How Philips' Market Intelligence Strategy is Helping to Drive Sales
Philips Healthcare has teamed up with m-Brain to implement its new intelligence plaza. Using digital technology they hope to gain greater insight into the market and drive more intelligent marketing in the medical device industry.
The Intelligence Plaza
Intelligence Plaza is a market intelligence platform which is designed to give Philips Healthcare unprecedented insight into the medical device industry and develop new strategies based on real-time data and knowledge.
“PHID is A global platform for knowledge transfer between various organisations within PCCI, a two billion EUR business within Philips Healthcare that consists of nine Business Units and over 30 individual businesses,” said Director of Market Intelligence, Patient Care & Clinical Informatics (PCCI) at Philips Healthcare, Daniel Cho. “In the past, managing communications and knowledge transfer was a very complex task, as we have a very complex matrix organisation in the markets, and they serve many different businesses within Philips.”
The platform uses a combination of in-house artificial intelligence analysis and human relevance screening, classifying billions of online documents and continuously improving its capabilities through data enhancement.
The Intelligence platform can curate the best and most relevant news from within the medical device industry and deliver it to the people who need to read it. This helps Philips Healthcare stay on top of the latest developments in the industry and use that knowledge to drive its marketing decisions.
“Some of our external partners also found it difficult to obtain real time information from Philips to help them drive their business,” added Cho. “So, we have developed PHID, which is a combination of real time News Alerts for Industry, Competitors, and Market Movements; as well as a well-organised database for useful customer presentations, sales tools, Market research reports and other useful documentation to help people manage their business.”
Another way in which the Philips Intelligence Plaza helps the company develop better marketing strategies is though the development of complex and detailed profiles. These profiles are not simply developed regarding customers – as in with buyer personas – but also featuring Philips’ competitors. By analysing competitor profiles, Philips Healthcare can quickly and easily draw comparisons and benchmarks between itself and peer companies. Furthermore, it grants the ability to identify the players, both new and old, in your market to watch and who may be presenting an opportunity for valuable market share.
The old adage of keeping one’s friends close but enemies closer would certainly apply here.
Customer profiles help Philips gain a deeper understanding of their customers – both potential and current – and the challenges and pain points they’re experiencing day to day. Once these factors have been identified, marketing strategies can be developed which paint Philips Healthcare as the ideal solution provider to meet them.
“The [platform] also allows us to capture, in real time, sales people’s questions and findings in the market,” said Cho. “For example, we can predict what competition is releasing by learning from rumours in various markets, and able to provide early warning to management and marketing team to prepare for the counter strategy way before the product was launched in public. This allows us to pre-train the sales people to proactively differentiate our solutions, rather than reactively defend their position when encountering new challenges.”
Final Thoughts
All these factors combine to create a suite of data tools which Philips Healthcare can use to empower its marketing teams to create better targeted and more relevant marketing campaigns which really hammer home the brand message in a way which is sure to resonate with its audience.
Market intelligence is the battlefield on which the future of sales and marketing will be fought, and it’s with innovative data platforms such as the Philips Intelligence Plaza which will help big brands swing the war in their favour.
“Now, by simply including them into PHID, we can start capturing new knowledge from these new partners, sharing with them our collections of Intelligence (500,000 EUR worth of secondary research materials in their area of interest), as well as capturing the competitive moves, and provide them with guidelines on how to win deals based on good practices in other successful regions,” concludes Cho. “Management loves the news alerts and are now increasingly choosing them as the only source of news they subscribe to, as each news piece is totally relevant to them.”
Using innovative digital technology to develop next generation market intelligence is set to be a hot topic at MedForce 2019, taking place in June at the nHow Hotel Berlin. Please download the agenda today for more information and insights.