"Make it like apple.com"
If I had a nickel for every time I've heard a client say this! Over the course of my whole career in pharma advertising, it's come up at least once every year or two, with a different client every time.
A funny thing about this is, due to the passage of time, each of these clients was talking about a different version of the Apple site! You may very well be familiar, the site changes pretty dramatically from year to year, but they always do something cool.
Some clients reference other sites that they like as well, but it's crazy how consistent they are with Apple. Hey, good for Apple for continuously producing design work that inspires people.
The reality is, every time a client has said they want their site to look like Apple's, I've had to talk them down from about 90% of their hopes and expectations.
A few big reasons:
A website like Apple's can be a very expensive undertaking. They've got that Apple money. Chances are, our client doesn't have that kind of budget for their site.
If you're in pharma like I am, Apple's website is serving a purpose that's very, very different from what our goals are with a "brochure"-style pharma brand site. The use case is extremely different, and the type of content we're presenting is also very different. They're mainly selling products. We're mainly educating and persuading.
It's a very different audience. Apple's customers are more likely to be familiar with navigating flashier and more complex types of websites. They're also more likely to be using modern devices with fast internet connections, which can contend with the heavy download and rendering demands of a robust site like Apple's. We can't assume any of these things with our audiences in pharma marketing. The Apple website's overall user experience is something I just can't call very accessible for a wide range of users, including older people, for example.
Here's a somewhat complex one: millions of Apple customers are Apple fans. They're loyal to the brand. They will be willing to work harder to find what they want on the website — much harder than what we can expect from a user viewing most other kinds of marketing materials.
Sexy might sell phones. That same level of sexy may be less likely to persuade patients and/or HCPs to put their trust in a medication. Tone is important. Of course we should push the boundaries of what works in a pharma website, but at the same time we have to acknowledge that there's a fairly well-established tone in most pharma marketing — and diverging from that by too much may be risky.
One last nit-picky thing: Apple's website uses a lot of carousels, and those may work okay for displaying products, but they're terrible for sharing virtually any other kind of information we want to promote. Carousels have been a huge pet peeve of mine my entire career. They're generally bad for engagement, for accessibility, and for SEO. As digital professionals we should know to avoid them in most cases.
Anyway, as digital agency professionals, I think it's important to be armed for this Apple conversation — and also to have a selection of more relevant but very exciting sites to share with our clients. These may be innovative websites that are in our own industry, or they may be sites from other fields that have interesting, stylish features that could easily be repurposed for our industry. They're out there! As digital experts, let's not just execute whatever our clients tell us to, but instead let's educate them and steer them toward good decisions that are likely to produce the results they want.
– Manning
Questions/comments? Feel free to contact me at manning@manningkrull.com. I update these articles pretty frequently — best practices evolve over time as the world of digital quickly changes, and I always welcome insights from others.