Services for Multividuals vs Services for Individuals (or Part of Them)

In working for various service and manufacturing organizations, I noticed a pattern in marketing approaches. Often, the marketing strategy was narrowly focused on conquering some part of the "customer's" nervous system: the bank focused on "wallet share", the cold meat food manufacturing in "fridge space share", and obviously the colas on "the fluid intake share". This style of marketing saw the customer through a very narrow and instrumental lense.

That perspective didn't seem interesting for me. And I saw a big opportunity in better understanding the world of the person and building a communication strategy, a service strategy, and a product strategy that was able to recognize and be sensitive to the dynamic of the self of the customer. The original proposal that I was working with was for the marketing department of AstraZeneca in Mexico City that was willing to launch a new cancer drug.

They were dealing with a physician as if the physician were a homogenous individual with needs. What they didn't realize was that just being a physician was being a conflicting network of role identities that even the physicians were unaware of. Physicians play, at the same time, the roles of: the healer, the hospital employee, a self-employed entrepreneur, an experimental scientist, a political activist, among others. Each of these roles have a different structure of concerns, ethical values, moral norms, and instrumental goals that produce interesting tensions and possibilities for change and innovation when you are able to map them, make them explicit, and recognize interesting "user-generated" bridging practices already invented by spontaneous collaboration. While the healer wants more time to listen to a person in pain, the employee wants to perform out of the hospital's standards of efficiency -- "bed usage" or referral rates. And the entrepreneur wants to maximize economic value. All these conversations do not fit together easily. Of course, the set of role identities that I just mentioned is very narrow; but it is a lot bigger than thinking about physicians as those that prescribe your drugs.

A marketing that supports the exhausting task of focalizing people's identities is very valuable. Making sense of the vast number of role identities in the modern world is an enormous task, and is not a task we are trained for dealing with. And, basically, we are quite oblivious to the amount of stress and waste that comes out of not being sensitive to this.

I made a flash presentation for illustrating the approach. I plan to have it up on my site soon and will update you when it is available.

Comments

[Ramon Ruiz]

Hola Guillermo,

He leido esta nota que escribes al respecto de tu propuesta a AstraZeneca y tu interpretación abre enormes posibilidades de estilos de ventas Y no sé si recuerdes, yo soy coach de profesionales de las ventas.
Bueno, en el último parrafo escribes que hiciste una presentación flash para ilustrar tu acercamiento, misma que no has puesto.
¿La vas a poner?
Gracias, saludos y felicidades, por la riqueza de tu sitio.
Ramon