Hypophosphatasia, or HPP, is a rare disorder with lifelong impact. It can affect a person’s bones, muscles, joints, teeth, lungs, brain, and kidneys. Symptoms often start presenting at a young age, sometimes right at birth, but due to HPP being very rare and not very well known, the journey to diagnosis can be very long, 32 years on average. In those cases when the onset of the condition is during childhood, the journey takes about 2 years. HPP consists of a series of seemingly disconnected symptoms that could easily be written off as something else, and certainly not connected to one another. A lab value that’s key to diagnosing HPP is ALP. If you have some or all of HPP’s mysterious symptoms and a consistently low ALP value in your bloodwork, you might have HPP. The focus of Alexion’s Unbranded HPP campaign is to help patients and their caregivers put the pieces together and hopefully get on treatment early to treat the root cause of these symptoms.
Alexion understands that what patients need is support along their entire journey, including undiagnosed people looking for answers. To ensure that strategy’s success, disease education carries a lot of weight relative to brand marketing: After all, it’s about supporting the patients and caregivers along the spectrum of the journey, filling gaps on the education side, and driving diagnoses.
Good content doesn’t get created in a vacuum. It is the patients who have the greatest expertise on what patients need. That’s why Alexion engaged Snow Companies as their HPP agency of record to drive everything from strategy to creative execution on digital, video, and print, and live channels.
On the print side of this integrated campaign is the unbranded HPP brochure. It features real patients who can shed light on some of the aspects of HPP. For example, the team worked with a pair of twins who have HPP and who illustrate the genetic component of HPP by sharing their memories of their grandmother and her mysterious inability to walk.
Another key module of the Alexion’s HPP campaign is hypophosphatasia.com and related digital assets. This unbranded website features detailed information about HPP and its symptoms, about how it’s diagnosed, links to support resources, and a Q&A. The most innovative part of the site is the HPP Symptom Tracker, which is an interactive resources for visitors to obtain guidance for their next conversation with their doctor. Alexion also runs several social media pages, including Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, where real patients and caregivers affected by HPP share their authentic experiences through beautifully shot storytelling videos and through creative user-generated content.
Through the microsite alexionhppevents.com, those affected by HPP can also sign up to attend the Unmask HPP Events, which are live programs across the United States. Attendants can hear real patients and caregivers share their stories alongside clinical experts. Events like these foster a sense of community and represent a highly collaborative touchpoint between Alexion and the patient community.
Another form of live patient connection is the Peer Connects Program—a phone-based program that matches callers with an HPP STAR, who is also affected by HPP as a patient or caregiver. It’s an opportunity to ask questions and connect with someone who understands HPP firsthand. Finally, the HPP STAR Ambassador Program encourages those impacted by HPP to share their story to educate, inspire, and support others in the HPP community.
Quantitatively, the numbers tell a story that’s highly unusual for a disease as rare as HPP: 7500 prints of the brochure are in circulation. Hypophosphatasia.com gets about 10k visits per month. Up to 10 Peer Connects calls are conducted any given month. 396 people follow the campaign’s Facebook page, and 279 are connected to its Instagram platform.
Qualitatively, this program has demonstrated that the most effective marketing campaigns are the ones that rely on real and authentic patient experiences and that offer multi-channel touchpoints to their audience. It also shows how much patients and caregivers long to connect with one another and to have a collaborative voice in working with the life science industry. Every patient who finds answers after years of struggle is a win. Every person who realizes they’re not alone and there’s something they can do about their condition makes the program worth it.
