A Telescope is Better than a Magnifying Glass when Diagnosing Marketing Ills

For life science companies, diagnosing marketing ills can be problematic. This has many potential causes – maybe the company is run by scientists, who might believe that technological superiority is enough (it isn’t). Maybe the organization just doesn’t have much experience in diagnosis. Maybe the situation has changed recently, and what used to work is no longer effective.

Having worked with hundreds of life science companies over the years, we’ve seen lots of individual situations with many marketing challenges. One thing we’ve learned is that using more lenses gives you a better view than using fewer lenses – in other words, a telescope is better than a magnifying glass when diagnosing marketing ills.

What do I mean by using more lenses? Well, you have to look at your specific situation through the lens of your audience(s) to understand how your communications are being received. And you have to look at your specific situation through the lenses of your competitors and your own brand in order to envision how you stack up against them. And you have to look at your specific situation through the lens of external influences to understand how your actions might fit into, for example, the regulatory environment. There are many such lenses and I’ve listed only a few here.

Whether you call them lenses or filters or viewpoints, you have to use many to examine your specific bioscience marketing situation in order to get a clear view. Ignore one or more, and your view will be out of focus.