STweM

AstraZeneca’s Arimidex-branded Celebration Chain offers friends and family the opportunity to ‘honour special women in [their] lives who have overcome or are fighting breast cancer, and to celebrate their unique, endearing qualities’.

Users begin by creating a ‘Celebration Doll’:

Next, they personalize the skin tone, hair, and outfit of their doll:

Finally, they select up to 4 ‘celebration options’ and an accompanying soundtrack:

Users can then email an invitation to the recipient to view a Flash animation of their ‘Celebration Doll’ engaged in their ‘celebration options’. Subsequent supporters can send the individual represented by the doll virtual hugs with personalized messages.

This low-grade patient support vehicle is a similar concept to that utilized by the Novartis Oncology CML earth site, but (in my opinion) nowhere near as effective. To date, the site proclaims the fact that ‘18,640 women have [received] 31,616 celebrations from their family and friends,’ but I’m struggling to see why they’d bother.

Perhaps the first point to make is that the site is aimed at relatives and acquaintances of those who have experienced or currently have breast cancer, not the individuals themselves. The creators doubtless see their invitations as a gesture of solidarity to show that the person in question is in their thoughts.

That’s all good.

What is less good is the fact this site in no way captures the diversity of experience that each breast cancer patient passes through that affects not only them, but also everyone whose lives they touch. Theirs is a spectrum of experience that may engender inspiration, hope, strength, but may also encounter dejection, despair and frailty. The latter should not be shied away from, and the site’s relentlessly upbeat tone (even its name) denies them the right to acknowledge the totality of their experience. None of the latter are conditions unique to the breast cancer patient: they are part of the wider human condition, and for all of us at some point, the unfortunate but inevitable corollary to the difficult business of being alive.

Far from celebrating a breast cancer patient’s individuality, Celebration Chain robs them of it.

How?

Everything about this initiative positively screams “CORPORATE-BLAND” at me, from the teeth-grindingly awful music that pollutes the site, to the conservative outfits users are forced to clothe their dolls in, to the prim-and-proper hairstyles (scarf excluded), and the dull, dull soundtrack and celebration options. And by the way: men get breast cancer, too.

Know a 20-something Emo type with piercings, a fashionable crop, very particular taste in their clothes, music, and pastimes, and breast cancer? They’re not going to appreciate your sending them this Stepford Wives-styled ‘celebration doll’, unless they have a particularly refined sense of the ironic. They may also raise an eyebrow at the fact that AstraZeneca is offering to donate ‘$1, up to a total of $25,000, to a breast cancer charity’ for every doll created in light of the fact that Arimidex generated revenues of $1,857M (+3% against prior year) in 2008.

This is old pharma thinking in a (barely) new media setting, as coldly mechanistic and inhuman as the eerie, faceless celebration dolls themselves.

A better solution for any pharma company wanting to engage with the breast cancer community (or indeed any patient community) would be: create a sponsored community space where those with breast cancer can make connections, share experiences, support one another, celebrate their individuality, but also feel included as part of a bigger community.

There are as many stories to be told about breast cancer as there are people with breast cancer.

Let them be people. Don’t make them be patients.

Peter Kim recently took the opportunity of welcoming newly-acquired social business consultancy Headshift to the Dachis Group (itself ‘created to unlock the value of social technologies for large corporate enterprises’) to restate of the foundations of social business design as they perceive it:

• business partner organization
• workforce collaboration
• customer participation.

As David Cushman remarks in a clear-sighted summary of the necessity of adopting a social business design model,

The people who can make the biggest difference to your company don’t work for it. Adapting to the network means they can[...] If there is a part of your business that can’t be disrupted by adhoc communities of purpose (forming online to improve on what you currently do) you are in an extremely enviable position.

Dachis offers a contemporary, persuasive take on the contemporary business environment with a number of heavy-hitting opinion leaders on their bench. I should imagine that every business who engages their services will conclude that they have added significant value to their enterprise.

However, whilst Dachis count a number of health care brands among their roster of clients, they can’t work with everyone.

It would seem to me that with the resources they are capable of marshaling, most pharma companies could heal a number of the afflictions that ail them by self-medicating with the principles of social business design.

It’s time to go beyond buffing your Twitter account, cultivating your Facebook page, sorting your StumbleUpon links, and tuning in your YouTube channel.

In short, it’s time to redesign your marketing strategies using the precepts of social business design.

• View your B2B associates as partners, not vendors.
• Design, implement, and make colleagues take personal responsibility for and ownership of an effective social media governance policy for internal and external use.
• Finally, and most importantly for your purposes, participate with your customers in an authentic, transparent way.

Defining who your customers are depends on where you’re doing business, of course, but I am going to define this as the patient.

Personalized medicine, patient health records, patient activism and advocacy are going to drive change in health care.

The challenge facing any given pharma company is to redesign its business to be able to meet patients where they want to find it.

Which channels are you going to choose?