Buzz Marketing: La "primera palabra" en Marketing...

Hoy, un año más desde 1999, comienzo a dictar mis clases en el Postgrado de Mercadeo de la Facultad de Farmacia de la Universidad de Venezuela (UCV) en Caracas.

El entorno global ha cambiado radicalmente en los últimos meses, megacrisis económica, drásticos cambios en el mercado farmacéutico (megamergers...).

Es necesario repensar y replantear todos los conceptos, una reingeniería total del Marketing farmacéutico.

Ya en la presentación hecha con motivo 15º Aniversario Curso Postgrado Fac.Farmacia UCV y de acuerdo al Análisis Beyond 2005: The Future of Pharmaceutical Marketing and Sales (luego ratificado en IMS (II): El declive del delegado médico...y en Price Waterhouse: Pharma 2020. Marketing the future) lo adelantamos como inevitable para la Fuerza de Ventas.

Ahora ya lo es para todo el Marketing farmacéutico.

Esa será mi intención...Espero lograrlo.


Este "post" creo va en esa línea. Por ello lo traje.

Call it viral, buzz or word-of-mouth advertising: Getting customers to spread the word about a new product through their social or professional networks is a hot strategy in the marketing world. Its proponents insist that the technique--whether online or face to face--is sure to boost a company's return on investment.

But how can companies find the right individuals to deliver the message? Marketers may wonder if they are finding the best "seeding points"--that is, well-connected people at the hub of social networks who will latch on to a product and promote it widely among the people they know.

New research led by Wharton marketing professors Raghuram Iyengar and Christophe Van den Bulte, working with University of Southern California preventive medicine professor Thomas W. Valente, has found that traditional targets may not be as influential as previously thought. The pharmaceutical firm that sponsored the research for their recently published paper, "Opinion Leadership and Social Contagion in New Product Diffusion," had its "a-ha" moment when they found Physician No. 184 on a map.

Mas...

Who's the Leader?

The study indicates that the spread of a product by word-of-mouth -- what the authors call "contagion" -- can and does happen over social networks. The study also indicates that marketers may need to re-think whom they identify as the best seeding points in their word-of-mouth campaigns.

Traditionally, drug companies have focused their efforts on reaching notable community leaders, believing well-known experts to be the most effective emissaries of a new product. In other industries, said Iyengar, marketers and their market research companies have tried to find opinion leaders through direct surveys, asking people, in essence, "Are you an opinion leader?" and then linking those answers to observable characteristics such as age, income, education level, media habits and so on. That, however, has proved rather ineffective, leading some companies to give up on finding seeding points and go for flashy "buzz" campaigns everyone talks about, such as when British fashion retailer French Connection UK put its four-letter acronym in large letters on its bags and shopping windows.

Mas...