Consumer Personas: Who Suffers from Allergies?

What do 50 million Americans all have in common?
They suffer from allergies, and as this season gets into full swing we thought it would be a great time to look at an example of how unstructured social data analysis was used to help improve education and messaging to both allergy sufferers and caregivers of those sufferers.
 

Personifying Patients

Everyday, millions of patients, caregivers and HCPs engage on open public online channels and social networks, discussing their healthcare situations, treatment options, side effects, efficacy, lifestyle impact, costs, insurance coverage and much more. To put this into perspective, according to Manhattan Research, almost 170 million US consumers research health information online and over 110 million seek out online information specific to prescription medication.
With these millions of unaided conversations comes a treasure trove of insights and information that can be used to improve outcomes. Today, with advanced technologies and methodologies we have the ability to mine these conversations and apply market research techniques to personify patients like never before. This is not a process of simply classifying posts into segments, but instead using advanced technologies and complex contextual modeling to understand patients decisions, concerns, fears, attitudes, behaviors, actions and challenges, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
This research is ultimately being used by healthcare manufacturers and providers to craft patient messaging, enhance education, improve compliance and efficacy, identify appropriate channels for communication, and improve the overall quality of healthcare resources.
 

Social Studies

Besides the enormous amount of data, social conversations are also completely unguided and genuine. Social market research is a form of ethnography, allowing companies to dive deep into the true emotions, behaviors, and actions of an online user.  The ability to collect, structure, categorize and analyze online discussions gives companies the ability to build genuine, unbiased personas for patients, caregivers, and even healthcare providers, and understand them on a multidimensional level with incredible detail.
In the example below, ListenLogic used contextual modeling to structure and categorize organic social conversations to develop detailed personas of allergy patients for a leading pharmaceutical provider’s brand.

In this case, “Make it Better Moms” were a caregiver type unknown by the treatment provider.  Through all of their primary market research, this large persona type was never identified. “Make it Better Moms” are mothers who are frantic seekers of effective remedies to treat their child’s allergy symptoms, and are a group of consumers that traditionally go to social media forums and health blogs to share information, ask questions, and offer advice.
Behind this analysis, ListenLogic completed a “deep dive” into the persona type, identifying the online channels these mothers were engaging on, the lexicon they used, what questions they asked, their perception of competitors, and reasons for starting, stopping and switching allergy medicines.  From this analysis, recommendations for possible solutions to implement were offered to the pharmaceutical company, including a mobile application for this consumer group, a hashtag campaign to drive users to the correct sources for information, and managed SEO services to improve search outcomes.
 

An Innovative Impact

Today, leading pharmaceutical companies are able to understand their patients using a data set that did not exist 10 years ago, through millions of daily, unbiased patient online and social conversations.
The key to unlocking this valuable patient insight is being able to mine, filter and classify using a combination of sophisticated technology and experienced human analysis to holistically analyze the entire relevant social universe of potentially millions of patients. Successful companies are then able to take the analysis and implement solutions which impact their bottom line.
Robert Gardner
For more information email [email protected]
 
About Anexinet
Anexinet is a leading professional consulting and services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions around digital disruption, analytics (and big data), and hybrid and private cloud strategies. Anexinet brings insight into how technology will impact how business decisions will be made and how our clients interact with their customers in the future.