A Whole New World of Education

Simon Haroutunian is no stranger to running events within the aesthetics sector. For the past 12 years he has been a well-known face on the conference scene, fronting the FACE conference first with Wigmore Medical and then with Informa/Euromedicom.

Today he is the Training & Events Manager for Merz Aesthetics UK & Ireland, a role he has been in for three years, and one that has recently thrown him a new challenge – taking a successful formula for intimate face-to-face hands-on training and adapting it to the new world online.

Adapting to change
When he first joined Merz, Simon was in charge of organising the Merz Expert Summits. He then headed up the masterclass programme across 12 regions in the UK and Ireland, which centred around the Merz Innovation Partners (MIPs), a group of industry-renowned Healthcare Practitioners (HCPs), KOLs and educators who are advocates for the brand and who provided intimate hands-on training based on a five-to-one ratio of delegates to trainer.

However, in March 2020, all face-to-face training and events came to an abrupt end when the UK went into its first national lockdown. Merz, however, was quick to adapt.

“We were very keen to move quickly into the digital world and I am very thankful and grateful to Merz for doing that”, recalls Simon. “Not that long ago, digital education wasn’t really on our radar. Around February last year, I remember conversations hitting the table in meetings that we needed to think about doing some online education but that’s about as far as it went.

”By the third week of home-working the UK and Ireland team was ready to go with its first series of educational webinars, focused on business support with global KOL and marketing strategist Adam Haroun.

“We made an ethical and moral decision at the time not to push product in front of people while clinics were closed”, Simon explains. “However, what we did want to do was maintain communication with our customers. One of our values at Merz is very much committing to the customer and we felt that this was the right time to stay true to that.”

Fast forward to the summer when clinics re-opened and the company started to introduce its clinical webinars, running the BELOTERO® range series from September through to December.

In the past year, Merz has run more than 70 webinars, watched by more than 1,000 unique HCPs and while Simon says they are keen to get back to seeing their customers face-to-face, there have been some surprising advantages to training online.

Upcoming webinars
Having found success with its online training, Merz is not slowing down. 2021 sees another packed programme of webinars already underway and under development.

Simon explains, “The future is packed. Lucy Dowling (Professional Relations Manager) and Patricia Ramos (Brand Manager, Injectables) have been working really hard behind the scenes to create fresh new content. We’ve got new videos on temples, the perioral region; the male lower face; mature versus younger patients and full combination treatments with BELOTERO®. There will also be some more webinars focused on Ultherapy®, which Katie Vaughan, our Devices Brand Manager has been working hard on.

“We have got Adam Haroun back doing a Marketing Masterclass for those who are slightly more experienced and then Marketing 101 for the more entry level.”

“The third avenue that we are exploring is Health and Wellbeing and I am really proud we are doing something like this. This third lockdown has been hard for people and we want to support our customers and community, if they feel that they need support, in this area.”

On demand
Merz are also very keen to integrate an On-Demand and Replay service for their customers in order to re-watch any webinars they missed or want to re-visit.

“We don’t want to sit still, we want to continue progressing and keeping up with the times so we are going to offer replay and on-demand services for HCPs once they have registered for the Merz webinars”, Simon says. “We are sitting on an absolute library of rich content and it would be a shame just to not utilise it.”

The Merz Institute online is still under development. Once launched, it will serve as an educational hub with e-learning modules on facial anatomy and educational videos on facial assessment as well as clinical supporting material and patient literature. “It’s in the pipeline, so watch this space.”