Moving beyond the pat & formulaic rational response. Uncovering the emotional drivers & barriers of HCP behaviour

One of the many questions I’ve been asked recently from my clients is ‘How can we encourage respondents to articulate the existence and nature of the emotional drivers, when they may be reluctant to admit to non-rational behaviour or when they may be genuinely unaware of the emotional drivers at play in their own prescribing decisions?’

It’s an important question, and one which we don’t always get to explore in today’s research environment, in which pressing deadlines and the need for consistent global research approaches play such a dominant role in determining what we do and how.

But even if we have the time and opportunity to catch our breath, there’s an underlying problem.  The majority of healthcare respondents like to think of themselves as rational, logical, scientific people who carefully evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of individual products in order to arrive at their prescribing preferences.  Indeed, this this is often true, with the focus on “evidence-based medicine” weighting prescribing decisions toward the proven clinical benefits of a given product (along with economic and practical considerations, of course).

However, there are many prescribing situations in which there is no obvious rational choice of product – where no single product within the competitive set shows clinical trial data that is far superior to the competitors, or where a benefit on one parameter is offset by a drawback on another parameter.  Thus, and understandably on a basic level, interviews with physicians may elicit no more insight than respondents professing that “they are all the same” or “I use this one out of habit – they could be interchangeable”. 

This can leave the marketing and creative teams with little guidance on optimising their promotional strategy for the brand – and presents a big challenge to researchers in terms of trying to identify such emotional drivers via the (largely) rational environment of a market research interview.

How, then, should market researchers advise their marketing clients on the optimal promotional platform for Product X?

Well, in these situations, it is often possible to identify factors influencing prescribing decisions that are based on [ahem!] less rational features, and thus to build a positioning and promotional platform based on the deep-seated emotional drivers at play in product choice.

Here at Purdie Pascoe Healthcare we have masses of experience in uncovering those all-important ‘golden nuggets’ - those hidden emotional drivers of attitudes and behaviours – the little difference that makes all the difference.  

We’ve worked with numerous client companies in seemingly undifferentiated markets and therapy areas to help them to identify key emotional positioning levers and opportunities for a product.  Two clear endpoints come from this.

First, there’s the importance of knowing how to ask the questions.  Here at Purdie Pascoe we have a plethora of specific techniques and approaches to leverage the rational and emotional drivers which have proven to be valuable in the past. Examples we tend to tap into include: facial coding, means end theory and empathy engagement to help us discover how and why people feel as they do. To uncover what they are really thinking we employ techniques such as laddering, brand personification, and virtual patient journeys, alongside ‘alternative’ NLP techniques such as the bridge between two extremes, parallel universe strategies, obituaries, forced trade-offs (sometimes called “qualitative SIMALTO”), war gaming and many more.

But that’s only part of the story.  Without the experience and commercial savvy to interpret and apply what these techniques generate, the techniques can only take you so far.  But with over thirty years of experience of close collaboration with our clients of work in this kind, we’re in an optimal position to transform deep qualitative data into powerful guidance for your business decisions.

We hope this has provided rich food for thought not just on the spectrum of techniques (grounded in good moderator listening and rapport building) that could be included in a bespoke research programme for your product, but also on how important it is to continue the smart thinking after all the questions have been asked.

For more information, or to discuss your needs further please contact: guy.pascoe@purdiepascoe.com