Dear Together: Great question. With so much data available, it’s sometimes difficult to know how to interpret it. The good news is that you have all the information you need to heighten the impact of virtually all of your communications tactics. You have the prescribing data. You have physician behavior surveys. You just need to put it all together.

Data isn’t new, but the technology we use to gather and analyze it has evolved at a dizzying pace. Here are just a few examples:

• Time — what used to take weeks now takes seconds. Only a few years ago, pharma companies received prescribing data, divided by physician zip code, up to a month after the prescriptions had been written. Not exactly a recipe for nimble or responsive marketing! Thanks to ever-growing processing capacity, clinician feedback is now almost instantaneous.
• Tactics — although waiting room brochures, physician leave-behinds, and exam room posters still have their place, today’s doctors are much more likely to be asked to react to an email, eDetail, or sales presentation on a representative’s tablet computer. Back-end data such as click-through rates can tell marketers which messages are resonating with customers—and which are not.
• Tools — it is said that the average calculator sold at your local superstore today contains more computing power than was used to send men to the moon. Today’s pharma marketing tools and platforms are amazingly advanced. They have evolved to handle massive amounts of data, and to analyze it in increasingly complex ways.
• Talent — the people who parse the data themselves have evolved. As the disciplines of data science and behavioral science have come to stand on their own and also intertwine, experts in the fields are constantly surpassing previous standards.

What does this mean for you? You can make constant improvement a reality. Nothing based on guesswork. No segmentation resulting from presumed personas, or value based on estimates. It’s real-world and real-time.

In order to maximize on the “new normal,” it’s crucial to have a creative marketing partner who understands how to parse multiple information streams and turn that information into improved bottom line results for your organization.

You’ll find that data science and behavior science are a match made in heaven!