Currently, there are many different types of transdermal patches on the pharmaceutical market. This technology has been used in various ways, from helping people to quit smoking to use as a birth control. The ways these brands have marketed themselves is very important to see how they have done it, what they have done well, and how Agile can do it better. Being a birth control patch, one needs to take into account that the target market is very specifically women, which makes it different from say, a nicotine patch. Keeping this in mind we have analyzed and discussed the marketing efforts of other patches and how they can be applied to Twirla.
We mainly used the Internet for our research of different types of patches and their marketing methods. We also did some research in female-targeted magazines, such as Shape, Cosmopolitan, Women's Health, and Self. We googled "Birth control patches" to see what websites and brands were first to appear, we then googled specific transdermal patch brands, such as Nicoderm and Ortho Evra to compare websites. We also read through online forums to see customers' perceptions of transdermal patch products and other contraceptives. After that we turned to social media (Including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram) to search hashtags such as #birthcontrol, #thepatch, #nicoderm, #nicotinepatch and #birthcontrolpatch. We then searched specific brands such as Nicoderm analyze social media presence.
Through our research we found that other transdermal patches have a very minimal presence on social media. Brand names are not the first thing that come up when patches/birth control patch is searched on Google, and that ads in magazines are quite popular. When searching through social media it was very difficult to find anything about any type of transdermal patch, birth control, and for both it was basically non-existent. On the platforms we searched there was little to no presence, no pages for brands, and the only time it was mentioned was on PlannedParenthood and Bedsider's pages.
