Healthcare communications and marketing news and information

Fact I: The Bible is the best selling book of all time.  

Fact II: The Bible is the best selling book each and every year.  

These facts are even more surprising when one realizes that a Bible is present in 91 percent of all American homes.  How in the world can a book with so much market penetration achieve nearly $500 million in sales annually?  The answer: The Long Tail.  

Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail has captured imaginations across the business world and beyond.  His thesis: “Popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.”  When taken together, niche products can rack up significant sales equaling or surpassing those generated by hits.

In a fascinating article published in the New Yorker recently, Daniel Radosh outlines how Bible manufacturers have been long used Long Tail thinking to stoke demand for the Good Book.  They do it be developing and selling Bibles targeted to niche audiences.

According to the article, publishers have developed Bibles to satisfy every taste, from the teen-girl magazine themed “Revolve” to the kid-friendly “The Super Heroes Bible: The Quest for Good Over Evil.”  Marketers looking for ways to demonstrate The Long Tail concepts to peers should look no further than the Bible market. Consider this passage from the article:

“The [distinctions between Bibles] points to one way in which publishers sell multiple copies of the Bible to the same customers . . . [According to Wayne Hastings publisher for Thomas Nelson Publishers Bible division]: ‘Look at satellite radio – what is that, a hundred and seventy-eight stations?  And it’s all niched.  Where doing the same thing in Bibles.’”

The Long Tail & Medical Care  

Robert M. Centor, MD who writes DB’s Medical Rants has spent a lot of time examining how The Long Tail concept applies to medical care.  He believes that there are a lot more Long Tail diseases than popular ones and that physicians should spend time considering whether their patients have niche conditions.

The Long Tail also has applications for other aspects of medical care – particularly the safety and efficacy of prescription drugs.  An adverse effect that only affects a small percentage of patients can be serious enough to cause the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to slap a black box on a drug’s label.    

Some companies, particularly Genzyme, have become very profitable by developing drugs for people with Long Tail illnesses.  Consider this:

- Genzyme’s Cerezyme is one of the only treatments for people with the rare disorder Gaucher’s disease

- Last spring, the FDA approved Myozyme for the first treatment for Pompe’s, a muscle wasting condition

- Aldurazyme is the first and only treatment for mucopolysaccharidosis I (MPS I), a genetic disease that affects approximately 3,000 to 4,000 people worldwide.

Treatments for rare illnesses are difficult and expensive to develop.  This is one reason why Genzyme breaks Rule #2 of Anderson’s Long Tail business strategy: “Cut the price in half, now lower it.”  For example, it can cost $200,000 per patient per year to treat Gaucher’s.  Genzyme has come under criticism for its pricing strategies.  However, the company asserts that it has never denied a drug to a patient who can’t afford it. (I’ll be covering Genzyme extensively early next year in a special series I’ve been developing over the past few months.)  

The Long Tail & Healthcare Marketing

Big Pharma has been criticized for developing and implementing a business model that relies on blockbuster medications to drive revenues and lift profits.  After Pfizer pulled the plug on its “good” cholesterol raiser torcetrapib, some analysts wondered if the $800 million the company spent to test it should have been dedicated to the development of drugs targeted toward smaller markets.  In a sense they were asking if a Long Tail strategy might work better for drug companies as it would help them to diversify and expose them to much less risk. 

If drug firms were to pursue the Long Tail strategy, would marketers be able to adjust?  Maybe so, maybe not.  In some respects, pharmaceutical marketing is already about targeting the niche customer.  Companies routinely segment the market into “customer types,” or groups of people who will be more willing to prescribe or ask for a product.  However, companies are also wedded to large-scale marketing efforts like advertising campaigns that drive patients into the doctor’s office.  It remains to be seen whether drug firms companies will be able to leverage the Internet and other channels that have been shown to be an effective means of reaching niche audiences.

As always, your  comments are welcome.