The Three Principles that Always Drove Apple! – Brand Management 110
A few days back I finished re-reading for the third time, ‘Steve Jobs’, the authentic biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.
“The Apple Marketing Philosophy” that stressed three points.
The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.”
The second was focus: “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.”
The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book by its cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.
Let us now dwell a little more on how these three principles can relate to our pharma industry.
Empathy
Empathy is about understanding people. It’s about feeling the feelings of others, feeling the pain points of others. Do you have empathy for the internal customers, especially our field force, our doctors, patients and their caregivers at home?
Empathy and sympathy are not synonyms, they have different connotations. In sympathy, we feel sorry for a person. For example, when a friend of yours loses his job, we have “sympathy‟ for the friend because we perceive the distress of the friend. When we have “empathy‟ for the friend we go into a similar emotional state of the friend if we accurately perceive the friends situation or predicament.
Empathy is identifying ourselves with and understanding the situation, feelings, and motives of the other person. It is our ability to not only know or detect what others are feeling, but to also experience that emotion ourselves. It is about empathy with the customer – both internal i.e. our medical representatives and the external customers – the doctors and the retailers.
In all our interactions, we need to have empathy with our field force if we have to establish our leadership. Empathy is one of the most important components of Emotional Intelligence. Emotional Intelligence is a pre-requisite for effective leadership.
Focus
Focus means to eliminate the many unimportant things, to do a good job of the important things. It means we need to understand our priorities and focus on important issues rather than end up doing a “firefighting‟ job when the important tasks become urgent. Learning to prioritize and then focussing on the most important issues is a skill which we must all develop.
In the Mahabharata, when Dronacharya was testing the shooting skills of his pupils, all could see the beautiful leaves and flowers on the trees, the blue sky and so on. On the other hand, Arjuna could see only the eye of the bird – he was focussed! That is the kind of focus we all need to develop in our activities.
Focus also calls for sacrifice as when we do our Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning exercise for our brands. While it’s nice to believe that everyone, every doctor would be interested in prescribing our product, it’s not wise to define our target market as such. Focus on the ‘STPed’ doctors and leave out the large chunk who aren’t ‘STPed’.
Not only does this definition (or lack thereof) create more work for us; it also does a disservice to our actual target market — by over-widening our scope, we fail to inform and educate our target audience about how our product can improve their lives, of their patients and the caregivers at home.
Impute
Impute literally means to relate to a particular cause or source; attribute the fault or responsibility to the actual cause (for e.g. a company imputed the wrong filling of 25 mcg of levothyroxine in a 88 mcg bottle to a faulty mechanical devise).
Our doctors and retailers form an opinion about our company or our products based on the signals that that they receive from us during our interaction. “People do judge a book by its cover”. We may have the best of the products and of the highest quality. However, if we present our products to the doctors in a slipshod manner, our products may be perceived by the doctors as slipshod. If we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute our desired qualities.
Therefore, training the field staff in the modern techniques of communication, using phygital and omnichannel to communicate will impute that we are from a good, progressive, and future-looking pharma organization. An organization which cares for doctors, patients, and caregivers.
We in the pharma industry can learn and apply these three principles of Steve Jobs to have a better impact both on our internal and external customers.