Influence
One of the most important terms in marketing is ‘influence’. Why? Because the job of the marketer is to identify who’s motivated to achieve something relevant to what the business needs and then to attempt to influence this person leading to value back to both.
But we don’t talk a lot about influence, why?
We talk about ‘products’, ‘benefits’, ‘strengths’, ‘market share’ and ‘differentiation’. But these terms make everything about us.
If I’m a marketer spending most of my time talking about my product, I’m seeing the product as my main influence on the market, but is it?
Sometimes .. but let me share two examples:
According to the World Health Organization’s Social Determinants of Health only 11% of positive of health outcomes are attributed to medical treatment, of that maybe a tenth or less is attributed to the physical pharmaceutical product.
Which means that you could be the worlds best product marketer, you could be leagues in front of any competitor, but you would still only be able to improve your influence inside a 10th of 11% of the market.
Another example is when we researched treatment pathways using openly available research which was not our own. When we looked at what influenced the successful treatment of a patient, we found no, zero, reference to either pharmaceutical products or the industry.
These aren’t proof, but I hope they invite a reflection that it’s easy to over estimate the product’s influence and under estimate other influences we could pull on to achieve what we want.
Which is why I think ‘influence’ as a term is so important.
Because it creates a healthy distance to the product in order for us to better see how we can achieve what we need through immediate or long-term, direct and indirect, low hanging or massively ambitious efforts. And it gives us an opportunity to better see the customer and what leads to what they need, which is what they are willing to pay for.
