We see them everyday on pretty much every site we visit…except for pharma. We often use them to make decisions about what products we buy and which we keep buying…except for pharma. We give our opinion to manufacturers, as the people who know what the product really does, to help them improve…except for pharma.

I’m talking about the product review. If you have bought anything online or researched a future purchase online, chances are that you referenced user-created product reviews. It’s becoming fairly standard practice for most companies, as they’ve come to realize that this is pretty much an expected feature among today’s consumer. But it wasn’t always this way. (note: I mentioned product reviews in my article “The Myth of Adverse Event Reporting.”)

One of the big reasons that product reviews were slow to appear for a long time is that companies were afraid of negative reviews. It turns out, of course, that simply having reviews can increase traffic, conversion rate, and average order value (see more detail here). In addition, negative reviews aren’t an issue so long as there aren’t only negative reviews.  Consider this situation. You’re checking out a product online and all the reviews are glowing. What do you think about that? You’d probably feel like the results might not be all that authentic. Instead, when there are negative reviews, it actually can lend credibility to the product (and site) because people know the reviews are actually genuine. Negative reviews don’t immediately turn people off. They read them and consider whether the negative would actually bother them. For example, someone ranks a product 1-star and says “this didn’t work on my Mac.” Well, if you have a PC, you aren’t worried. Simple example, but you see how it works.

AdAge just published an article about product reviews with a great title (good article, too): “Forget Twitter; Your Best Marketing Tool Is the Humble Product Review.” This title says it all. We’re talking an awful lot about Twitter lately, but let’s get back to the basics. Yes, it’s important to monitor Twitter to see what people are saying about your brand, but if you’re expecting some major insight or great new idea, you’re looking in the wrong place. AdAge quotes Sam Decker, CMO of Bazaarvoice, a” company that manages product-review platforms:” “His offline analogy is a room where everyone is there to talk about your product [product reviews] vs. a room where they are there to talk about anything [Twitter].” Tough to find the important conversations about a specific product in the latter.

Product reviews have become so mainstream and so important in brand consideration that many companies use product reviews received online in their offline advertising. Makes sense, right? If product reviews drive conversion rates and increase order values, why not advertise your reviews?  Best Buy was one of the first to do this. Bazaarvoice’s blog (company CMO quoted above) had a good article about this and reprinted this example picture of a Best Buy Sunday circular:

With all of this increased adoption of product reviews (and increased sales from them), are any pharma companies using product reviews on their sites? I haven’t found one, so please correct me if I missed one. I’ve seen content reviews, where users can rate thumbs up or thumbs down or assign a number of stars to a specific article or page, but not product reviews. At least, I haven’t seen them on pharma websites. But reviews of pharma products do exist. Meet iGuard. iGuard has user ratings on thousands of drugs including aggregated stats and comments. As an example, you can view the profile for Lipitor on iGuard here (registration required).  Here are some of the overall ratings for Lipitor:

But, how reliable is this information? The Lipitor ratings are based on 45,430 surveys sent out by iGuard (more on their process here). That’s a pretty good sample to me. iGuard also collects information about what patients wish they knew about the drug before they started. For Lipitor, 18% wish they were told more before starting treatment. iGuard used to include what specifically people wished they knew in the drug profiles, but it appears that they no longer post this information. My guess would be that they would be more than happy to sell you the information. This is a great opportunity to figure out what to include in future patient educational efforts.

There are also 80 comments (i.e., product reviews on the site). That’s going to tell you a lot about Lipitor. I’m going to warn you right now, the comments aren’t pretty overall and do include quite a few “adverse events,” but there are some great comments as well. Here’s a sample of each:

“I have taken lipitor for many years and have recently developed chronic inflammation of the pancreas and a triclycercide count of 636. I am not overweight at all, don’t drink, exercise and eat healthy. Can lipitor cause this.? [note: comment unedited]“

“I am a 62 year old female who with out this I can not walk to shop or any thing in my home that took any being on a step stool or walking in my home, now I can walk 8miles to do shopping, do the shopping & with a full 4 wheel personal cart walk back. [note: comment unedited]“

Yes, you will have to deal with adverse events if you go with product reviews. With a simple process, you can moderate every comment and deal with it appropriately. It’s ironic that pharma companies always cite this issue of adverse events when it comes to getting feedback from patients particularly when discussions about social media come up. However, at the same time, more and more companies are voluntarily adding links (which I bet will be required soon enough) to the FDA website and a phone number encouraging people to report adverse events directly to the FDA. This tells me that pharma companies aren’t necessarily afraid of what they might hear, but rather that they simply don’t want to deal with the information. That is, they don’t want to create a process to deal with it. But all these companies already have processes in place for adverse event reporting. An electronic version would flow quite simply into this. Also, keep in mind that you aren’t required to post every comment or review on your site. Those that are inappropriate (not just negative, but contain rants or foul language, for example) can be taken out. You simply need to ensure that you are transparent about your policy on how you moderate comments and which you post and which you don’t.

So, how is adding product reviews going to help you sell more of your product? One of the first things they teach you in sales and marketing is that a customer saying “no” to your sales pitch isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The reason why is because, with some questions, you can figure out why they aren’t interested, and deal with these issues. But going through all of this effort is very expensive. Just look at the budgets pharma companies allocate for field sales teams if you don’t agree. When it comes to pharma, or any industry, keeping your current customers is always cheaper than finding new ones. The people writing reviews on iGuard, for example, are already on your product. You’ve spent money on DTC TV, iMedia, the sales team, print ads, and a thousand other tactics, but now you’re about to lose them. Unless you don’t.

When comments are on a 3rd party site like iGuard instead of your own, you can’t be involved in the conversation. Imagine instead that they were on your site. This would allow you to do two things. Since you would require people to register to leave a comment (and you would), they also would provide their contact information. You can ask them if they’d like someone to contact them about their issue when they sign up. In this case, when someone posts a review saying they are having a certain side effect, you can do something to keep them on your product. Chances are that if this patient doesn’t get an answer, they’ll stop your treatment. So, you can have a nurse or other professional call and talk about the person’s issue. You can even go so far as to contact with the person’s doctor (with his or her permission) and explain the problem. The doctor can then follow up with appropriate actions like dosage adjustments, side effect management, or, where necessary, switching the patient to something different.

Think for a minute how this would be perceived by the medical community and patients. Wouldn’t doctors like to know when their patients are having a problem with their medication? As you know, patients aren’t always forthcoming with this information, as many simply stop treatment on their own before talking with their doctor. So wouldn’t this be a really valuable service? Wouldn’t this also give you an opportunity to talk with the doctor about your brands? I’m not saying you should “detail” the doctor when you make one of these calls, but you would be sharing relevant clinical data about the product during your conversation such as side effect rates and efficacy. This would certainly keep your products top of mind in a meaningful way. As for patients, they’d also find this service useful. Sometimes they don’t know how to communicate effectively with their doctors. Maybe you can bridge this gap.

This is one way that pharma companies can start doing Marketing with Meaning instead of trying to get people’s attention via interruptive  advertising that people are tuning out. It’s not without complications and it would take a unified effort across a number of different divisions in a pharma company to make this happen, but it would be worth it. The impact you could have on physicians and patients would be far larger than any investment and could go a long way to changing the perception of pharma in the public’s eye.

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. One More Reason Pharma Needs Product Reviews
2. DFC: The New DTC
3. The Myth of Adverse Event Reporting