pays lip service to progress and only results in incremental activities.

Here is how Thoreau characterized the innovation processes used by so many companies today: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things."

In all too many instances, the results of these innovations are, in reality, merely line extensions of existing brands or services. Nothing truly novel. But gosh it really feels good to sit for hours with colleagues, playing games, free-associating and dreaming up the Simple Pleasures of Tide detergent.

Now Vanilla & Lavender Scented Tide laundry detergent probably sounded novel in that innovation session in Cincinnati. But Europeans have putting those scents in their pockets ever since they wanted to hide the fact that they were suffering from Plague. (Remember the Ring Around A-Rosy rhyme? What do you think those pockets full of posies were for?)

No, the real innovation was the discovery of Tide itself and synthetic laundry detergent in 1946 when P&G scientists added sodium tripolyphosphate. We end 60 years later with a scented line extension.

So, for beginning the new year, let's make a promise. No more innovation, if innovation only means progress by increments. Let's try and make this year and every year, a leap year, wherein we make "a sudden lively movement" that means real progress and real growth.

Hot Tip: Clean Your iPod with Dove Soap

2006-12-12T14:37:00.000-05:00

My Body = My Software

Here is how I think about these products.

I go to Planet Fitness. I climb on the elliptical trainer, preparing for a journey of miles while staying in the spot. I put my white earphones on. Then I'm off on Green Day's Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

Somewhere past U2's Where The Streets Have No Name and Soul Asylum's Runaway Train, I look around and I see that the vast majority of my sweating, straining, traveling compatriots are wearing the same white earphones.

But they are listening to the Beatles or Bach or Blige.

Each of us is doing the same thing on the exact same hardware but, for each of us, the music of our journey is unique to us because, for each of us, our tastes, our emotions, our desires and dreams fill our individual worlds.

From the Dove Soap web site: Dove believes that beauty comes in different shapes, sizes, and colors and that real beauty can be genuinely stunning.

The soap (great soap!) is the same for everyone. But what Dove realizes is that this mass market product cleans and moisturizes a world of individual beauties.

The hardware is the same. It is the application of that software that makes each consumer's use of and appreciation for that product special to them.

Are the products you use or make special to someone else? Are you capturing that specialness?

Excuse me, it's time to get back the trainer.

A Rose By Any Other Word Is My Cellphone

2006-12-01T14:53:00.000-05:00

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet."
- Juliet, Romeo and Juliet

"A rose is a rose is a rose."
- Gertrude Stein

What do you call that battery-operated device you carry around in your hand that lets you talk to other people, listen to music, watch videos, locate yourself and your friends, watch televised media and pay for your lunch?

Here's the flash: Whatever you call it, Motorola has sold in the last two years, 50 million Razr units almost EQUAL to the number of Ipods sold by Apple.

In the December 4 Business Week article on Upward Mobility, Motorla calls it the "device formerly known as a cellphone." Nokia calls it a "multimedia computer." Samsung says they are "mobile information terminals."

This is a lot like Adam, who, in the book Does G-d Have A Big Toe?, called a bear that "big, brown, furry two-eyed big-clawed, loud, scary beast." And he used that term only after he realized that he couldn't just assign a number to each of the animals in the world. Hmmmmnnnnnnn, kind of sounds like the electronics industry. And Adam called the bear a bear after the bear told him what he wanted to be called.

Do we really need a Carolus Linnaeus of nomenclature to figure out what to call one of the most potentially useful and profitable devices created by man? Maybe it is easier to name G-d's creatures than it is to name Man's devices.

And we all know what happens to Man when he is left up to his own devices.

This is the kind of mistake that is made by many technical industries. You get breath-taking technical breakthroughs but it takes years for the breakthroughs and consumers to catch up with each other.

Remember the billions that European wireless carriers paid to purchase G3 bandwidths?

Basically, it comes down to three simple things: Talk, See, Buy.

Within those dynamics, a myriad of permutations and services will be developed and offered to consumers -- and the risk, the huge risk, is continuing confusion that will force developers to under-deliver.

If you can't name it simply, then how can you simply use it? This where I would spend a lot of time and conversation upfront talking to consumers, understanding their needs and desires and price parameters -- and this has to be done holistically. If each developer only looks at what they are developing, they are missing the bigger picture of the choices that consumers can make and what their competition is offering. It isn't easy. And it is certainly a bear of a problem. But if you can't tell the difference between a bear and a rose upfront, you run the risk of either being a beauty or someone's supper.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

2006-11-24T10:07:00.000-05:00

Raymond Carver, in his eponymous short story collection, goes not just for the concept of love but for how we think and feel about love. I like Jayne Anne Phillips characterization in her review of the book: we speak not of love itself, but of the delicate structures and distortions that support love.

That's why I was struck by the Advertising article in the NY Times today by Louise Story on W-O-M, word-of-mouth marketing. She notes how a new word-of-mouth firm, the Keller Fay Group, seeks to demystify consumer conversations about brands. Keller Fay asks people to keep a diary of conversations that mentions products or brands and later asks them for the details. She quotes Ed Keller as saying, "When you talk about engagement, as a lot of marketers are, people talking about your brand is the ultimate engagement." On average, Story writes, Keller Fay finds that people discuss dozens of brands each day.

Keller Fay is doing great work that can be very valuable to marketers. The challenge, though, is how do you go deeper to understand what those brand mentions mean. Like Raymond Carver's short stories, how do you understand the structures and the distortions that support the dropping of brand names?

I would recommend building on this initial research by seeking to understand the psychological and cultural nuances beneath the structures of the words. Wal-Marting in Texas is certainly different from Wal-Marting in New Jersey, especially when, from town to town and from state to state, the income levels and the needs of those customers can vary widely.

How do you contrast the power of highway billboard with that David Ogilvy-inspired long ad copy in The New Yorker?

Building up the context is critical in really getting to the heart of how consumers think and feel about your brand. Word-of-Mouth is a powerful tool. When I put together the marketing plan for Listerine Pocketpaks (and this was before Gladwell's The Tipping Point), I knew that no 30-second ad was going to convey the power of the product. My whole plan was predicated on buzz and sampling.

As marketers have become more sophisticated about using word-of-mouth to launch and build brands, the challenge is no longer how to surf along on the cresting waves of conversations. I think Keller Fay is doing a great job and providing a needed service. The goal should be to dive deeper into that sea of chatter and to understand what consumers mean when they talk about their brands. That is when you will get pearls of wisdom.

Muddy Waters: Who do you trust (online)?

2006-11-20T16:10:00.000-05:00

Ain't that right? Muddy Waters singing Who do you trust? It's perfectly clear.

The Wall Street Journal published an article last week noting that the web site for Wal-Mart is in the top 5 for online retailers and that the growth rates for pure online retailers will be lower this Christmas vs. last Christmas. They noted that many consumers are using the internet to vet their choices for information before they go into the stores, and, if they want to buy online, they are more and more trusting the web sites of bricks-and-mortar retailers.

For many marketers, that big Directions for Use sign is becoming increasingly clear. Consumers want to buy from "trusted advisers" who also offer worry-free shopping experience.

The challenge online is in becoming that trusted adviser. The need is there to bundle together:
- Packaging information
- Advertising and promotion
- Frequent buyer programs
- Consumer education
- the Virtual User experience
- Friends and Family and Word-of-Mouth endorsements.

Five-star guarantees go to the best and the brightest in communications this holiday season. And it is up to many manufacturers and retailers to pay extra attention in how they communicate to earn that customer's trust.

One of the best ways of determining your success is hosting online site research, allowing real people to provide real-time reactions to site design, information and purchase experience.

There is so much unfiltered, diluted and poor information experiences, that those brands that stand out in terms of how they put out their products will be the real winners not just this season but for seasons to come.

The Power of Altering Perceptions

2006-11-10T12:25:00.000-05:00

Last night I attended a reception for Equal Access, a non-profit organization. Equal Access provides information and education about healthcare and social issues through radio in developing countries. The organization is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Kathmandu, Nepal; Kabul, Afghanistan; Phnom Penh, Cambodia; and New Delhi, India. It was founded in the belief that people everywhere are entitled to Equal Access to information and education and should have the opportunity to join the dialogue as both recipients and contributors of that information. The organization's radio programming focuses on healthcare issues like HIV awareness, women's rights, youth issues, teacher training and migration.

I have done some advising for Equal Access, and you can learn more about the organization by reading my Wikipedia article on Equal Access.

The reception was particularly noteworthy because it featured a reading by the Pulitzer-prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri. I was struck by the fact that Equal Access is all about providing people in rural areas with information that will help them change their perceptions of themselves, while, the characters in Ms. Lahiri's book of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies, are changed by the discordant knowledge of how they see themselves and how others perceive them.

This is the truest impact of insight. Whether it is about how you think about brands, evaluate your health or perceive your status in society. Good communications possess the power to alter perceptions and drive growth.

Is Personal Care Geared For Boomer Gadgets?

2006-11-08T09:27:00.000-05:00

Boys love gadgets. Girls say they don't but they do. Do either boys or girls want a straight edge in their hand that vibrates like a razor with Parkinson's? Let's go beyond the Fusion and move to Mach 50.

The number of US Boomer Consumers over age 50 is going to increase 25% from 89 million to 111 million by 2016, while the number of 18-49 year old consumers is going to remain flat at 135 million.

Have you seen those razor studs electronically trimming those whiskers like a hot knife through melted butter leaving their skin soft and smooth to their woman's touch? Or the women enjoying a glide as smooth as Botticelli's Venus rising from a sea shell?

Well, that's just fine if you want to target your product development and advertising to a consumer segment that is flat and your real goal in marketing is to steal share.

The last time I figured it men and women over 50 still shave, but who is taking the time to understand the changing dynamics of older skin care or older teeth or older hair.

Now there's a growth market that can be targeted by

- understanding the physical dynamics of body change
- adapting product performance to deliver superior benefits
- using built-in technologies to provide performance feedback
- offering clear, simple, "readable" directions
- creating design that excites and delights.

Every day 10,000 Boomer Consumers turn 50. If you captured those newly minted birthday boomer boys and girls via a promotion at Wal-Mart or Walgreen's, you would be thrilled with the incremental sales.

But if you gave them an small personal electric product that truly met their needs, looked good and felt good, they would be thrilled.

Now that's consumer satisfaction.

Hippes Hype Habits into Rituals

2006-11-01T16:03:00.000-05:00

I listened to an interesting presentation by Jody Crane of New Solutions and Caroline Gibbons of Portico Research about how people adopt "new" habits for themselves.

They were making distinctions between habits, routines and rituals. I won't go into the details of their proprietary research, but here is what struck me about developing insights and pitching products to consumers.

Forget those Eisenhower-era marketing touts focused on functional benefits.

Those Hippies (now Baby Boomers) are more interested in the emotional benefits of products. Yes, they expect certain functional benefits, but functional benefits alone (those reasons to believe) are not enough in commodity product categories.

In an increasingly complex, threatening, multi-multi-media world, people want things that not only do good but make them feel good about using them.

Good design is an increasing cost of entry. And why not? Do you want a lime green tea kettle or a shiny, sleek Michael Graves tea kettle from Target? They cost the same. But which one makes you feel good about using it.

It all goes back to that Sixties revolution that asked for everyone to tune in. Today, the marketing translation of "tuning in" is an appeal to emotions. Eisenhower moms bought in to what worked best. Soccer moms expect that what they buy works; what seals the deal is the emotional appeal.

That soap in your shower. Lifebuoy, that gets rid of B(ody)O(dor) or L'Occitane's high-lather, citrusy Verbena soap. Unilever has got it down now with Dove. Real pampering soap for real women.

How do you transform your product from something that people use out of habit into something that becomes a ritual. Understand the emotions at play and play to them. Rituals operate at a higher level of involvement. That is where the premium play is.

The CEO Plaint: A Better 100 First Days

2006-10-21T16:56:00.000-04:00

. . .that soul imprisoned in a body, itself a prisoner within that dungeon, and from out that double incarnation of flesh and stone, the perpetual plaint of a soul in agony . . ..
-- Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris

I was struck yesterday by a book I was reading, George Bradt's The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan, and an item in Business Week noting that 1,112 chief executives are gone this year and CEO turnover is on a pace to exceed last year's record 1,322 exits. So what do those 1,000 -plus new CEOs do to get themselves and their troubled assignments on the fast track?

In Who Says Elephants Can't Dance, Louis Gerstner, Jr. had a positively leisurely time going around talking to customers, senior managers and the rank and file before he came up with his strategy. In today's nanosecond business world, two Wall Street quarters go faster than a New York minute for troubled companies, and there wouldn't be a new CEO there if it wasn't a troubled company.

So I was struck by the single minded on-boarding focus of George Bradt. He's got it down. Like the pre-planning for Operation Overload's D-Day invasion of Europe, Bradt's approach comes from preparation (that T-minus D-Day planning), delivery and follow-through. He recognizes that the success of the CEO's team requires the alignment of people, plans and practices around a shared purpose.

It all sounds pretty simple. Bradt has a very clear approach on how to manage the different stages of on-boarding. I also checked out his website at www.primegenesis.com. He looks to increase the Tactical Capacity of the new leaders.

Interesting, huh. Tactical Capacity not Strategic Capacity. Oh yeah, you can have those long-night sessions to develop strategies or hire the top Big Think shops. The best strategies, though, can be written on a napkin in a bar or put together in forty-eight hours. Then what do you do in the next 2,352 hours (viz. 98 days)?.

Bradt's got it down. You define your

Imperative
Milestones
Early Wins
Team Roles
and Values

You execute like crazy. Heady stuff? Sounds too easy. Well, remember that 40% of new leaders fail in their first 18 months, according to the Center for Creative Leadership. And those men and women weren't stupid in the first place. They and the Boards that selected them thought they knew what they were doing. The cost of that failure is millions of dollars and possibly thousands of lives -- not just the life of the CEO.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins found that most CEOs don't get their businesses humming until their seventh year in office. Wow, if you're a new CEO, you better be good real fast. Those first 100 days could be a real agony of the soul for the toughest Al Dunlap. Good thing George Bradt's got it down because the best way better be up with some pre-planning and a sound tactical approach.

Postscript: Who's Looking In My Drawers

2006-10-21T16:41:00.000-04:00

Truer than what I said the other day:

Today, the New York Times did a feature on Aleksey Vayner, an earnest 21-year-old Yale undergraduate who had sent a video of himself as part of his job applications.

According to the article, Mr. Vayner "submitted an 11-page resume and elaborate video clip to UBS. It then showed up on two blogs, and then quickly spread to every corner of the Internet. The clip, staged to look like a job interview spliced with shots of Mr. Vayner’s athletic prowess, flooded e-mail inboxes across Wall Street and eventually appeared on the video-sharing site YouTube. And the overwhelming reaction was mocking laughter.

Mr. Vayner is not amused. Instead, he said he feels like a victim. The job materials that were leaked and posted for public view included detailed information about him that allowed strangers to scrutinize and harass him, he said. His e-mail inbox quickly filled up, with most of the messages deriding him and, in certain cases, threatening him. Since the video surfaced on the Internet, Mr. Vayner said he has deleted at least 2,000 pieces of e-mail."

I rest my case.

Who's Looking In My Drawers?

2006-10-18T09:27:00.001-04:00

There is a huge irony in the fears about privacy and identity theft and the rush to pose on the social networking sites of myspace, facebook, tagworld.

In the media, you read thousands of stories about people having their personal data stolen and the actions that major corporations are taking at the same time to get people to sign up with them while promising protection (uumm, sounds like a Mafia come-on).

Do you really want to bank online? Have a portable electronic wallet? Share your personal data? Sign up for massive online storage sites for photos and documents?

And at the same time, ensure that absolutely no one else has access to your personal vault of life, love, money and the pursuit of happiness.

Well, heck yes. (But what about those Citigroup commercials where the voices of thieves come out of the bodies of their victims?)

Most online-active adults over 35 years old want it both ways.

But what about those under-35? Social networking is booming. Murdoch pays a fortune for myspace. Facebook will eventually be sold. Tagworld is a start-up by serial entrepreneurs looking for a payday. YouTube (your face, your life, your antics) is bought by Google. They are waving their online underwear like flag signals on a 18th century Admiral's battleship. If you can decipher it, you will learn everything.

Do those people who sign anyway their offline lives for an online network really care about privacy and security? Maybe not because they don't have anything really stealable? Except who they are.

That poor page who was victimised by Mark Foley was outed by a persistent blogger because of an online data error.

So let's see how do we reconcile social networking with privacy and security with theft.

Maybe the only safe place to live is in Second Life. Or never put yourself online.

How many Angels on a Pin or Messages on a M&M?

2006-10-15T12:27:00.000-04:00

I want my M&M's my way. The coupon came in the Sunday paper today and I can get my M&Ms personalized. Also, I don't need New York Times or Evening News with Katie Couric or MSNBC.com. I have my RSS feeds so my information is delivered, filtered and focused the way I want it. And my cellphone is my life. I call who I want, get no solicitors and V-Cast gives me music, videos, email and news.

To paraphrase e.e. cummings: How do you like your blue-eyed blue now, Mr. Marketer. Emerging technologies and the delivery of media continue to spell Mr. Death for mass marketers.

The irony is that TV networks still charge ever higher rates for declining viewerships because they still aggregate larger groups than the other less trackable, less aggregated modes of communication.

However, like the elegant empty posturing in Agnolo Bronzino's 1569 mannerist painting of The Martyrdom of Saint Lorzeno, guess what? You're still going to die.

The challenge continues to be marketers, media mavens and technical inventors to develop the research tools and approaches necessary to identify trends and understand and meet the needs of their consumers.

Consumer goods manufacturers get this. They recognize the need to identify true consumer insights that will let them adapt exisiting products and develop new products to meet the needs of their consumers and to grow their businesses.

If technical inventors and the media communicators can come together and develop new research approaches, learn to mine and convert consumer insights into tools and message, then they will reduce confusion, competing formats, fragmented tools and messages and provide efficient, focused, relevant and motivating media.

Saint Augustine asked how many angels can dance on the pin? In a world of nanotechnology, the answer is infinite but the question is if the messages are hitting home. Really, it should be as simple as personalizing your M&M.

Does that pain mean I am going to die?

2006-10-10T12:47:00.000-04:00

It is a deceptively simple question. When you get that first twitch in your shoulder, that pain in your stomach, that ache in your head, how do you know whether you should go to the doctor or go to the drugstore.

It is amazing how little pharmaceutical or consumer products marketers understand about decision-making when it comes to those death twinges (see previous post about all consumer products being about death or sex).

Pharmaceutical marketers are focused on developing clinical trials that deliver primary endpoints that mean something to the FDA and physicians. But those endpoints may mean very little to consumers who are meant to buy and use the products.

OTC consumer product marketers spend much more time mining for those consumer insights that will be a call to action. When you get that headache, think Execedrin. When you get that stomach ache, think Rolaids.

But what if you need Imitrex because you really have a migraine or Nexium because you have acid reflux disease.

Understanding the decision making that goes into healthcare decision-making can be a key driver to improved care and cost management. Am I consumer or a patient? Am I dying or not? That insight can save lives and money.

Sex, Death and Consumer Products

2006-09-29T08:50:00.000-04:00

So this then is what it all comes down to: sex and death. The consumer products that we buy are really about just two things: trying to avoid dying and being attractive enough to the opposite sex to form a liaison. From food and medicine -- that living part -- to personal care and cosmetics -- that attractive part, almost all of our consumable activities line up behind those poles of life.

Think of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Do you see any fat Egyptians on those walls? Those drawings and the attendant stories were the Vogue magazine of the Nile cognoscenti.

Two other quick points. Woody Allen in his eponymous movie calls these poles: Love and Death. A friend of mine, Jim Carpenter, characterized the attraction, as it pertains to women, as seeking security. Men, of course, are more focused on just sex. So maybe I am being crass and Darwinian by focusing on procreation and surely we are better than that and seek more out of life.

This is still the challenge for marketers. They need to truly make an effort to understand their consumers, to identify and mine the insights of their motivations, going under their skin and into their brains, and to develop products and positionings that meet consumer needs.

I know this sounds so basic. It is the mantra breathed in many CPG companies. Yet other businesses like banks, insurance companies, airlines, automotive companies even industrial manufacturers, do not well understand this point. They are struggling to find their way in and even their buy-in. And some CPG companies themselves have a long way to go to understand people's coping habits, buying drivers and decision-making.

Time, Money and Pixels

2006-09-25T13:13:00.000-04:00

"Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love's day."

When the metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell wrote these lines in the 17th century, he was blogging what we already know about successfully reaching our customers (clients, consumers, patients, etc.)

This is what the world comes down in commerce: time, money and an exchange of satisfaction. Understanding those levers of satisfaction are critical for success.

Even if you enter a virutal world like secondlife.com, the trading can quickly change from virutal linden dollars to hard currency. It is the basic understanding of human motivation that stays the same: experience, expression, application of knowledge, acquisition of content (viz. knowledge) and simply living.

The challenge for many businesses is harnessing the concept of self-expression in their own lives and the relationships they have with their clients. If you can tie determine how to self-expression into your business transaction, you can harness a huge degree of satisfaction that will, in return, drive loyalty. And this will only increase your share of time, money and pixels.

Batter Up: Talent Management and Performance

2006-09-17T15:35:00.000-04:00

Many companies talk about talent management but how many of us know of people who got promoted because they were friends of a boss. If you are truly competitive, you want to have the best athlete in the right position.

When I worked for Peter Harf, the then CEO of Benckiser, one night at dinner, Peter said to a bunch of us: "I may like you, I may not like you. I don't really care. All I do care about is that you know how to get the job done and you do get it done."

In baseball, team managers have known this fact for over 100 years. Why don't business managers know this? Despite all the lipservice about talent management and the efforts of HR departments, the best people don't get the best jobs.

This approach is an area where executive recruiters can be effective consultants for their clients. Get them the best people and tell them to forget the beauty pageant.

Here's what the magazine Fast Company learned from Jeff Angus, a baseball columnist:

FC: So baseball managers are people people?
Angus: Since the National League was organized in 1876, managers have known that they will succeed only on the drive, acuity, and sharpness of their players. In business, the thing that prevents you from being outsourced or downsized is keeping the talent you have from being commoditized. Tom Peters and others started talking about this in the mid-1980s. Baseball had a 90-year head start.

FC: Baseball hasn't changed much in more than a century. So how is any of this relevant to business, which changes all the time?
Angus: Baseball is a perfect example of making yourself over on a regular basis. Every off-season, they debrief, reassess, start a new cycle, bring up young players, try people in new positions. Look at the Atlanta Braves' Bobby Cox. Over the past 15 years, depending on the talent, he's made power teams, hitters' teams, pitchers' teams--and they've all been competitive.

Learning Dance Steps on Your Competitors' Graves

2006-09-10T20:58:00.000-04:00

I was recently asked for advice from a friend of mine, who is a fashion designer. He was interested in becoming a master licensee for a famous European women's design name in the United States and targeting men. The potential gains seemed like a no-brainer: a well-known name entering a new market. He was all ready to go, but I asked him first if he had thought about other design houses that had done the same thing. What about Donna Karan? Liz Clairborne? Even a retailer like Talbot's? Were they successful? Yes, at first, but then the sales evaporated. I asked him if he knew why. He said no but that he was going to find out.

Then there were the goods. He was going to do belts, ties, watches and shoes, licensing the name out to sub-licensees. I asked him where he was going to focus. Which item was going to be the lead focus that would carry the entire line? What was the one item he would advertise? How much was the sub-licensee going to invest in this lead item? That licensee and their ability to deliver could determine the entire success of his line.

The biggest mistakes I see my friends making are in not analyzing and understanding their competitors and in not focusing their product lines. Competitive analysis helps you understand the landscape where you will be fighting. Focusing your line gives you the sharpest sword. Everyone learned this in business school. The challenge is truly spending the time and the effort to understand your market and then to understand which of your products will give you a competitive advantage in that market.

Internet Headlights Make Product Introductions Shine

2006-09-04T09:55:00.000-04:00

Democracy in the marketplace is increasingly shaping the aspects, roles and popularity of products with the use of the internet. While this is not an amazingly astute observation, a pause for the moment to consider these developments can help direct future initiatives. Market researchers always understood this power: conjoint analysis has consumers assign degrees of attractiveness to various aspects of a product concept. With the internet, more and more people are anxiously willing to take polls, provide product reviews, write articles, adding their opinions, ideas and power to almost anything from the academics of Wikipedia to the electronicc reviews on cnet. P&G harnesses these views in seeking new product ideas, movie production companies build advance word-of-mouth through planned dialogues and politcial consultants endlessly poll, promote and raise money. Now, if you've got a new product, that is largely unknown, an interesting question is how you can build awareness, shape its introduction and secure its popularity by focusing on the relentless democracy of the internet marketplace. Unique points of difference can shine when consumers themselves turn on the light.

Why let drug retailers control a manufacturer's success in the souk?

2006-09-02T11:21:00.000-04:00

I was doing store checks for personal care last week, and I continue to be amazed about the variability and vagaries of shelf sets, particularly in drug stores. Drugstore Headquarters demand the best deals and margins for their space and promise execution, and Manufacturers, knowing there is no other game in town for mass market distribution targeted to consumers who purchase prescriptions and their other needs at one location, pony up what is needed and then pray for success. Retail merchandising forces who go in and set the shelves help, but all too often the incremental revenues realized by using a merchandising force do not payback the expense. The answers continues to be demand, stimulating desire that, for the consumer, over-rides the hazards of navigating the drug store souk. Cut the promotional fees. Reduce line promotions. Forget the circular ad no matter how much incremental (and profitable) volume you will realize. It still comes down to simple demand generation in the best media reaching your target audience.

Robert Rubin and Uncertainty

2006-08-27T19:52:00.000-04:00

This week Robert Rubin resigned from Ford to avoid a conflict of interest since Citigroup, where he is a director, is advising Ford on strategic options.

More interesting, though, is David Leonhardt's recent observation in the The New York Times that Rubin championed the idea, during the Clinton administration, that "uncertainty was an inevitable part of life and only the foolish imagine they could eliminate it."

Yes, Leonhardt goes on to write, you evaluate all the data, assess the risk and act. However, a good decision can still produce a bad outcome.

In an uncertain world, you have to hit for a high average. On any given day, you have to make ten decisions. I go for making seven good ones, two so-so and one bad. You just have to hope that the bad one doesn't kill you. Then you have to understand what caused the failure, learn from that and do better next time.

Freedom and Initiative is Good - But what about the discipline

2006-08-24T15:47:00.000-04:00

Freedom is a powerful motivating idea. But motivation alone is not enough. The Greeks at Salamis fought better than the Persians because they were motivated by their desire to defend their land and their ideology.

In the same way, in a different war: the revolutionary war, the American colonists were ready at Lexington and at Bunker Hill to defend themselves against the British. However, throughout the war, there was a tension between amateur militia soliders (like those at Lexington) and the regular army led by Washington. Washington believed that only a regular well-trained, well-led army of regular soldiers could systematically defeat the imperial British army. He regarded the local state militias as auxiliiary troops to his regular ones. And in small skirmishes, in fight-and-flee tactics, the militias did well. But in pitched fights, sieges and attacks, discipline powered by ideology was more critical than ideology alone.

After his defeat in New York in 1776, Washington realized that he could not win a major pitched battle against British regulars (as much as he longed to -- to justify his strategy and his view of himself as a regular soldier) so he adopted the fight-and-flee strategy. The success of this strategy led to his victory at Trenton -- which started out as a successful pitched engagement, became a retreat when threatened by a superior reinforcing army and then became a battle again at Princeton, followed by a retreat across the river back into Pennsylvania.

In business, you can have great strategy and great passion, but, if you don't have the discipline of the organization to adjust strategy and to execute, you will not succeed.

Personal Leveraging Engine

2006-08-20T11:15:00.000-04:00

Read an interesting article by Nancy Fox, author of the Sixty-Second coach. She writes how most of us under-leverage our resources and contacts to help us with our business opportunities. I think that the key is to do personal due diligience. We do our due diligence whenever we do a deal, and sometimes we close the deal and sometimes we walk away. Why don't we do this for our most crucial and critical personal opportunities?

Here are Nancy Fox's five top tips for revving up your personal Leveraging Engine:

-Shift your thinking.

Your results are not going to improve dramatically with only better time management, working more hours, or longer to-do lists. Once you embrace the perspective that all around you are resources to be leveraged, what blind spots are uncovered? What processes can you simplify or even eliminate? What relationships are waiting to be tapped to assist you in producing the results you desire?

-Make a list of your resources and review them once each month.

Spend at least one hour each month reviewing your resources. Brainstorm with other colleagues on this topic so that you speed up uncovering the blind spots.

Here are some examples of commonly under-leveraged resources:

Your computer (go beyond how you are currently leveraging your computer)
Your hobbies
Your special interests
Your unique areas of knowledge
Your talents (you have more than you acknowledge)
Your service providers, vendors, etc.
Your local college
A current project
Your colleagues
The person to whom you report
The people that report to you
Your entire contact base
Their contact bases
Your brand
Your coach

Keep adding to this list.

-Make one unreasonable request each week.

Very often, we don’t leverage others’ desire to be of assistance. We often give ourselves reasons why we can’t ask for something. However, most people do want to be of service. When you leverage this opportunity, you give the other person a chance to make a difference and be generous. You gain the experience of being powerful and not being stopped by “reasons.”

-Interview people whom you admire and who have accomplished the kind of results you would like to.

Leverage the knowledge and experience of others who have attained what you would like to accomplish. How have they done it? What mistakes did they make? What worked well? Often, people enjoy sharing their history and their path to success, as well as the pitfalls they wished they had avoided.

-Put an implementation program in place regularly.

Good ideas are a dime a dozen. Without implementation, most good ideas evaporate into thin air. Put a regular process in place weekly where you ask yourself:

What are the biggest challenges I am facing right now?
What am I not leveraging now that I could be leveraging? (What are my blind spots around this?)
What new results would that produce?
Write down your answers. (Writing them down gives them a concrete reality in your brain.)

War Strategy - Ideology at Salamis

2006-08-19T22:48:00.000-04:00

In 480 BC, the Greek sailors led by Themistocles soundly and horrifically defeated the Persian navy of Xerxes, even though they were outnumbered 2 to 1. The importance of freedom to the common Greek sailor, drawn and bound by a single national idea, was a more powerful driver of success than the mercenary payment promised the forced conscripts that came from all over the vast Persian empire. In his book, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, Victor David Hanson notes that the Greek ideas of personal initiative, free speech and flexibility was a critical motivator; in contrast, all these elements that forge the foundation of what we take for granted in Western demoncracy, were an anthema to Persian thought.

During the battle, Xerxes sat on a throne high above the seas and watched his navy destroyed, while Themistocles was in the lead ship, urging his navy onward.

Strategy, teamwork motivation and initiative are all hallmarks of how we like to think we can be successful. In the West, they continue to be fundamental to how we think and how we act.