Researcher, Heal Thyself: How NEJM Made Market Research Strategic
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Jun 11, 2010
The New England Journal of Medicine has a long tradition of success, having been published since 1812. Like its readers, its editors are physicians. As a result, the editors typically felt that they implicitly understood the needs of their readers. Market research was an afterthought, called in after a product was developed to help identify the best customer for the product, according to Ann Boyle, the market research manager for the Massachusetts Medical Society, in her presentation today to the MRA Annual Conference, “Shifting to a Customer Focused Strategy, Our Experience”.
But did editors really understand reader needs? The Journal is at the intersection of two industries undergoing tremendous change: publishing and health care. The Journal now competes with web sites, many offering information for free. The practice of medicine within the health care industry is stressed by the rapid pace of medical advancement, greater awareness of treatments by patients (reading those free health-care sites) and increased fear of malpractice. The physician today, as a consumer of medical information, is dramatically different from the physician of five years ago.
While Journal staff thought they understood customer needs, the fact is that those customer needs are undergoing such change that regular market research is needed. Often, product development groups would create a product without thinking through the target audience for the product, let alone their willingness to pay for it. Market research was often called for when the product was done: “We have this prototype, and we want to understand which of our customers will love it – we know they’re going to love it! We don't know who we designed it for, but let’s see what we can charge them for it.” Research was often so specific to an individual department’s needs that it had no value to anyone else in the organization. There was a disconnect from department to department about what the Journal’s customer segments were.
To address these issues, the Journal decided they needed to “create a common internal language to describe our audience, removing the limitations of conducting research using demographics to truly understand motivations that dictate usage of content and features and identify unmet needs.” The existing customer segmentation was driven by the needs of advertisers and represented traditional demographics and the medical specialties. To get beyond that demographic segmentation, initially the plan was to do an extensive quantitative analysis of physicians. Unfortunately, given the high cost of researching physicians and the many medical specialties the Journal serves, only one specialty could be segmented in this way.
As an alternative to this quantitative approach, the Journal’s researchers implemented a qualitative methodology. They interviewed internal staff to develop initial ideas and then conducted extensive face to face interviews, telephone interviews and focus groups with physicians, supplemented by some small-scale quantitative research. From this, they developed six roles.
The roles, proprietary to the New England Journal of Medicine, profile physicians according to: information need, motivations and stressors, current experience and work environment. They are not personas but represent the dominant roles of physicians at a point in time: “they are a tool and common language for describing our audience, a different way of segmenting our audience based on their needs and a way to inform staff without medical knowledge about the details of our customers.” They are not an exhaustive list of all possible roles but “these six roles cover most of our audience. We created and named the roles to match our internal understanding, mapped our audience and the universe of physicians to our roles to assess market penetration.”
While this is still a work in progress – the Journal is currently conducting a survey to better map medical specialties to these roles and to better determine how attitudes and behaviors vary by role – the Journal has already seen benefits. The Journal can now monitor behavioral changes by role and create specific solutions for changing needs. “A greater understanding of our customer makes our work easier, makes market research easier. We can design projects easier. We can talk from department to department with a common language about our customers; we can share research results from department to department.” Where before nobody else would look at the reports, because they were too specific to one department’s point of view, now the reports are broadly useful. “This adds longevity to our research and makes it useful longer.”
As Ann concluded, “We needed to step back and relearn how we think about our audience and their needs. We needed to change the mindset of the product development team, so that they would talk to market research ahead of time. It is critical to understand the challenges our audience of physicians faces in order to support them throughout their career.”