Example Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge: I am heading the marketing department of Pharma Company in Ortho speciality and my  challenge is to improve the market share of brand Durolane which is Hyaluronic acid to be inserted  in knee for taking care of Osteoarthritis by spending marketing budgets on the right campaigns and  brand positioning at right customers. The project scope includes the marketing department  composed of 3 employees, as well as the larger sales department, with whom we work closely. The  project is limited to gain Market share gain by doing right marketing campaign at right customer.  The project solution should include providing right marketing positioning of brand to treat  osteoarthritis by postponing knee replacement.

We will focus on trying to uncover what our team members, as well as key stakeholders within the  marketing department and sales department, consider to be ineffective or problematic with regard  to the current brand positing and campaign.

Selection: we decide to use mind mapping tool by designing a series of questions to understand our  customer’s behaviour (i.e orthopaedic surgeons and knee replacement surgeons) which includes  why they use our brand, demographics and socio-economic status of patients where they use brand  Durolane. Mind mapping is looking for patterns and insights in large quantity of data you have  collected during your exploration of “What is”.

Application: We interview and survey 228 customers to get the details of their preferences and help  us to map the mind of customer’s w.r.t our brand Durolane.

We asked our team members to come with all the observations after interview of our customers and  non-users. We put all the observations in sticky notes and put them on white board for generating  the insights. We asked the questions like “so what” on each observation written on the sticky note.  For example- one insight come was that orthopaedic surgeons use our brand for more than 5 years  in patients suffering from osteoarthritis as they want to postpone knee replacement as they  themselves don’t do knee replacement surgery.

We placed all the insights which come through driving “So what” observation with different colour  sticky notes on the board. Then we connected the dots of all the insight generated for better  representation of “What is” and then we completed the mind mapping tool. The goal was to  establish criteria for the “What if” idea generation phase.

Insight By applying the insights, our team identified our assumptions and designed ideas to test  these assumptions. Additionally, we thought through anticipated results, expecting to find that a  new brand positioning to target Orthopeadic surgeons to use our product to delay the knee  replacement surgery in patients below 60 years of age.  Our actual results were slightly different  from what we anticipated: while our team was open to the prioritization of brand communication  and target customers, the key stakeholders in the marketing department and sales department  expressed some concerns. Moving forward, our team will review this insight and incorporate it into  future brand communication. The ongoing incorporation of insight is particularly important at this  stage, as launches come before a full rollout in the design thinking timeline.

Approach Given that our team has already gone through several design thinking activities/tools and  are at this stage in the timeline, the mind mapping is the appropriate tool. As previously mentioned,  our team needs to review the insight gained from our first customer survey/interview and  incorporate this insight into future brand communication at targeted customers. Future brand  communication at targeted customers should reflect insight gained, progress made, and come closer  to a compelling solution ready for full rollout.

