Hill+Knowlton Strategies

MINDSPACE (Dolan et al., 2010)

+  +  +         #2  Incentives         +  +  +

Incentives can be a powerful tool in harnessing the power of the public – engaging people and motivating behaviour change. The impact of incentives clearly depends upon factors such as type, magnitude and timing of the incentive. In a competitive economic environment brands are increasingly using incentives to attract consumers and stand out from the competition.

The power of incentive

Brands in the service industry – such as high-street banks, mobile phone network providers – are using incentives and rewards to become more attractive to consumers. However, the behavioural economic insight loss aversion is important in order to understand how best to use incentives in marketing. Loss aversion is used to explain that we dislike losses more than we like gains of the equivalent amount. What this means, for example, is human beings feel the loss of losing  £1 more than we feel the elation of being given £1. Therefore, brands that emphasise the money (or reward) that people will lose out on by not taking an action/purchasing can have a more powerful impact and motivation on people’s behaviour, rather than simply highlighting the amount they could be given if purchasing.

Brands in the fast-moving consumer goods industry consistently have to compete for consumer’s attention. Unilever’s Magnum icecream is an example of a brand currently (April 2013) using incentives as a marketing strategy to drive sales and engage consumers. The incentive Magnum is giving consumers is the chance to win a designer handbag worth £800 every day. However, now understanding loss aversion, if Magnum had framed the incentive in a way that consumers feel that they are losing out if they do not purchase, then this could have a more powerful impact on people’s behaviour to drive sales. Although, the type and magnitude of the incentive of a £800 handbag could be significant enough in itself to demand attention from some consumers. Furthermore, people have a habit of over-weighing small probabilities – for example lotteries – and so consumers may over-weigh the small chance of winning the handbag.

Magnum - win a designer handbag everyday

Another example of using incentives to engage a community is ConAgra Foods. In order to increase engagement on it’s Healthy Choice Facebook Page, users who “liked” the brand received a coupon for 75 cents off their next Healthy Choice purchase. ConAgra then coaxed more consumers to join its Facebook page by dangling a “buy one, get one free” coupon offer. In other words, the coupon’s value grew as more consumers joined the page.

However, a fundamental problem with using incentives, is that once an activity (such as buying a Magnum) is associated with external reward (chance to win a handbag), then individuals are less inclined to participate with the activity in the future without further incentives. Furthermore, and worst still, is if a brand fails to deliver on a reward/incentive – an example would be Red Bull’s VIP trip of a lifetime to the Belgium Grand Prix Competition. Red Bull was censured and criticised by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in February 2013 after sending competition winners on a budget trip across three countries, making them share a bed and then sending them home early after they were barred from entering the race’s VIP enclosure.

Incentives - influencing behaviour and engaging consumers

In summary, incentives can be a useful tool to engage people’s behaviour – and the impact of the incentive depends upon type, magnitude and timing. People have a habit of over-weighing small probabilities, meaning competitions can be effective. Losses loom larger than gains, and so framing incentives to consumers in such a way that they feel the loss if they don’t participate can be a powerful communication and marketing tool. However, if brands become associated with external reward/incentive then consumers can be less inclined to participate in the future without these external rewards/incentives.

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On Rare Disease Day last week, a new online community was launched for patients with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) on the existing patient website, RareConnect. RareConnect is led by the non-governmental, patient driven, rare disease organisation EURORDIS, and makes information available via patient advocacy groups from a variety of countries. RareConnect also provides a forum style platform for patients to meet and interact, allowing users to share individual experiences about how IPF has affected them, creating a sense of community between users. The website even has a translation service for all of its posts, making information available in five different languages and allowing its reach to be truly global.

Rare Disease Day also saw the announcement of Boheringer Ingelheim (BI) working with the online patient community Patient’s Like Me to enhance the website’s IPF community. Patients Like Me is a similar type of platform to RareConnect, but the main differences are that it has not been set up by patient advocates and is not just for rare diseases. With BI’s involvement, it looks like the IPF community now have online spaces on the platform where they can meet others with similar diseases, also allowing patients to input their health info and track their diseases. Although these communities have been around for a few years now, the involvement of patient advocacy groups and pharmaceutical companies to help strengthen these sites is new, developing the pages to be more patient focussed and giving them more of a ‘community feel’. 

Tracking patients’ health data in apps and online is a trend we have seen increasingly and now, patient data tracking company, Qualcomm, and patient information site, WebMD, have forged a partnership to track patient data and make information searched for on WebMD, more relevant for the user. Qualcomm partner with a large range of medical devices, such as blood pressure and blood glucose monitors that are connected to the internet and have a cloud based platform, which stores and tracks the health data from these devices. The idea behind partnering with WebMD, is that rather than receiving generic information when searching, you can receive information that is relevant to you. The idea is not new, and we have seen Google collect search information to make searches more relevant, but this is one of the first ways we’ve seen the potential for this style of tailored information for patients in the healthcare setting. The partnership is still early in its development, but it will be very important to see how this develops, and if this style of searching for patient information catches on in the future.

Last week, a study was released in the American Journal of Medical Quality, looking at the correlation between hospital Facebook likes and the quality of the hospital. Not only were the hospitals that had the higher number of Facebook likes more likely to be recommended by patients, it was also positively correlated with the mortality rate, meaning that based on this study, the more likes a hospital had, the better it was. This study shows the importance of having a strong and engaging Facebook presence as well as demonstrating that patients increasingly want more information from hospitals to make a more informed decision about where they seek treatment.

In the past few weeks, we have talked about the growing trend for articles and blogs, which are digging deeper into social media and digital within the healthcare industry, providing more specific and detailed insight as the industry continues to grow in this space, and it looks like this trend is set to continue,

We have selected some must-reads for anyone with an interest in digital communications in the healthcare industry. This article on PMLive’s Smart Thinking blog addresses this issue specifically, stating that while we all tend to judge how well pharmaceutical companies are doing in social media by looking at their presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, there are in fact many other ways of using social media that should be considered, including what is known as social innovation.

Although Twitter and Facebook are obviously parts of this, they are not the whole story, the blog argues. Other aspects of social media such as social bookmarking, wikis, virtual social worlds and crowdsourcing are also part of the equation and further inspection suggests pharma companies might not be as far behind as some people think when it comes to these less obvious forms of digital innovation. Indeed, the blog suggests that there are in fact plenty of examples of internal social media projects within the industry that are on a par with other sectors, with three of the top ten pharma companies (GSK, Janssen and Merck) using the enterprise social network service Yammer.

The article pulls out some encouraging examples of social media innovation within the pharma industry which back this up. Definitely worth a read.

Another article that caught our eye here at An Apple a Day was this one from Pharmafile, which covered some of the platforms more traditionally associated with digital and social media engagement such as Twitter and Facebook. The article looks at the ‘received wisdom’ that suggests pharma should be joining the online conversation and asks some very important questions about what sort of conversations are appropriate and inappropriate, as well as conversations actually worth engaging in.

As social and digital media continue to secure their place on almost everyone’s agenda, communications professionals will increasingly be expected to show they are capable of answering these sorts of questions and provide genuine insight, to ensure they are not just suggesting digital for digital’s sake, but are actually able to identify the most appropriate and effective solution to meet specific objectives.

(image: Cancer Research UK: Cell Slider)

In other news, Cancer Research UK has teamed up with Amazon, Facebook and Google to create a mobile game for analysing genetic mutations. Data is integral to finding a cure for cancer, however the challenge is getting the data investigated by human rather than machine eyes in order to be properly analysed. With this in mind, Cancer Research UK has teamed up with these US tech firms to try and build an engaging, fun and user-friendly mobile game, which can be used on the move. The charity has already developed a web-based game called Cell Slider where users look through archived tissue samples.

Finally, if you work in the oncology disease area, this interview on the Cancer Network website is really worth checking out. Dr Michael A. Thompson, an oncology specialist who writes a blog for ASCO (American Society of Clinical Oncology) Connection, talks to Cancer Network about the use of social media by oncologists, providing some great insights into the dissemination of research results, clinical trials, and other oncology news using social media.

In the past week, there have been a number of interesting healthcare stories that have been making noise in the digital world.

As we’ve seen on this blog, the number of healthcare apps are ever increasing and now this growth has been truly cemented and recognised by none other than Apple. For a while, Apple has been creating lists of its favourite apps for specific demographics, including children, parents and film lovers. The new Healthcare Professional (HCP) list categorises apps that HCPs can use for reference, medical education, imaging, patient education, personal care and patient monitoring. Although iTunes have only made these available in the US, what’s interesting is that the list includes apps from pharmaceutical companies, including Novartis and Medtronic. Understanding and keeping track of how to get onto the list could be crucial for pharma companies to gain more visibility for their apps and help bring greater HCP engagement to mainstream attention.

Another story that garnered significant attention was that of the world’s first live-tweeted C-section. The Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston tweeted the whole C-section surgical procedure from beginning to end, with followers able to see the process in real time. Essentially an educational procedure, this garnered a large amount of traction, with an estimated 72,000 people watching the C-section live on Twitter and an additional 11,000 viewing it in another format. This is not the first time a surgical procedure has been live-tweeted, with the same hospital carrying out a live brain surgery and live heart surgery last year. The popularity of this is a clear sign of  the educational value this type of digital format offers as well as perhaps whetting the (somewhat gory) appetite of many online.

As communicators, when creating campaigns we know how important it is to target the right audience with the right message. Previously, studies have shown women to be the influencers and decision makers in the household, and the results of recent survey have now shown that women are more likely than men to search for health information and advice online. According to a survey from the Pew Research Centre, 79% of female internet users vs 65% of male internet users went online to look for health information. These percentages overall are quite high, proving the potential reach an online campaign can have. This also demonstrates that when considering a digital campaign, it is important to think about whether it is right for your target audience, and the stats below, although US focused, provide a useful breakdown of which demographics are most likely to engage in the online space.

This is the first in a series of nine blog posts which takes inspiration from a Cabinet Office commissioned report entitled MINDSPACE. The report sets out nine of the most robust (non-coercive) influences on our behaviour, which is captured in the simple mnemonic MINDSPACE:

MINDSPACE (Dolan et al., 2010)

The vast majority of government public policy aims to change or shape behaviour – changing or shaping behaviour and inspiring or engaging people is often a perquisite of many of the work we do for clients at H+K. “Hard” instruments such as legislation or regulation is the most effective way for policy-makers to compel us to act in certain ways. However, these instruments are not readily available, of course, to PR professionals aiming to change people’s behaviour and attitudes towards detergents, gin, football boots and the like – “hard” approaches are not appropriate. Policy-makers are increasingly turning to less coercive measures, such as incentives and sophisticated communications techniques, to change and shape behaviour. These less coercive approaches, summarised by MINDSPACE, are directly applicable to the work we do in marketing, advertising and communications. My series of posts in the coming months will work through each of the influences outlined in the MINDSPACE framework, giving examples and explaining how the framework is applicable to our industry.

+  +  +         #1  Messenger         +  +  +

The way we respond to information depends greatly on the reactions we have to the source of that information.We are heavily influenced by who communicates information. Whatever our considered judgment about the value of a message, we automatically give it more or less weight according to the messenger. For example, we are often swayed by authority that has associations of expertise: public trust in expert public sector workers like doctors and teachers is much higher than for politicians.

Brands understand the importance of ‘the messenger’ with regard to influencing consumer choices and driving sales. Celebrity brand ambassadors are effective marketing techniques, because who communicates determines the consumer response and engagement to brand messages. Marketing spends are increasing in budget for the celebrity brand ambassador - PepsiCo struck a $50 million deal with Beyonce to be Pepsi’s brand ambassador.

Beyonce - Pepsi Brand Ambassador

Of course there are plenty of notable examples in UK/global brand marketing campaigns, and include Walkers veteran Gary Linekar, Marc Jacobs and Taylor Swift for Diet Coke, and Blackberry and Alicia Keys. However, sometimes brands can get it wrong – Alexander ‘Hooray Henry’ Armstrong was dropped in 2009 after 7 years as Pimms brand ambassador, reportedly for being ‘too posh’.

Brad Pitt - Chanel No. 5

In order to quantify and qualify the use of celebrities in marketing campaigns it is important to evaluate their awareness, appeal, and relevance to a brand’s image and the celebrity’s influence on consumer buying behaviour. Advertisers are using celebrities for voice overs, and public relations + communications agencies understand the importance of influential celebrities to engage and shape behaviour. Harnessing the power of celebrities social media platforms can be a very powerful marketing tool. We saw that this week at H+K in which Ricky Gervais and Stephen Fry’s Twitter accounts generated a huge amount of consumer engagement with a hashtag campaign for our client Aviva.

Post your comments below on which celebrity brand ambassadors you think are the good, the bad and the ugly!

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As 2013 moves along, we’re seeing a wealth of articles and blogs highlighting digital and social media trends to look out for throughout the year. What is striking is the increasingly specific nature of these predictions. It is no longer enough to say social media or digital are important or that more people are using apps, these points are practically beyond debate. Now the questions being asked and the insights emerging suggest that there is a need to explore the particulars of these trends, how they might impact the industry and the opportunities and challenges they present, demonstrating how far the industry has come in the past few years.

A new report from Accenture is a case in point. The management consultancy has identified six technology trends set to influence companies over the next three to five years and they’ve now supplemented this with a report looking at how these will specifically impact the pharma and life sciences industry. The trends they’ve identified are quite technical and go beyond healthcare communications, but they certainly demonstrate the way digital is moving and how pharma companies are expected to respond to this shift:

1.       Context-based services: Essentially, the convergence of real world and digital data to draw conclusions about consumer experiences. Context based services have evolved from the rise of cloud computing, social media and increased usage of mobile devices. Crucially, the approach has already been adopted by pharma companies looking to engage directly with patients.

2.       Converging data architectures: This is about developing new ways for effectively handling data. Pharma companies have increasingly large amounts of data to contend with and are already demonstrating an appetite for exploring these new data architectures.

3.       Industrialised data services: In much the same vein as the data architectures trends, pharma companies are starting to realize the value of data as an asset that can be utilized for multiple purposes when shared more freely.

4.       Social-driven IT: As we all probably know, social media is a powerful catalyst that has changed the way customers, employees and partners use technology to interact with the world around them. While most pharma companies now accept this fact, the challenge will be to recognise its full potential and make the most of it, something we’ve mentioned numerous times on this blog.

5.       PaaS-Enabled Agility: You will probably have heard of cloud computing, even if you’re not completely clear what it is! Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is an extension of this, which combines cloud computing with a series of software applications and allows apps to be created by users.

6.       Orchestrated analytical security: Of course, all this growth in connectivity, as well as presenting numerous opportunities, has also increased the potential security risks and pharma companies will need to show their ability to adapt to the changing environment and explore new ways of handling these risks.

There is a more detailed analysis of the insights on the PMLive website, which also provides some really good examples of pharma companies that are already adopting some of this new technology. Definitely one to bookmark.

Image from Geek and Poke

Finally, in another example of this more nuanced, specialized approach to digital insights, this thoroughly recommended article on the website Eye for Pharma looks at the role social media plays in patient adherence. The article suggests that just because a doctor recommends a new medication to a patient, it doesn’t mean that the patient will necessarily go along with it.  In fact, the article claims “…a whole universe of interactions takes place outside the medical environment that can change the direction of a patient’s care”.

Many patients will now look online to weigh up the pros and cons of a drug, and in fact 30% of the patient posts online that Eye for Pharma looked at, indicated that they decided not to take a physician recommended medication due to information they had received from their online peers.

This is a really interesting perspective on this particular part of the patient journey and a demonstrable example of the way social media is affecting the industry.

There is nothing better than a well-crafted cocktail, saying that there is nothing worse than a badly made cocktail, so we thought we would share our favourite cocktail bars in Londontown with you!

Artesian Bar @ The Langham

http://www.artesian-bar.co.uk/artesian.html

Image credit: http://www.smh.com.au/travel/activity/food-and-wine/no-ordinary-pub-crawl-20120830-252t6.html

This chic and glamorous bar has been voted as one of the world’s top bars and never fails us. The service is impeccable, and if you arrive just after 6pm on any weekday you will be greeted with a buzzing atmosphere and a charming host. Once seated, you will have a fully loaded cocktail menu offering anything from your classic cocktails through to the bars own famous creations. Saying that, if you just can’t decide what you feel like, ask your host to recommend something.

Trailer Happiness

http://www.trailerhappiness.com/

Image via http://londoncocktailscholars.co.uk/trailer-happiness/

Don’t let the look from outside fool you, this place is a fantastic cocktail bar with a relaxed atmosphere in the heart of Notting Hill. We stumbled across Trailer a few months back and it was an instant winner in our books. The staff are extremely friendly and provide a calm and relaxed service. Cocktails are priced competitively, with a G+T coming in around £8.

Worship Street Whistling Shop

http://www.whistlingshop.com/

Image via: http://www.designmynight.com/london/reviews/worship-street-whistling-shop-bar-review

Has been open for a few years now, and if you are ever looking to experience a new type of cocktail, we highly recommend it. Entering through a black doorway from a quiet street (Worship Street), you head down a few steps in to a room that appears like you have gone back in time. With its Victorian gin palace concept, expect to find an array of cocktails here that come with one or two ingredients you most likely will not have tried before.

ECC

http://www.chinatownecc.com/

Image via http://www.sergetheconcierge.com/2010/12/seeing-is-believing-experimental-cocktail-club-london-now-open-in-chinatown.html

Situated in the middle of Chinatown, unless you are looking for this place you will never find it. Hidden behind a small door, you are greeted by security who asks if you are on the list! Depending on how busy it is, sometimes you need to be on that list! On entering the townhouse building, you are greeted with a few decisions – drinks at the bar being our normal choice rather a table! Now a warning, the cocktails here are amazing, but watch out as they tend to be a little strong! A classic cocktail bar, with a lively atmosphere.

Sometimes, nothing can help make a point better than some good quality raw data, which is why in this post we’ve looked at a few studies investigating different aspects of digital health.

This week it was interesting to see a study published investigating how patients were managing their chronic conditions and the extent to which they used digital to do this. The study, which came out of the Pew Research Centre in the US, found that 62% of patients that had two chronic conditions tracked specific health measures, with 56% of these people saying the tracking had affected their overall approach to maintaining their health. 53% of these people also stated that the tracking had led them to ask doctors new questions or to seek a second opinion. Whilst tracking health measures demonstrated a change in behaviour towards a patient’s disease, what was really interesting is the data the researchers found on the use of ‘health tracking’ apps or devices. They found that a minority 21% used some form of technology to track their health, with 34% tracking it on paper and largest chunk (49%) of patients did so ‘in their heads’.

Apps such as GSK’s MyAsthma app, which intuitively build in an Asthma management diary, tests to track the progress of the condition and various other useful content for Asthma sufferers, can offer a patient much more than simply tracking in their heads. The MyNetDiary Diabetes app goes as far as helping with diet planning, with a barcode scanner to allow for easier tracking of a diabetes patient’s diet, and the iBGStar product combines an app with a blood glucose meter as an attachment, which offers a seamless mix of blood glucose testing, tracking and sharing with HCPs.

21% is not a small number by any means, and the fact that a significant amount of people are using these apps after only a few years of them being available is definitely positive. But the data shows that while there is still a relatively large market for these types of apps, more needs to be done to get people engaged and using them. Looking on the app market place there is no shortage of these apps; it appears raising patient awareness of the benefits of using them could be key.   

Moving on to the evolution of public health, a trend that has been surfacing recently is how powerful Twitter is becoming at helping predict public health trends. A study carried out by Bringham University looked at over 24 million tweets from 10 million users globally, and concluded that by monitoring health mentions in tweets, health officials can track, and even use the site as an early-warning system for, disease outbreaks. The speed and volume of tweets meant the information could be gathered faster than ever. This has evolved drastically from the previous days of health professionals having to collect health data over time before analysing.

Building on this, another study showcased how by collating what people said in Tweets, where they were when they said it, and when they were there, researchers could go as far as to estimate potential spread of disease between two users or even between users and their environment. The video below shows how researchers are even developing a web application, called GermTracker, which uses Twitter information to allow people to stay away from areas of ‘high risk of germs’. This is all in early development, but it will be interesting to see if this prediction of high risk areas can help pharmaceutical companies keep ahead of the trend and engage with patients in the right areas more effectively.

Hello – I’m really pleased to be a contributor for the H+KStrategies UK London Blog. My name is Andrew, and I have recently started at H+K on the graduate scheme. I will write a couple of blog entries about the graduate scheme – students and those starting a career who want the best start to the PR + Communications industry watch this space!

The majority of my posts however will be on behavioural economics. Behavioural economics is delivering very interesting insights and is something I find exciting and topical. As means of an introduction, behavioural economics is somewhat an umbrella term for a range of approaches that seeks to understand and explain the effects social, cognitive and emotional factors have in influencing the choices and (economic) decisions of individuals and institutions.

Behavioural Economics - an umbrella term

Why I find behavioural economics so interesting, and why it is so popular across the advertising, marketing and PR service industry, is that it provides the framework and insights to better understand people and the way people behave. Therefore behavioural economics can be an incredibly useful tool because it can assist in better understanding the ‘public’ and provide the structure in which to devise the most effective strategies to shape and influence conversations.

There are various ways in which social, cognitive and emotional factors influence choices and decisions – such as loss aversion, framing, status quo bias or simply not putting in the mental effort to make the right decision!  Check back here for my blogs, which are going to give a range of examples to show how these different factors and behaviours influence choices and (economic) decisions.

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This month’s Golden Globes kicked off awards season with all the glitz, glamour, pomp and ceremony expected of the 70th instalment of this highly anticipated annual event. Hailed as ‘the party before the Oscars’, it’s not only an unrivalled tool for predicting who’ll be recognised at the forthcoming Academy Awards, but is also useful when forecasting the key fashion and beauty trends of awards season and the year ahead. With the BAFTAs coming up next week, I took to predicting which trends are set to stay. 

Splits and Slashes

‘Leg bombing’ made the headlines again this year with the pin-perfect Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Lea Michele and Eva Longoria paying homage to Angelina Jolie’s infamous pose. This trend also underlines the importance of looking and feeling body beautiful; read Venus and Braun Beauty Therapist Nathalie Eleni’s top tips for red carpet worthy pins on Female First.

Prediction: With the sun set to warm the shores stateside, we’ll be seeing more and more polished pins stepping out and hopefully they’ll be decked out in some statement stilettos and sparkling shimmer.

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