Choosing Words Wisely
by Sarah Stone Wunder
April 2008
Semiotics and the process of studying vocabulary has found a niche in the pharmaceutical industry.
When Pfizer launched Viagra in the late ’90s, the company didn’t launch into the “impotence” market. Instead, it opted for the “erectile dysfunction” market. The two terms might have similar meanings, but according to Dr. Barry Mennen, vice president of medical and scientific affairs at Innovex, in Parsippany, N.J., USA, the difference between the two terms had a significant impact on Viagra’s eventual success.
“They didn’t launch into the impotence market because they didn’t think the term prepared the market for what the drug really did,” Mennen says. “You have to consider how the doctors talk about it. What terminologies work best to help physicians communicate to patients the issue surrounding the drug?”
The idea associated with this thought process—semiotics—isn’t new to the industry, nor is it always identified. However, whether it’s called semiotics, industry research, brand positioning or market preparation, it’s a process that every pharmaceutical company must consider long before clinical trials are complete.
Semiotics Defined
When Innovex works with pharmaceutical companies to prepare new therapies for market, its process includes a service it calls StratSemSM, or strategic semiotics. Innovex defines strategic semiotics as “an iterative process through which the nomenclature and vocabulary of a disease and its therapies are developed and refined in order to best serve the communication and educational needs of a particular brand.”
“It’s felt by myself and many others in the industry that in order to optimally prepare the market, your communications need to be as clear and easily understood as possible,” Mennen says.
When used in the pharmaceutical market, semiotics help establish the way new therapies are communicated to the industry and physicians, not to consumers. Semiotics is not used to name a drug, for example. Those decisions are usually left to branding companies, Mennen says.
“We don’t name the products themselves. We’re not a branding company. However, what we identify will sometimes be used by the branding folks,” he says. “Some of our research will help, but we stop at the scientific terms. Oftentimes the clients are running market research on a parallel track, and the tracks converge. That’s the line we don’t step over.”
Paul Hale, Ph.D., director of global medical affairs at Bristol-Myers Squibb, in Lawrenceville, N.J., USA, uses semiotics to identify scientific terminology, which sometimes bleeds into other areas.
“From a very fundamental aspect, the semiotics exercise gives you the key words and phrases you will use everywhere, but it’s designed from a medical perspective rather than a more commercial perspective.”
When It’s Used
According to Mennen, semiotics is especially helpful when launching a drug into a new category or as the first drug in its class. The process also can help differentiate a later-entry drug and can help alter perceptions about a particular class or category.
“If you’re one of many in a class,” Hale says, “semiotics makes you better able to describe what you and what your therapy represent, whether it’s describing your method of action or ultimate medical benefit.”
According to Mennen, you also need to assess how physicians speak to each other and their patients about the treatment. “There are times the patient-physician dynamic has to be looked at,” Mennen says. “How do they talk about disease? You have to see how they speak to patients.”
To begin this process, Mennen says Innovex asks a series of questions, such as: How do physicians speak to each other about the disease? Does the terminology differ for various therapies for a particular disease state? How do physicians speak to their patients about it? What are the terms used in the medical literature? How do patients speak about it? What does the consumer press say? Are there specific visual symbols?
“Semiotics provides an opportunity to look at vocabulary that you believe will resonate in different regions and with different audiences,” Hale says. “In some cases, it’s a confirmation of what you believe is true or what you’ve vetted only through internal or external discussions.”
The semiotics process should begin as soon as the company heads into Phase III, Mennen says. “It’s a four-to-six month, multi-layered intensive process, but it’s a live process. It doesn’t stop because things change. Certainly we like to have a good sense of where the language is going while they’re in the preparation stage of some manuscripts.”
According to Hale, the earlier you begin the process, the better. That way, the same type of communications and vocabulary is used throughout the process. Starting the process earlier also minimizes the chance that people use many different terms to explain the same aspects of the drug, Hale says, which can lead to confusion.
Hale—who says he’s a “big fan of a non-silo mentality”—says it’s important to make sure many different departments, especially research and development, are involved in the semiotics process. “It’s not just a market research or commercial exercise,” he says. “You need the people working most closely with the drug on the clinical side.”
A Recent Development?
It can be difficult to determine when semiotics entered the pharmaceutical market, says Steve Bliss, global director of marketing also at Innovex. Although it’s become more of a formal exercise over the past few years, the thought process isn’t that new. For example, semiotics has been used in marketing for at least 20 years, but using the process in a medical, scientific way is relatively new, Bliss says.
“It’s one of those ideas that when you go to the client, even if they haven’t heard about it, they say, ‘Well yeah, that makes sense,’” Mennen says. “Even if they don’t call it semiotics, everybody’s thinking about it, all the time.”
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