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Posted by Hexagone team |
April 16, 2021
It’s no secret that digital transformation is key to staying competitive and accelerating growth in a digital-first world. CRM environments capabilities and medical and regulatory requirements are continually changing in the Life Sciences industry as well. Communication channels too. A current example would be the remote engagement in which we are being drawn. Keeping customers engaged through this evolutive cycle of ever-changing environment is work, time consuming and expensive.
In order to be able to fully focus on customer engagement, Pharma organizations need to free themselves from handling tasks and requirements resulting from these continuous movements.
In these times of digital globalization characterized by accelerated technological change and also complexity, more and more Life Sciences organizations have been working in order to reinvent their business processes for the sake of cost-efficiency, speed (time to market) and consistency, by looking for integrated solutions approaches. These approaches are meant to optimize their digital transformation journeys, following trends and changes and to address content management challenges.
One of the challenges that we’ve already mentioned in previous articles was handling heavy digital content development and management workflows resulting from a growing demand for more personalized digital content and various channels of communication.
One of the solutions to tackle this problem is using modularity to produce digital content. Modularity to handle challenges of digital content will take Life Sciences even further up in the game to better serve their entire multichannel strategy.
Few Life Sciences companies have actually welcomed modularity as a digital competitive approach that helps them answer to higher demand in digital content, customers' needs for personalization as well as value-added content and also gain competitive advantage. Modularity seems to have a positive impact on performance.
An easy way to define modularity is using a famous example: LEGO. Who has never played with these plastic toys? They are made with elements that can easily be assembled and reused to develop different things (a car, a tower, a house etc. as far as go our imagination). Now imagine you are using the same concept to create digital content instead. This is modularity in design or modular design.
Modular design combines the advantages of standardization with those of customization. It is a key strategic approach for increasing a Brand team’s ability to respond quickly to sudden changes in a dynamic market.
Actually, modularity should enable Life Sciences firms to boost their growth of digital content with even more consistency and compliance while saving time and money.
It can be seen as a general set of principles/rules within a system that has pre-programmed elements that takes care of the complexity of developing digital content.
This concept has been applied in industrial production but also technological design for websites or eLearning. This approach is no new. It has been there for years especially in the engineering industry. In web design many systems are based on the modularity.
Indeed, the modular design approach in digital marketing content uses components just like a LEGO piece that offers endless possibilities to create and reuse the final desired outcome.
In the end , you have a library of components i.e., content that can be mixed and matched and used and repurposed to accommodate new content as required. Those components can be graphs, key messages, images, etc.
The well-known Master to Localization process is actually based on modular content: HQ delivers digital assets that can be adapted at the local level based on each market’s needs.
In practice, the modular design system offers a set of digital assets (modular content) made of pre-built components that could be reused, adapted etc. as fast as the market goes and at no additional cost! For instance, the content in any CLM presentation can be combined with the content of any other CLM presentation.
The way you arrange modules to create new slides is entirely up to Brand teams or their creative agencies. And as your content needs evolve, you can adapt the existing assets in your library or build completely new ones as required.
Implementing such system within a Life Sciences marketing department will flip the game of creating content from traditional development processes that only offer standalone digital assets that can’t be easily adapted unless you spend a lot of time, money sometimes even redoing things and missing your window of opportunity in the market.
The system also includes common branding components that can be configured at once (like navigation bar settings).
Modularity can also be materialized by implementing a library of compliant validated content that can be pulled from a shared platform and used as long as they are permitted and relevant.: the easiest way to ensure content compliance with the branding strategy and MLR requirements. In digital asset development, it makes pieces of an overall design reusable resulting in greater efficiency and higher speed in the localization process.
It allows a marketing team to adjust more easily and faster your content based on CRM data and preferences of your target audience.
Eventually, within a Life Sciences organization, the system should be considered as a fantastic and consistent foundation laid out for Local teams to create and customize digital content, while Global teams can retain control of the most important branding decisions. For users, modularity makes possible efficient upgrading over the lifetime of a digital campaign for instance.
Deliverables are modular content pieces part of a larger system. Adding or adapting new content is easy. Marketing teams can create new interactive slides on a CLM presentation for instance using the modular design library without always having to involve agency or touch a line of code.
The modular design includes simple design edits like the look of the navigation menu, company or product logo, references and pop-in windows, for example, which would be time consuming to change retroactively using traditional design approaches. But also, compliance edits such as the references that can be easily changed across the whole presentation.
Currently for most of Pharma companies, the end-to-end creation in one system to create digital content is just a daydream.
So, what stops Life Sciences organizations in getting such technology for their businesses? Well, everything that seems simple comes with few challenges.
The reason is simple: in an effort to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible, some companies jump into modular content without considering the bigger picture. They may adopt one tool to solve a problem - and then another solution to tackle possible raising challenges.
Life Sciences organizations need to leverage a modular design-based platform-centric solution that integrates the full spectrum of next-generation authoring capabilities providing configuration options.
Being platform-centric is basically using a single solution ecosystem that has features and capabilities to transform and optimize processes. It breaks down the silos of disparate / disconnected traditional processes for more efficient and effective centralized design. It offers more agility, alignment, simplicity to organizations and drives innovation.
A modular design approach is essentially a strategy for providing a solution to an unstructured design problem: 1 consistency, 2 compliance, 3 efficiency, 4 time to market, and 5 cost.
A downside to modularity is that some modular systems are not optimized for performance. If it doesn’t answer to all these 5 key issues stated above, then it should be reconsidered.
Useable modules have to be flexible which requires the right format to allow for adaptation. For instance, modular content cannot be encapsulated in an image format. What’s the point then? Whether they’re based on validated marketing strategy, or pre-approved components, they should all be built with the ability to change in mind. Because in Pharma, the regulatory and medical requirements oblige you to submit content every time anyway.
Modular content should allow to reuse content that is compliant in terms of branding, common regulatory rules like the logos etc. but should not be driven by standalone pre-approved content that do not provide the ability to make changes instead you have to re-create the whole module from scratch. Therefore, modularity may lead to excess cost due to over-design, inefficient performance, and too many standalone modules may result in loss of design identity.
Being modular means ability to change a text, an image, an icon in the navigation bar menu etc. without messing up with the consistency of the design as a whole.
The look and feel of components like the navigation bar, buttons, surveys, references icons etc. are set up by the colors and design that define the brand. This is where the consistency lies.
Modular content itself as explained cannot obtain all of the benefits stated earlier. Indeed, the existence of such diverse benefits suggests that there should be in fact different kinds of modularity within the system, with different sources of value, and different implications.
Part of the challenge of realizing the value in modularity lies in the fact that an effective modular design requires several kinds of levels:
• Components / modules level (how the pieces are used)
• Architectural level (how the system is structured to design digital assets)
• Interface level (how easy it is to create and navigate throughout the system)
• Testing level (how the systems allows for performance)
• Compatibility level (how much integrations the system has)
The consequence is that unless a Life Sciences company invests in an integrated system with a collection of supporting features, a modular design will certainly have much less outcome than it can.
• Customization while brand consistency is maintained
• Faster time to market since digital functional elements (not content) are faster to assemble (set up once and for all according to brand guidelines)
• Each modular component is designed separately to save time, and then get integrated within the digital asset
• Cost efficiency: shorter development cycles thanks to cutting off programming costs and modular components’ reusability.
The idea of modularity also refers to the level to which the system itself consists of modules. A room to quickly set up the digital assets’ settings, the references list, another for the navigation menu, the pop-in settings and so on. These are individual framework pieces part of the system that ease the prerequisites for the configuration of digital assets as a whole. You’re building the whole from existing blocks instead of rebuilding a new set of blocks with each project.
Modularity is attractive but need to be handled thoughtfully.
1. No Code based system
2. Easy workflow orchestration
3. Template-driven process rather than relying only on customization
4. Flexible configuration management
5. Easy to access and use
6. Integrated to CRM systems of your choice
7. Transparent cost model
8. Strong support service
Versatile Content should not be mixed with modular content. Versatile content is the overall outcome of a comprehensive modular design system approach.
In fact, Versatile content is a content that can be adapted, reused, and have several applications.
It has a whole set of pre-configured options to set up once for a better performance - more generally an interface defines the rules that a given user (marketing team or design team) needs to follow to ensure that digital content is applying digital rules. A platform-centric approach provides a framework with best practices and proven patterns that have worked not just within a single organization but within others as well.
It allows to fully comply with the requirements of digital practice and demanding market. Instead of designing a new menu from scratch for a project you can choose from available solutions. Usually following digital rules. Working this way leads to much greater efficiency and consistency.
It brings a brand identity and compliance to every material produced across geographies - much of it focuses on establishing foundations for branding guidelines color, typography, grids, texture and the like. Design patterns encourage reuse. They speed up design, and development. They ensure consistency, and through improving them independent of other concerns they lead to greater usability. The specific patterns we create may constrain our choices, but they do lead to a consistent Brand or Corporate design language. Modules can lead to a consistent visual vocabulary and voice for each individual Life Sciences company.
Also, it should include predefined designed structure like creative design templates based on Corporate and / or Brand guidelines.
It serves several applications such as different CRM / CLM systems.
Managers charged with evaluating potential investments in modular design systems must ask: what is the purpose of this investment? Will it make the design process more efficient? Will it be valued by marketing teams? Will it reduce migrating costs? What else must be done to make modularity effective? These questions in turn establish a broad agenda for choosing the right system or range of capabilities.
Migrating costs? What exactly is that.
You must think as long as I can create and share digital content in a fast, easy and cost-effective way, why should I think of migrating content?
A potential challenge that IT teams face achieving maximum value is when they switch to another CRM system and need to migrate all the existing content to the newly chosen system.
A modular design platform is a base set of capabilities and features that provide the foundation to optimize and innovate, within a cloud-native environment. It should enable and support applications, data, and business capabilities specific to the Pharma company.
For example, a CLM presentation may be designed as a set of modular content, with the flexibility for customization. But once the parts have been assembled together, the final digital material cannot be compatible with a new CRM system for instance except at great cost of migration. This is an example of how modularity-in-use is also important to keep structural integrity, and in this respect differ from modularity in design which outcome is modular content.
Therefore, to make modularity work, systems must achieve modularity-in-design (modular content) and modularity-in-use meaning seamless integration of capabilities at the same time. Otherwise, the cost for migrating content will be very high. As we all know that switching between CRM systems is common in the Life Sciences industry.
Any brand manager must know that the results of their work can be integrated effectively with other CRM systems at no cost. This is important to encourage Life Sciences to use modularity. The objectives of modular systems MUST be clarified.
The right modular system platform allows a marketing team to automate processes which were once handled by multiple vendors. A solution that provided a modular architecture for this purpose helps mapping the whole branding communication across markets.
Versatile content means that it handles different CRM data systems and is flexible in its output.
Versatility is being Global to Local, offering flexibility to affiliates across geographies while ensuring consistency and compliance.
Modular design is providing a dynamic tool.
Modular design as a tool to enable a more agile digital asset development process. Knowing that there is a big amount of content to build which requires input from various third parties like copywriters, designers, developers etc. for the creation of a single digital asset, Life Sciences companies must know they need a system to simplify and streamline the process.
The reality is far from being as simple as that. If we refer to content strategy in a multichannel strategy, then the answer would be a no. Indeed, Brand communication must be consistent across all channels for a defined marketing objective. But they way to convey the message and its kind will definitely be different whether you’re delivering it by email or remote detailing. Read our article on tips writing emails to HCPs.
Therefore, modular content, where companies create and approve core content once and reuse across many channels, is not always possible.
Each channel to feed each other has its own way of conducting a message so using the exact same pre-approved module (content) would be the same as considering eating an orange is the same as eating an apple. They’re both fruits, but we recommend that you peel the skin of the orange before eating it.
Modules are achieved to address a common functionality such as the digital brand voice in all aspect of produced digital assets.
It is important to understand the difference between the outcome and the objective. Modular design is an overall objective to face increasing demand of digital assets while ensuring compliance and consistency. Modular content is an aspect of the wider modular design approach.
While modular design can bring substantial benefits to a Life Sciences organization, this doesn’t mean that adoption is straightforward. Indeed, the implementation of a system based on modular design requires buy-in from all departments, including the medical and regulatory teams and creative agencies, so that the new process can work seamlessly. In other words, all stakeholders involved in the content development need to fully understand the benefits to their activities.
In that matter, a solution like the Content Authoring Manager represents a flexible, and possibly efficient tool in the Pharma marketer’s toolbox.
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