Episode 296 / Filip De Groeve / Keynote Speaker & Ex-Marketing Director
Finding the Story & the Emotion Behind the Data
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After training as a pharmacist, Filip de Groeve discovered marketing and was hooked. He has subsequently built a successful career in pharmaceuticals, food supplements, and medical devices. His Shiny New Object is finding the story.
In the world of pharmaceuticals and medical products marketing, connecting data with a story is likely to reach and engage more consumers. This is why at Coloplast, Filip delved into the story behind the data to understand exactly how consumers were using their products and what would determine others to buy, too.
This is not just his Shiny New Object, but also closely linked to his top data driven marketing tip. Filip thinks quantitative insights work better when used with qualitative data. This means finding the emotion, and the best way to do this is by listening to what the call centre has to share.
“Call centres are the perfect source for this information and for finding the emotion that people are showing.”
Learn more about using qualitative sources of information, how to find stories to link with your marketing launches, and how marketing is like warfare, by tuning in to Filip’s podcast episode.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Filip de Groeve 0:00
They managed to compare simple marketing warfare with positioning of your company. Am I a market leader? Am I second or third in the market? Am I a challenger for example?
Speaker 0:18
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Tom Ollerton 0:50
Hello and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of Automated Creative, the creative effectiveness ad tech platform. And this is a podcast about the future of data driven marketing. Every week or so I have the pleasure and the privilege of interview one of our industry's leaders, and today I am in Utrecht. I think I'm vaguely saying that right? And I am here because I'm sat in the kitchen of someone who I can't really pronounce his name's Filip. Is it Filip De Groeve?
Filip de Groeve 1:23
Yeah, quite well. Yeah. Well done.
Tom Ollerton 1:25
Come on, give it to me.
Filip de Groeve 1:26
Well done. Filip De Groeve, indeed.
Tom Ollerton 1:29
You know, I always try. I always try. Filip is a marketing director, Benelux, at Coloplast. So Filip, for anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do, can you give us a bit of background?
Filip de Groeve 1:39
I'm Filip, born in Belgium, living now in the Netherlands. I'm a pharmacist by training, but I fell in love quickly with marketing, and since I've always been working in in marketing and mainly pharmaceutical companies, food supplements, Infant Nutrition, and now Coloplast medical devices.
Tom Ollerton 1:59
And what was your "I love marketing" moment, because I was quite the shift from the pharmacist to a marketing what was that moment where you're like, I need to do that?
Filip de Groeve 2:08
It's after my studies as pharmacist. I had one year of business management that I followed in Brussels, and it was at that moment that I first came into contact with marketing. And what I liked about that part, what was the aha moment, was probably the moment that we had to start up a business, and we had to think about simply communication. How would we communicate our product and the thinking behind, how would we position ourselves versus competitors. That first thing I was like, Oh, you have people thinking about this, how you would position yourself. You need to know if you, if you have a pharmacist in Belgium, for example, it's not allowed to make advertising for your pharmacy. There's some some professions like lawyers or or pharmacists or doctors, they cannot do advertising for themselves, so everybody's the same. Let's say so the whole aspect of marketing doesn't appear for doctors and pharmacists. And that was for me, then sounds like quite a new world opening.
Tom Ollerton 2:40
Sounds like quite an easy exercise then, if you can't do it, you're like...
Filip de Groeve 3:23
Yeah, it's an easy actually, you don't have to do the positioning exercise. Then, Yeah, indeed, yeah.
Tom Ollerton 3:28
I had a realisation that I could, I could do stuff on Facebook all day. I was like, Oh, I could actually get paid for that. I was close, yeah. 17 years ago, I was just like, really, is that a job? You can just mess around and come up with ideas of Facebook? I thought that was brilliant. So pharmacist by training, one year, business management, had your eureka moment when you when you realised you could combine the your knowledge with your with your creativity. But are you a reader of marketing books? Do you have a book you can recommend?
Filip de Groeve 3:57
Yeah, I have tonnes of book upstairs, if you want. I can kind of show to you, yes, but yes, and I also recommend my team to read quite often marketing or management books. The book that I would propose to everyone that I meet is in fact, something that I recommended quite often in my early careers, and that was also recommended to me by one of my mentors, let's say, in my early careers. And that's a marketing warfare. Marketing warfare is a very, very old book. You can just today download it for free because it's so such an old book, right from Al Ries and Jack trout and those two guys, they managed to compare simple marketing warfare with, let's say, positioning of your company, and that was such an eye opener for me that you can say, am I a market leader? Am I second or third in the market? Am I a challenger? For example, it forces you to think, where are you in the market? Are you the market leader? And do you then have a defensive strategy? Are you the second and third in the market? Do you have an aggressive strategy? Are you only a small player? Do you, for example, do some guerrilla marketing, and are you a mediocre player, bigger than the small ones, but let's say 15 in the market. Do you have, then a strategy to attack in the flanks? And the whole comparison between where are you in the market and what's your strategy to gain market share? That's a very nice book to read, and the fact that the book is already so old also shows that the examples that the book has are still valid today.
Tom Ollerton 5:54
So someone's gonna like this idea, but not get round to reading it. So you've talked about, know where you are in the market, and then using that knowledge of that position to come up with strategies and tactics to gain market share. Like, can you remember some of the examples? Or how have you used that intelligence? Help me kind of flick through a few pages here. What else is in that?
Filip de Groeve 6:15
Yeah. So imagine that you are, for example, the market leader in your market, and you need to have a defensive strategy. And sometimes, many people don't understand that if they work for the market leaders, that the defensive strategy means, for example, that you're not obliged to, for example, invest in innovations. You have the luxury to look from your top of the pyramid, I would say, and you can see which company is innovating, and at that moment, you, as a market leader, can decide, I'll copy, or I buy, because that's the position that you have in the market. That's not something that you can do if you're a smaller player. That's not something that you can do if you're the third or the fourth in the market. Then you need to gain market share, for example, through innovation and to come up with it yourself. But if you're the market leader, for example, you have that luxury. And I often see, very often, people in market leading companies that are a little bit frustrated because they have good ideas and they have great new ideas. But perhaps those ideas are not needed to defend your market share, or even to gain market share.
Tom Ollerton 7:23
Yeah. Well, I mean, that's classic Facebook, isn't it? Someone said to me that Facebook aren't a particularly innovative business. Yet, it's really good at acquiring.
Filip de Groeve 7:31
Yeah, yeah, but that's the position that they have in the market. They don't have to do that. It would be for them be a big, little bit too big a risk to say: Let's innovate and create 10 new platforms with 10 new ideas. No, it's for them better to watch out of the 10 which is working, and then acquire them.
Tom Ollerton 7:51
It does make me a little sad though. You know, you see companies that I use and adore, things like Calendly, you know the link that I sent out, just, yeah, it's just such a great and then you see Google come up with a copycat. And you think, some, some poor founder and his, you know, his exec team have been working all night, all weekend, and someone like Google goes, should we copy them? Okay, yeah, get it, done.
Filip de Groeve 8:15
Yeah, that's, that's what happens, of course.
Tom Ollerton 8:18
That is business, of course.
Filip de Groeve 8:19
That's business, you know, but it makes the people also understand why you do something.
Tom Ollerton 8:23
What do you mean?
Filip de Groeve 8:24
For example, you if you work for a market leading company, sometimes you hear marketeers or people in product development being frustrated that there's not enough money for innovation or for new trying new things. But as a market leader, perhaps you don't have to do that.
Tom Ollerton 8:41
Indeed. Well, look, you've got me thinking about that. We've kind of gone slightly off topic, but that's fine. And Marketing Warfare, you can get on Amazon and just notice, what's your best bit of data driven marketing advice? What is that one line, that kind of silver bullet, bit of advice that you find yourself sharing most often with your team?
Filip de Groeve 8:59
Go into the data and find the emotion. If you have a lot of data, and it's also links with what we will later discuss, of course, but you need to collect the data to be able to create content afterwards that has a certain emotion that will then again drive data. It's difficult to explain.
Tom Ollerton 9:26
It's a podcast. It's a kind of explaining mediums. So the stage is yours.
Filip de Groeve 9:33
No. Imagine that you have a database of, let's say, 10,000 people, and you have names and you have records and etc. If you don't have any fields in that data that they also say something about, in our case, a disease or the problem or the issue that the person is having, and then you cannot really do a lot of new content creation with the data that you have. And. What we, for example, at Coloplast do pretty well is we have the data, but we also have a call centre, and the call centre is an tremendous, good place to enrich the data with emotions. Then it's up to the marketeers, of course, to digest all the information that is in but with the tools that you have today, that's that's pretty easy, and then you can find the perfect, let's say, emotion or insight, that you need for your new launch, for your new campaign, and then you can immediately even contact those people and do some new marketing materials with it, but first of all, try to enrich your data with qualitative data. Let's say that's probably how we call it. But call centres are the perfect source for these for this information and find the emotion that the people are showing, is it a happy emotion? Is frustration? Is it a problem that they always have? Is it's, I don't know what all the things pop up in your in your call centre.
Tom Ollerton 11:19
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So I'm quite proud to say this, although it nearly killed me. Well, a book will be published that I've written in September that looks at data, creativity and advertising, and that was one of my biggest learnings. I went into the book going, right, this book's about data and creativity. Yeah, let's let AI do this. Here's the black and white data. But what came back from all the experts I interviewed was largely that point that actually, you need, okay, you need to find the emotion, it's the humour, it's the qual, it's the qual in parallel with the quant that works. If you just look at the world from a quant perspective, which is very much a platform point of view, you know, you've got, here's your... if you only look to Google Analytics, then you'd basically be, you know, looking at your audience with like, you know, smudged glasses, right? You know what I mean, it's, it's not the whole thing. And so it's really reassuring to hear that from your perspective as well. But let's kind of go a bit deeper. So your shiny new object is finding the story, yes, which I guess is similar to finding the emotion. But kind of, give me a, give me a mini masterclass on that, right? So you talked about the call centre. You've got, you've got human beings saying real things, presumably, that can get transcribed and then whacked into whatever safe AI to produce, out and spot things that aren't obvious. To see, it's easy to say, find the find the story. But how would you actually do it?
Filip de Groeve 13:20
Yes, let's, let's, let's move into something very practical. In general, companies, when they have new launches or new products, they know that many years upfront, at least two years up front, you know, we will have that innovation, and it will do this, and very often it will be a very technical person and a very medical oriented person that will tell you how your this new product will decrease infections or the or something else with a certain percentage. So it's very dry information that you're getting. What you then can do as a marketeer is go to your database and say, Hmm, for who in my database, will this be of interest? You can then try to enrich these people's data and see how active they are. Do they react on, for example, a survey, and in that survey, you can easily ask questions like, how do you perceive now sleeping? How do you feel after a day of not sleeping? What do you worry about during the day if you didn't sleep, for example, and etc? So you can specifically on the product that you have ask questions that will drive you towards people that have a tremendous interesting story, then you don't have that story yet. Because if you, if you do that survey and you find those interesting people, then you still need to invite them in focus groups on events, on, for example, congresses, if you organise congresses for in our case, patients or consumers, but the easiest way to get those stories out of those people is on nice events. For example, we at Coloplast we organise also day at the beach. And the weather is now really nice. It would be lovely to invite 40 patients of you at the beach, invite them for a coffee, a cake, and perhaps also some activities on the beach. At that moment, you will discover that people are so open to talk amongst them, because they will quickly see, oh, we have the same problem. We have the same issue, and they will easily share all kinds of wonderful stories with you, and then those stories come your new content for your new launch products. But then, of course, what you can do is link that story with quant data. For example, person X can't sleep at night, and 70% of the patients have the same problem. What about you? We have the solution, and you have done a full story at the launch ready, not only from that one person, but because you send it a survey to everybody in your database that is of interest, all those people will immediately be contacted with that story. So you immediately need, not only did you create but you also prepared your database for that story.
Tom Ollerton 16:28
I've just got a really complicated image in my head, right, of of a group of people who all have the same condition have been invited to the beach.
Filip de Groeve 16:36
That's, of course, in in our, in our in our business, the case.
Tom Ollerton 16:38
Yeah, of course, of course. So there's a group of people who every so this is needlessly practical. I just need to get so you send an email, these people are you suffer from ABC? Would you like to hang out with 40 other people who also suffer for ABC on the beach?
Filip de Groeve 16:55
They don't know that necessarily, necessarily from each other.
Tom Ollerton 16:59
So what's the premise, like, how to get these people to the beach? Like, how does that? What's the hook?
Filip de Groeve 17:04
Yes, yes, indeed. Of course, the idea you will see, we offer you a community of people with the same problem, people probably also from the same age group, people with the same issues, but not with the same let's say problem on the emotional level. It's not because you can't sleep. That's, for example, your marriage is a is also a disaster. So so sleeping disorder, sleeping problems, they lead to 20, 30, other problems. But the people will talk, and we'll see, oh, it's because you can't sleep, and it's because you're doing and, for example.
Tom Ollerton 17:47
So, so you get people to meet collectively around a topic, and you pay for all the tickets you'll go at the beach, and they're having a great time. So then are you, like, stood there with a microphone or a clipboard, like, how do you, how do you capture those stories?
Filip de Groeve 17:59
And then then you invite your team, and you have your marketing team. We also invite our call centre, and then we just join them in the activities in the in the things in the drinking, in the eating, in the pleasant. And then people start talking, and then we note down who has an interesting story,
Tom Ollerton 18:19
Right. I would love to come to one of these. I've never heard of anything like that. That's absolutely fantastic. Yeah, brilliant. Sorry, sorry, I just had a really odd image of people playing beach volley, and you with a clipboard writing everything down that they say, which isn't what happened. So, no, I get that.
Filip de Groeve 18:36
No, it's all very natural that people don't have the feeling that we are digging into their lives. But sometimes...
Tom Ollerton 18:43
But you are.
Filip de Groeve 18:43
Yeah, but sometimes, for example, you're looking for a testimonial, I'm saying, for somebody with a different religion that you normally have. And then, of this event, if you see them one person or two persons with, for example, a different religion, then you say, Oh, that's interesting. I will certainly go listen to their story and see if they have an interesting story and whether you can do something with it. So of course, your mind is set on specific people, for example, a wheelchair patients, or perhaps a couple with the same condition. Or you always have coincidences that that happen, and then you find the stories, and finding that story out from your data, that's, that's, that's so essential, and if you do it with surveys to all the people that are of interest into and of course, only at that event, 5% is perhaps present, but you prepared all the others with questions on the launch so you can also individually say to those people you in the survey answered this. We have now the solution.
Tom Ollerton 19:59
At the start of this interview, you put a magazine down on the table, and you said, That's my shiny new object. Obviously this is an audio only podcast, and there's a there's a magazine on the table. Why is that your shiny new object? What's what was there?
Filip de Groeve 20:15
Because if you... we are a pretty big organisation, so we do a lot of work with data, and we have, let's say, 100,000 active consents, names in the database that we work with, and that over different divisions and etc. But the most important thing is and also to collect those stories and these magazines are full of only the stories that we collected. And making these magazines makes it and again, interesting for nurses, for other new patients, for patient organisations to also share this information. And of course there are again, name catchers, as we say it, as we call it, new requests. So if you want this magazine, if you want to have more information on this, please contact us, go to the website, and then the new consumers enter again your database, because they really want to see more out of it, and they wanted so the magazine is not only the collection of all these stories, it's, again, a name catcher for the new people in your database.
Tom Ollerton 21:31
By name catch, you mean data capture. Data Capture. Name catcher. Name catcher sounds bit more romantic.
Filip de Groeve 21:41
For us, we have different name catches as services, magazines or other brochures that we have, and most important data catcher that we have is that we have a website with all our products, and every product can be tested for free by our patients. So every patient or consumer that wants to test our products can go to the website, give his data, and they can exchange for the data. They get a product for free.
Tom Ollerton 22:08
So Filip, unfortunately, we have to leave it there. That was... that went somewhere I was not expecting and thank you. If someone wants to get in touch with you and send you a message, what goes into a message that you will actually reply to.
Filip de Groeve 22:24
Yeah, LinkedIn is, for me, always the easiest way. And if it's interesting, then they'll get this Calendly invite. And then normally, what I do...
Tom Ollerton 22:32
Come on, what makes it interesting? What makes an interesting message?
Filip de Groeve 22:39
The most interesting message to start. I've heard you saying this. That's that's the most interesting. No, I read every message, in fact, on LinkedIn, but I don't reply if it's again, the so many years person that wants to sell me something, and then, very easy, I use my time in the car to have every day one call with somebody, so people, if it's a student, that needs something, then then I say, yes, my Calendly is set. And between 830 and nine, I'm in my car, and you can call. And for me, that's a new source of inspiration and against my loneliness in the car. And sometimes it is. Sometimes it's a person that wants to sell me something, and sometimes it's even a student that wants to learn something.
Tom Ollerton 23:37
Filip, thank you so much for your time.
Unknown Speaker 23:38
So I missed all the times I reply within a simple Calendly invite like you mentioned earlier, also thanks for the time. Tom it was nice inviting you over here in Utrecht.
Tom Ollerton 23:51
Mate, it's been there's no way I would ever have come here otherwise, so yeah, what a lovely experience. I really appreciate your time.
Filip de Groeve 23:58
Thank you very much.
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