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Tag : attribute analysis

BioBM Provides a Template for Attribute Analysis

biobm 8:34 pm , January 31, 2015

In continuation of its mission to empower life science marketers with valuable resources to aid them in their jobs, BioBM has published an attribute analysis template.

An attribute analysis is a powerful tool used to identify competitors’ positions within a market and a critical analysis when positioning a product, service, or brand. It both helps to identify key differentiators and shows how crowded or competitive any particular position is. The MS Excel-based template provided by BioBM, which is accompanied by detailed instructions, will make attribute analyses much simpler and easier for novices and much less time consuming for veterans.

The attribute analysis template may be requested at https://biobm.com/resources/attribute-analysis-template/

News 8:34 pm , January 31, 2015

The Role Of Branding – Part 2

Carlton Hoyt 12:13 pm , June 12, 2014

This is the second in a three-part series on branding. For the first part, go here. The third part can be found here.

As mentioned last week, the ideal brand position can be thought of in formulaic terms; it is all the “valid” brand positions, less the positions that are occupied strongly by competitors, less those that are unimportant to your target market(s).

Brand Positioning Formula

So how does one go about solving that equation?

Start with determining all of your company’s valid brand positions. To do this, you need to answer the question: “What are all the positions which we could validly claim?” The answer is dependent on a multitude of internal factors – everything from company vision and mission, company culture, down to the details of how you do business. This process therefore requires a holistic internal investigation, usually gathered via internal documents and from team members. It should be structured like a market research project with a qualitative and quantitative component and both primary and secondary research. Qualitative secondary research is a good place to start, where you can assess things like mission and vision as well as company processes that might give insight to potential differentiators. Qualitative primary research is generally next, with interviews of influential employees to get their opinions of what the company or brand means to them. A quantitative survey of a larger set of internal participants (presuming the organization is large enough to merit it) is helpful to validate and clarify the results of the qualitative research.

Next, look to see how your competitors are positioned. Start with analyzing how they are attempting to position themselves. At most basic, this could be done with an attribute analysis using their publicly available brand messaging. (More details on how to perform an attribute analysis can be found here.) If you want to dig even deeper, put yourself in the customers’ shoes and try to interact with your competitors to determine how they present themselves. This is difficult to do impartially by yourself, so it’s best to have neutral participants interact with the competitors on your behalf and report their experiences to you. Ask yourself: how does it feel to interact with the competing companies? What kind of experiences are they providing and directing customers towards?

After determining the competitors’ projected position, you also need to determine their actual position. This asks the question: “How are our competitors perceived by the target market?” If your market is large enough there may be data on the competitors in published market studies, but generally this requires your own primary market research. Qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys will provide the data to analyze your competitors’ actual positions.

Lastly, you need to determine which of the valid brand positions are actually relevant and important to the target market. Similarly to determining the actual competing brand position, this requires speaking with the target markets. To save on cost and time, these two questions can be answered simultaneously. As with any market research project, what questions you ask and how you ask them is extremely important such that you obtain unbiased answers.

With all the values on the right of the equation known, you can now complete the equation and determine your ideal brand position.

The next step is to translate the results of this equation into tangible elements which will align with the desired position. We’ll discuss this in our next post.

"Brand value may be intangible, but its effects on your business are not. A branding advantage may be the difference between customers choosing your product and them choosing your competitor’s – it’s not uncommon for a perceived demand generation problem to be rooted in the brand. To secure brand value, you need to ensure that your brand position is meaningful and that your brand experiences are positive and reinforce each other. That’s a big task, but it’s not one you have to do alone. Call BioBM. We’ve helped dozens of life science companies build their brands and generate more demand. We can help you, too."
Blog / Branding 12:13 pm , June 12, 2014

Optimize Your Messages

Carlton Hoyt 11:09 am , January 30, 2014

Optimize Your Marketing MessagesThink about how much money (not to mention effort) goes into disseminating your marketing messages. Think of all the resources spent on advertising, copywriting, conference exhibitions, social media, printed materials, even search marketing. Life science companies spend huge sums trying to reach their audience but many companies don’t spend nearly enough on making sure their messages are effective. Instead, messaging is often based on personal opinion, anecdote, or simply left to whatever the copywriter puts on paper. The result is that most marketing communication efforts are sub-optimal. In other words, you’re throwing away money on every marketing communication you make or disseminate.

To avoid this, companies need to devote just a small amount of their marketing communications budget into optimizing their messages. There are three primary ways in which this can (and should) be performed.

First, start with the competition. Analyze how your competition is positioning and describing their own products by performing an attribute analysis. Just as your products / services need to be differentiated (unless you’re competing on price) your message needs to effectively convey that differentiation. If you’re describing your products the same way that everyone else is, then your audience is going to have a hard time discerning which product is more valuable to them. However, differentiating the message isn’t enough to discern what message is optimal.

That’s where marketing research comes in.

Many companies think they know what is most important to their customers and why, but it’s easy to be wrong. For instance, say your product enables what was a 5-step procedure to be done in three shorter steps. That obviously has value, but what is most important to the customer? Do they perceive the greatest value in the reduced number of steps, or is it that the whole process is shorter? Is it that they are saving time? Is it that the time saved allows them to do other things and thereby accelerate their research? Perhaps, if you’re selling to a manager or PI, they think less time equals less money and that is what’s most important. As you notice, any one feature or attribute may translate into a large number of perceived benefits. In order for your message to be optimally effective, you need to understand where the customer places that importance. Draw out a “web of benefits” to articulate all the reasonably likely perceptions of value, then query your audience as to which benefits they find most valuable. However, sometimes the feedback received in this kind of marketing research differs from how people actually act in a real-life situation.

That’s where A/B testing comes in.

So now you have a short list of what the most important areas of perceived value are to the audience and which messages are the most differentiated. Overlay those and choose a few messages which reflect your differentiation, are distinct from your competitors, and align with the customers’ perceptions of value. Now test them to see which ones actually work best in practice.

None of these things need to be time consuming or complicated, and they’re certainly a lot less costly than wasting a significant chunk of your communications budget.

Just one last tip – no matter what you do, always avoid facile claims. Reliable, high-quality, and industry-leading have lost their meaning long ago. Stick with meaningful claims that can be expressly validated.

"Are you looking to get more from your marketing? To ensure that your communications are effective, contact BioBM. We’ll work with you to ensure you’re resonating with your audiences and that your communications are generating leads and creating brand value."
Blog / Market Research / Marketing Communications 11:09 am , January 30, 2014

Differentiating Services

Carlton Hoyt 11:53 am , June 13, 2013

differentiating life science servicesSome types of offerings can be especially difficult for life science companies to effectively market. Services, in particular, seem to cause companies problems. Services are intangible. Many services are customized and lack a fixed set of features. Because of this, marketers need to be especially careful or else marketing messages can quickly become uncompelling. While the default differentiators for products are their features, services often cannot be defined in such a way. In the hands of a novice marketer, this often causes the message to devolve into little other than benefit claims. The lack of anything tangible causes many companies to give up message validation almost in its entirety. Messages often revolve around the vague and facile claims of a company being “experienced,” “knowledgeable” or “leading” and its services being “valuable” and “effective,” among other claims which offer no comparative advantage and are largely meaningless to a skeptical audience.

So how does one effectively market a service-based life science business? Like any other offering, it starts with a meaningful differentiation. Since the differentiation won’t lie in anything tangible, we need to look at things such as processes, specialization or people along with more obvious things such as proprietary intellectual property. Attribute analyses can be important in helping to identify positioning opportunities, but there will ultimately be a limited amount of meaningful attributes which the scientist-customers truly care about. The life science marketer must ensure that any value propositions are extensively validated to combat the inherent ambiguity (and therefore increased utility risk) of the intangible service. Every time you make a claim, think about how you could best substantiate that claim, then do it. Standard tools such as case studies and testimonials help as well, but more direct validation techniques should be used when possible and applicable. As always, educational content should be a core component of your marketing. In order to trust you to perform a service for them, the scientist-customer will have to accept that you have the requisite knowledge and experience. Unless your brand is very well known to the customer, you should display your knowledge through educational content.

Service companies often have difficult time differentiating their services and validating their messages, and sub-par demand generation is often a direct result of this. By focusing on differentiators and strong validation of claims to reduce the perceived risk in purchasing the service, life science service companies can greatly improve their rate of lead generation.

"Is your life science service company failing to meet your lead generation expectations or quotas? If so, it may be time to call BioBM. We’re familiar with many of the pitfalls of marketing life science services and have the full-spectrum experience necessary to build your CRO or other service company into a growing, well-respected brand. Contact us today."
Blog / Demand Generation / Marketing Communications 11:53 am , June 13, 2013

Find Positioning Opportunities

Carlton Hoyt 10:18 am , April 19, 2013

Attribute analysis can be used to help identify positioning opportunitiesYour life science company could have a stellar new product or a unique new service. It could be wonderfully differentiated and offer your customers a unique value. If you fail to effectively communicate that differentiation and value, however, than your marketing is still going to flop.

As we’ve discussed before, life science marketers often resort to facile claims to describe their products, and in most cases that not only leads to messages that are devoid of real meaning but also leads to messages that are not unique or differentiated. Even when meaningful claims are made, competing products / services tend to describe themselves in the same ways, using similar attributes. Your product may be differentiated, but if your messages are largely the same then how can scientists tell that your product is better than the competition? They can’t, which is why it is so important to not only differentiate your product, but convey a unique positioning in your marketing message as well.

One of the best and easiest ways to make sure that your positioning and value claims are unique is to perform an attribute analysis. An attribute analysis is a market research technique that determines how competing products / services are outwardly positioned* by looking at their marketing communications and seeing how they are defined.

To perform an attribute analysis, first list all the competing products or services and collect references which you will use for the attribute analysis. Webpages and pdf brochures are generally the best options in terms of content and accessibility, however product manuals and other more technical documentation may be used, as may marketing materials that are generally less accessible such as webinars or email blasts. Have at least two references for each product whenever possible, although more is better. Secondly, collect all the attributes that are used for each product. Note that attributes should be counted – you want to know how many times each attribute is used rather than simply if it is used. Attributes can include descriptive terms, features and specifications. The list of attributes can easily become larger than is valuable, so basketing similar terms is recommended (for a basic example, “fast” “rapid” and “quickly” could all be basketed under one attribute, and you could assign ranges for specifications such as “read lengths between 200 and 300 base pairs”) as is ignoring unimportant specifications or features (example: for many products, few people may care about weight). Once attributes are counted, you can group them into categories as well. You then have laid out in front of you a numeric map (or a visual map, if you plot the attributes) of the positioning of competing products and services. The data can be analyzed in various ways.

Having performed the attribute analysis, you will be able to see what claims are commonly used and which are uncommonly used. You can combined this with market knowledge of scientist needs to find positioning opportunities; positions that align with customer needs but which are not used by competitors.

*I use the term “outwardly positioned” because many companies do not have their positioning formalized or do not effectively translate their positioning into effective marketing messages. This erroneously leads to different outward and inward positions, where the company believes the product has a certain positioning but the positioning communicated through its marketing is different. You could also call these externally-facing and internally-facing positions.

"Ever felt like you’re having difficulty communicating the true value of your products to your target market? An ineffective positioning could be the root cause. Combining our demonstrated market research expertise and deep industry knowledge with marketing skill and communications acumen, BioBM can help you define a position and communicate value to your audiences in a way that transforms your demand generation. Contact BioBM, ask us any questions you may have, and set yourself on a path to more successful marketing."
Blog / Market Research / Marketing Strategy 10:18 am , April 19, 2013