What Sanjeev Chopra teaches about brand purpose

Unlike any other consumer who's there for any other category of brands, there is enough and more data which is available in terms of the insights, the behavior, the decision-making pattern of that consumer. Hi Sanjeev. So advertising in the healthcare space carries a lot of responsibility. How do you address this?

See healthcare space as such has been bound by so many regulations which had been laid down. So automatically it becomes a discipline category. But yes you are right that whatever information goes out in public to the patients or to the consumers have to be validated. And here is where there is responsibility that as healthcare communication agencies to get information from doctors, validate information from doctors and the other healthcare professionals before it is being rolled out in the public or even to you know the general masses.

How do you see the landscape of healthcare communication evolving in India? Do you see any like a radical change or a marked change? So healthcare communication is really evolving over a period of time because this whole thing started with that earlier brands were more consumer brands which were advertising and content was being created for that.

So healthcare communication is the prescription brands which was more out for the consumers. The other side of healthcare communication is the prescription brands which initially was targeting you know very simple communication which was just in the problem and solution mode. But today more and more brands which are also prescription brands they are taking larger grounds in terms of communicating that.

So let's say it is not just promoting my brand or my brand is better than the other. It is not just promoting that this is the problem which my brand will be solving. But it is a larger context which the brand will be helping out which we find most of the consumer brands are doing. So even prescription brands are picking up those kind of initiatives. If you have to talk about the top two landmark campaigns in the healthcare space that have become benchmarks today what would they be?

See I would say that there is a recent campaign which we did for one of our clients and primarily the objective of this campaign to was to promote vitamin D you know make people aware of the vitamin D deficiency which is very common and particularly amongst kids in India. We all know that the biggest source of this vitamin D3 is sunlight and the second part which we picked on was an interesting study which came in.

This study showed that the effective sunlight time is during the noon time which was a radical shift between what the earlier perception was that early morning sunlight was important. Right. And we created a campaign which was meant for kids which was rolled out in schools which was known as noon assembly which means the traditional way of having assemblies in school was early morning but we shifted that timing.

So it all required was just to change the timetable of the kid and spend those 15-20 minutes in the sunlight so that they get the maximum absorption of vitamin D. A little bit about sector focused agencies how successful is the model? So I think for healthcare has two legs to it as I said earlier one is where there is HCP focus communication which happens and the other is consumer focus communication.

The HCP focus communication and there is where a specialized agencies have come into picture is very important because see unlike any other consumer who is there for any other category of brands. There is enough and more data which is available in terms of the insights the behavior the decision making pattern of that consumer. The second part is that again this part of healthcare is very regulated. It is very scientific and the duty of a healthcare agency communication agency is to marry that science with creativity.

Now until unless the person understands that you know it becomes very difficult for creating concepts or campaigns around it. So hence it is very important that the sector focus agency takes up the mandate because then a they are well versed with the regulatory, they are well versed with the insights with the of the doctors and also they are well versed with the science part of it. Do you think high regulations and lack of specialized talent make healthcare advertising challenging?

Absolutely regulation is a norm regulation is something where healthcare communication has to work and that's the framework. But what happens is when you have specialized talent when you have doctors when you have creative people who have experience of working on healthcare brands when you have talent in terms of the planners who are well versed with the creative side when you have the servicing people the account management team who are able to understand talk the same language as the client.

The brief is bound to get right and the output hence is bound to get right. So, I would say that regulation yes is there, but when people understand it if they have the right kind of talent then the things become very simple and you know you get the brief right at the first go.