Generating buy-in to Pharmaceutical Company Brand Plans           

Background

Each year, ABC Pharma brings together its sales and marketing operation to review the company’s brand plans for the forthcoming year. The traditional format relied heavily on presentations and gave little scope for feedback or input from the delegates. This caused two problems for the sponsors: firstly, they had no clear picture of what the delegates thought about the plans, their issues and concerns or indeed what excited and motivated them and; secondly, they had not used the conference to harness the delegates’ views to improve the plans.

The Need

ABC Pharma re-designed the conference format to focus more closely on capturing delegates’ views and encouraging a two-way dialogue. They engaged the Crystal team to support them in designing and delivering this interactive process.

The Solution

• Within the format the conference was divided up into plenary presentations (in which the leaders outlined the high-level strategy and company performance) but also included more detailed breakout sessions on brand plans for specific products.

• Each plenary presentation was followed by an in-depth, interactive Q&A session where delegates submitted questions anonymously via small tablet laptops on the tables.

• The second half of the conference was spent analysing the brand plans for each of the major products. In this session, delegates circulated around breakout rooms, learning about the detailed plans for each product and providing structured feedback captured via the wireless laptops.  This included an overall, numerical rating for the plan, what delegates considered to be the strengths of the plan, and some suggestions for improvement. Finally, delegates also captured any remaining questions they had.

• All this input was relayed in real-time back to the plenary room, where the business leaders were able to build a picture of what delegates thought of the individual plans.

• When delegates returned to plenary for the final session, the leaders provided a summary, drawing together the strengths of the plans and identifying where, based on delegate feedback, there was still work to be done.

Results

Previously, the event sponsors had found delegates reluctant to pose questions in front of a big audience (either because of shyness, a lack of confidence speaking in English or a fear of speaking openly in front of the senior leadership of the company). However, because they could enter their comments anonymously, delegates were much more open with their questioning and the leaders were able to respond to the twenty most important or commonly asked questions from the floor.

As important as the live review, was the analysis of the delegates’ views. Every delegate submitted their feedback at the event. This allowed the brand teams to review a the feedback immediately after the event. By incorporating Crystal’s services and advice on event structure and implementation they are now including an interactive element as a permanent fixture in ABC Pharma’s future events.

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