A Sound Strategy That Healthcare Marketers Could Learn from Colin Powell

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Ideas you can use.

Colin Powell’s rule for decisions: act with between 40 and 70 percent of the information you need. Decide with less than 40 percent and your chances of being right aren’t very good; wait for more than 70 percent and the window of opportunity closes. In markets that move this fast, the rule has never rung truer.

Applied to pre-marketing research, most clients focus on three areas. Product benefit evaluation tests how the market responds to benefit statements — quantitative results in days, where earlier qualitative work risked too-small samples. Competitive comparison doubles as a brand awareness study, adding unaided category-leadership questions to show how you rank. Message testing is the biggest use: concepts from asset topics to sales-pitch approaches can be tested in about 30 days — excellent insurance before a launch spends real money, provided the test is designed to look like a legitimate email, not a questionnaire.

You don’t need 100 percent assurance. You need confidence based on something other than opinion.