who and why
Matt Rowley and Rob Barker are the founding partners of central. Between them they have over 30 years' experience within healthcare marketing and have both held roles within blue-chip global marketing departments as well as Managing Directors within the world's largest agency networks.
In the years before central, Matt and Rob had both noticed that physicians, when asked in market research what most influences their prescribing, would rate ‘colleague recommendation’ ahead of anything else, including advertising, sales reps and medical publications. To begin with, they put it down to physicians not wanting to admit the influence of marketing.
What they struggled with though, is that conventional healthcare brand theory comes from the consumer model where the ultimate goal is to generate an ad concept. The problem with this is that in healthcare we’re not trying to get someone to try another brand of pizza, we’re trying to change the way a physician treats their patients.
Eventually Rob and Matt came to realise that the most important question in healthcare marketing isn’t “what are my ads, reps or meded saying to my customers” but rather “what are my customers saying to each other and how do I influence it?”
Yes, the physicians in the research were telling the truth.
Looking into it, they found that a lot of academic research had already gone into colleague recommendation, just no-one was applying it. They had a thought: “someone really ought to set something up that recognises the way healthcare marketing really works – through word of mouth.”
In 2004 that’s what they did. central now works with a range of clients - from top 5 pharma to biotech and nutritionals - in two key areas:
- building more effective international brand communication strategies using word of mouth marketing principles
- bringing the latest marketing science to the management of those most important customer recommenders – opinion leaders
central has steadily grown since inception; at last count there were twelve people working for the partnership. central also works closely with Kingston University to develop new word of mouth expertise through a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP), which is in majority funded by the UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). Click here to find out more about the KTP »
Rob and Matt
"central are particularly strong strategically;
they think with us rather than for us."
Ellen S
Global Brand Marketing Manager
Royal Numico