What's The Brochure's Response Rate?

I feel that it's not fair to ask Marketing about any typical brochure, that comes from them, for response rate.

How could they possibly know?

Do they even care?

Since I understand their challenge, I'm going to answer myself herein.

Pharma sales reps called their brochures "visual aids." And as of now, with the "wildly" use of tablet PCs, notes, and iPads, the word "interactive" is usually added to them.

"Does it change anything?"

Maybe. Our marketing department, in particular, did something entirely unexpected to the interactive visual aids: they add "tracker" to them. For those who don't have a jack what I'm talking about, a tracker is a program that tracks or record something digitally. In the case of the visual aid, it marks the page that reps used the most.

Now, would this help to answer the question of what's the brochure's response rate is like, through tracker usage?

A tracker can only tell us which page people like the most. Maybe the reps like to flick them or perhaps, the customers want to look at them. We couldn't say for sure.

"When it comes to response rate, there's no indicator
used to measure the response."

"Shouldn't we track how they use this brochure?"

Most medical sales brochures are plastered with the visual representation of clinical studies.

There is no "call to action" like they did with direct response brochures.

And that's my point...

On behalf of marketing, I'm telling you that medical sales are nothing like direct response sales. I notice that some health-related products are sold through immediate response but not the high-end, high-tech, evidence-based pharma sales.

Nope!

So, pharma marketing, being wise and all, design their brochures as such and claimed that the defining factors for every advertisement are The Reps...

... Yes!

"Reps are the critical success factor
for using a brochure."

In other words, people determine the success of the sales campaign using the brochure as a sales tool.

That means, the design, the content, and even the market, have little or nothing to do with brochures' effectiveness.

Agree?

Once again, how can we be sure of this?

Perhaps they'll say, "We need to conduct a survey or do a proper study for this." And nothing ever gets done. They still point back to the reps and make them the critical success factor.

But, what if we design the brochure to measure its effectiveness?

If this is a study, the brochure can be used as a control to compare with the brochure with reps using them for detailing.

"Can that be something unusual?"

"I'm pretty excited to share my brochure with you today!"

Better still, if we can design the brochure and measure which message hit prospects the most. That will be much, much better. Before we know it, the pharma sales job as we all know it will be replaced by pages of high response brochures.

If that really happen, many sales reps are going to eat their heart out.

But I won't. And you know why?

Because I'll be at the other end: the end that design the brochure and send them out.

I would be able to point which brochure brings in the highest response, and I would be able to point up to the stage, which message hit prospects the most.

Most importantly, I know which market to target before I type a single word on the brochures.

What I can see from how brochures were designed today, they were more towards passing the standards of the Medical Department and skip the potential of medico-legal issues.

Yup, I've seen brochures being recalled from the market, but the case with all these brochures is they often display outdated or wrong information. I have not seen brochures being recalled due to action they asked prospects to take.

Not yet, maybe.

And that's proved my point that no marketing department is measuring the response rate for any brochure.

"If you think about it if they can implement trackers on brochures,
what stopping them from measuring
the response rate from that same brochure?"

Think about it this way:

Which tactic yields a better return from sales campaign - tracking pages or tracking response?

With the current state of limited marketing budget available to most pharma companies, doesn't it make sense to focus on activity to minimize expenses and increased return?

Ladies and gents, measuring response IS that activity.

But of course, who am I to advise marketing directors or marketing managers or General Managers or Managing Directors about this common-sense approach?

Common sense, as it appears, is very uncommon these days.

In the meantime, stop cursing the tracker that have been installed into digital visual aids.

Not worth it, seriously...