According to Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Colour Institute®, “Tangerine Tango combines the vivaciousness and adrenaline rush of red with the friendliness and warmth of yellow, to form a high-visibility, magnetic hue that emanates heat and energy”.

What does Tangerine Tango mean to you? A single colour has the ability to evoke all of the senses, creating a wealth of thoughts, feelings and visions in the mind of the viewer in seconds. Colour is therefore the mainstay of design across a range of industries, the pharmaceutical industry included.

Communication and marketing within the pharmaceutical industry is more important today than it has ever been and colour is an essential component of brand development and campaign identity.  Think pink and breast cancer immediately springs to mind; think blue think Viagra, and so on…  consider whether tranquil blue or fiery red represent a good night’s sleep and the answer is immediately obvious.

Consequently, pharmaceutical companies are continuing to invest in ever more daring design options to support and enhance their brands.  So, with over 13,500 PANTONE® colours to choose from, which will be critical to the pharmaceutical industry’s next blockbuster brand?  Tangerine Tango perhaps?

Source: www.Pantone.com

Research has found that about 20 per cent of users return to an app after the first day they downloaded it but that the average app has a less than five per cent chance of being used for more than 30 days. Furthermore, around 20 per cent of the free apps available in the Android Market have not even clocked 100 downloads.

This is why creativity and engagement is key. Identifying a niche that will entertain, educate or ease the life of the consumer is vital to its success. But in this increasingly crowded marketplace, both creativity and engagement are crucial to differentiate and activate demand but it can come in different forms – from a quirky idea to impressive use of technology.

Take for example, the augmented reality (AR) app called Lungs designed to show smokers the damage caused by cigarettes. Users can control settings to reflect their own experience based on factors such as their age and how many cigarettes they smoke each day; these all impact on both the visual representation and ‘time taken for lungs to recover’ statistic.

Or how about the BeerGut Fitness app, the calorie check book that will assist you in avoiding the dreaded beer gut telling you whether you’ve earned a drink or need to exercise?

With NHS waiting lists growing daily and falling disposable income making private healthcare more unaffordable, combined with an increasingly informed patient base, the market is ripe for the countless new apps and devices actively targeting consumers keen on preventing, examining, improving and managing their health. So the question remains, is this a route more healthcare companies should be focusing in on in 2012?
In a world where audiences are publicly disclosing increasing amounts of personal information about their lives on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, health apps are becoming more relevant and increasingly invaluable to companies wishing to have a social media presence. However, it is clear that without a healthy dose of engaging creativity many of these apps are destined to fall by the wayside.

* (Source: MobiHealthNews, September 2011).

The remedy? Step forward Simon Kelner, former editor of The Independent and now chief executive of the Journalism Foundation. The Foundation, which launched this week, was borne out of discussions between Kelner and his immediate boss, Evengy Lebedev (who along with his father, Alexander Lebedev, are financial backers of the organisation). The Journalism Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation aimed at supporting “free, fair and independent journalism” on a global basis.

The initial result from the foundation is the launch of two initiatives to show the scope of its work. The first involves practical training courses for journalists in Tunisia, teaching local journalists how to report in a free and open society. The second sees the Journalism Foundation supporting a local website in Stoke-on-Trent, in an attempt to increase interest in local politics and demonstrate how journalism can be built up from the grassroots through digital media.

Sir Max Hastings, former Daily Telegraph editor, has commented: “This is a time when bad and corrupt journalism is receiving extraordinary exposure in Britain, which makes the promotion of good, brave and campaigning journalism all the more important”. However, from a critical perspective, it’s hard not to ponder how much of an impact the Foundation will really have on public perception of the media in the short term. In our opinion, it is rather premature to be pushing for positive promotion of the media, before the root of corrupt journalism has yet to be completely resolved. Only time will tell…

So are charities needing to become more creative in how they attract donations? Certainly, the recent collaboration between Dulux and UNICEF, which invited people to own a colour, is a brilliant example of a fresh and more importantly engaging approach to fundraising which we mentioned in a recent blog.

In a bid to make it easy for people to donate, we are seeing more and more charities turning to social media sites which can be linked directly to sponsorship platforms such as JustGiving, which help supporters to collect funds and eliminate the hassle of filling out sponsor forms.  In fact, this has helped 13 million people raise over £930 million for more than 12000 charities since 2001. Unsurprisingly, Facebook and Twitter have been most successful in driving these donations – in September 2011 it was reported that over 27% of all JustGiving’s on line donations were driven directly through Facebook and the highest value donations were received through Twitter.

So the question is in tough times are charities the first to suffer or is creativity and engagement the key to success? Well, last month’s high profile ‘Children in Need’ campaign seems to refute this having raised a record-breaking £26 million.  The question is was it the content that drove the rise in donations or was it the integration of donations via social media and texting alongside the traditional that broadened the scope and made it all so much easier to give.  ‘Meaningful’, multi-channel, or a combination of both, is that the way to improve charities fortunes?

Other industries that have recently come under similar scrutiny include the media and financial sectors. The current Leveson inquiry is examining journalistic practice and story sourcing and the roles of the media and police in the wake of the phone hacking scandal. The inquiry hopes to investigate the nature of contacts between the press and politicians and the press and the police. It is certainly clear that the regulatory regime for media conduct has fallen short at times but the extent of this failure is yet to be fully determined.

Whilst questions abound of the extent and scope of independent Vs self regulation, the pharma industry is forging ahead with clear and transparent practices and ethics set out and robust frameworks for interactions with healthcare professionals, leading experts and government officials put in place. With the ethics of the British media and financial worlds currently under question, it may be time for other industries to step up to the mark pharma has set?

We’ve blogged before on why regional papers are important, both in terms of health communications and beyond. Dialogue with these audiences is as important as any other.

There is nothing to suggest people are going to stop using social media because some long forgotten (but reassuring) concept of privacy will all of a sudden return. Fears are often quickly calmed when the ‘reasons for’ come in, and the bottom line is that if people see the benefits of these systems and genuinely want to use them they will be willing to take a little bit of risk. It’s likely we’ll see more educated users of social networks, but if people are willing to share with trusted parties where they are on a map, they are going to be willing to share sensitive healthcare information if approached in a professional, trustworthy manner and there are clear benefits to be gained.

On a simple level, we believe that the pharma industry should be able to provide information to patients when appropriate. This is comparable to other industries. For example, when buying a car most people will initially develop a shortlist based on the brand’s advertising that most closely reflects their own values (such as safety, reliability or status). But because buying a car is a major investment it’s likely that the purchaser will also look to other sources for confirmation that the decision is the right one. When the claims the manufacturer makes are also backed up by Jeremy Clarkson and What Car? the brand and environmental messages are congruent and a purchase is more likely to occur.

While healthcare is very different, the principle is similar. In the same way that a car manufacturer knows more about their cars than anyone else, a pharma company knows more about its drugs than anyone else. Therefore, a pharma company should be able to share information about medicines with healthcare professionals and patient groups if appropriate of course always complying with regulatory obligations. We are not talking about direct to consumer advertising or direct communications with patients – this is something we’re more than happy we do not have in the UK. We are simply talking about the pharma industry providing balanced information in an appropriate manner to complement the information provided to patients by patient groups and healthcare professionals, such that patients are able to make well informed choices about their healthcare.

The point here is that the knowledge pharmaceutical companies have about their medicines should not be kept locked away, but communicated to healthcare professionals, and in some cases patients, in an appropriate and responsible way. If initiatives funded by a pharmaceutical company enable greater insights into the management of a condition, this can obviously benefit patients. In our opinion, it is not a question of whether pharma should be able to provide information to healthcare professionals and patients when appropriate, it is how they do it and what the information is.

However, like all agencies winning well deserved awards, we did not get where we are today by ourselves and thank those we have worked with, clients and supplier partners, particularly for their support and input. The spotlight on our industry (and all industries) is bigger and brighter than ever before. Most importantly, healthcare communications can make a real difference to enhancing the reputation of our industry, advocating informed choice and ultimately delivering real improvements in healthcare. All of those awarded by Communiqué in 2010, and many of those who were not, are doing just this.

Visit our new website www.virgohealth.com

Last month, Bristol PCT was the first NHS trust to release an app with the ability to pinpoint local NHS services (through GPS), issue GP appointment reminders and even provide a ‘panic’ button in case the user experiences an emergency.  This is just one of many apps appearing to enable us to live better and healthier lifestyles. Last week, the Mail released their top ten health apps to ‘keep the doctor away’. The list includes a body mass index calculator, first aid guide from St John’s Ambulance, symptom checker and diagnosis gizmo, hypnotherapy smoking cessation tool and even a ‘period’ diary to track the menstruation cycle of women trying to get pregnant. In the US, ‘AirStrip technologies’ are going that little bit further with an app that enables hospital doctors to check patients’ blood results from the lab, monitor bedside ECGs (in real-time) from anywhere in the world and view any data anomalies.

It is with no doubt that healthcare is being propelled into the digital sphere. It makes perfect sense too as whether you live in the UK or abroad, distance and expense is a major barrier to health education, service provision or access to treatments. Having instant, hand-held and remote access to information and services breaks down these barriers. With all these new applications being released, we might see less patients coming through the doors of our GP surgeries and pharmacies (potentially with job losses?). On the other hand, perhaps we’ll see a huge influx of the paranoid worried-well. Only time will tell. One thing is for sure, this emerging technology is providing PR professionals with new and exciting ways to engage, communicate and interact with doctors and patients.