Executive Summary
- Pharmaceutical marketing should encompass all activities aimed at promoting products, not just promotional efforts. Historically, departments have operated in silos, but a cohesive strategy integrating all teams is essential for positive patient and customer impact.
- Digital technologies can revolutionise market understanding, enabling a customer-centric approach. Effective marketing must prioritise customer needs over internal structures.
- Cross-functional planning and digital tools enhance data analysis and customer account planning. Integrating all channels and customer touchpoints (i.e. omnichannel) ensures the right content reaches the right customers at the right time.
- Navigating regulatory challenges is crucial, involving stakeholders early to ensure compliance.
- The future of pharmaceutical marketing lies in breaking down barriers and fostering collaboration, seeing digital as both an accelerator and enabler of experiences, relationships and outcomes.
What is Marketing?
What do we mean by marketing? In the pharmaceutical industry “marketing” is often used as a byword for our ‘promotional’ activities. This is arguably flawed logic as in the classical sense marketing refers to all activities a company undertakes to promote its products or services.
All teams within pharmaceutical companies are working to this aim, albeit in different ways, otherwise they wouldn’t exist. In the past, and unfortunately the present for some, pharmaceutical company departments often operate/d in silos, with strict firewalls between them and even separate strategies, visions and goals. This fragmented approach is obsolete. Teams need to be aligned around a common purpose; creating positive impact for patients and customers, through leveraging the deep expertise each pharmaceutical company holds on its medicines. In this article we won’t distinguish between promotional and non-promotional activities, when it’s about the market, we’ll refer to it as marketing.
Digital and its Impact on Marketing
Digital technologies can revolutionise our understanding of the market (patients and customers), breaking down the barriers between customers and helping internal functions to assimilate and act on information that was previously unavailable to them. Tapping into this potential requires a convergence of the traditional disciplines, creating a more cohesive approach to how we engage the market.
The central tenet of marketing should be ‘it’s not about you, it’s about the customer’. Although patient- and customer-centricity are terms often used, how often do we truly embody these principles? Achieving this market orientation is a difficult yet vital position if we’re to make the most of novel technologies to drive impact with customers and patients.
Focussing on Customer and patient-Centricity
Effective marketing needs to be oriented on the customer, not our structures. No one function exclusively ‘owns’ knowledge of, or relationships with, customers. A non-promotional eye on ‘commercial’ understanding of the customer will offer a different perspective that will likely challenge assumptions. This is rarely anything other than beneficial and is applicable across functions.
While reflecting the needs of patients is paramount in framing our commercial strategies, we need to come to a pragmatic balance between patient-centricity as a driver for adding value to our commercial approach and a set of distinct plans and tactics in itself. In markets like the UK, the efficacy of prioritising patient marketing over commercial tactics can be debated. A more strategic approach that also leverages our digital capabilities to mobilise expertise could focus on the place of patient communities that companies can partner with and align their digital services accordingly for the benefit of patients, their families and carers, and their Healthcare Professionals.
Remaining siloed, in both structure and thinking, or solely focussed on shiny tools and technologies, rather than truly putting the customer and patient at the centre of what we do, will diminish the impact of all our strategies, campaigns and projects. We are not the customer; we must spend the time and resource to properly understanding them and shape our goals, strategies and tactics to better meet their needs.
Cross-functional Planning
It seems obvious that in order to have a cohesive customer strategy we need to plan cross-functionally. But how often is the brand planning process purported to be “cross-functional” yet still ends up with individual marketing, medical, and access strategies? If we follow the principles of market orientation through, brand planning should be naturally cross-functional. Teams should be encouraged to bring information and insights from as many and diverse a set of sources as possible and analyse them together; no more siloed commercial or medical insights presented by function, or disconnected tactics!
Digital infrastructure and capabilities bring huge potential here. For example, data captured by all field teams in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system could be summarised and anonymised by AI for analysis by the cross-functional team. Functional teams often collect different types of data and analysing that together leads to deeper insight and better customer account planning.
The answer to every need doesn’t have to be AI either – simple digital tools can help address gaps in our understanding too. Key questions a team needs to answer can be addressed with something such as a simple survey sent to all HCPs, where consent is captured. Five to eight questions, shaped and shared by the whole team, could transform our market understanding very quickly. Timely quantitative and qualitative data should be a marketing team’s dream.
A final thought on planning is the use of funnels. Not generic opportunity funnels, but those built specifically to understand how the market moves from being unaware to prescribing. Consider the journey a customer goes on from disease awareness to product awareness to prescribing as a single entity. Careful selection of the stages each functional team can tackle can help navigate the promotional and non-promotional minefield whilst knowing they’re working to a common purpose. Well-designed funnels can exploit digital brand tracking tools, a great way of tracking meaningful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Integrating Multi/Omnichannel Marketing
Healthcare professionals spend far less time thinking about our brands than we do – and they care about the brands even less than they think about them! So how do we make sure we’re relevant and recalled at the time of prescribing? The answer is the clichéd ‘right content, right channel, right time’. If we truly understand the customer as described above, we can understand the places where we can add value.
An example: medical education helps a customer know what to look for when treating a condition, a Key Account Manager (KAM) provides patient-specific context in a call, the follow-up describes how to initiate the product, a sceptical customer checks the KAM’s explanation on a product resource page before prescribing. All these steps implemented on digital infrastructure can show how often this plays out to inform what we do next.
This holistic view is simple in concept and no doubt what we already know, so why is it so rare to see it done well? And it doesn’t require every conceivable touchpoint to be considered. How likely is it that, if the customer gets what they want, we get the behavioural change we were hoping for? And the value of ‘channel preference’ may even diminish if we focus on one or two and make sure our execution is brilliant. Some of the magic of digital is that it can very quickly become part of the norm, especially when the content is right for the needs of the customer. And none of it is owned solely by one function; rather it is built from a solid and robust foundation of data and content that can be effectively delivered, monitored and measured.
Navigating Regulatory Challenges
We all know the pharmaceutical industry is highly regulated, with strict guidelines on advertising, privacy, and data security. As digital marketing efforts expand, it is important to navigate these regulatory challenges carefully to ensure compliance in all instances. It is necessary to involve the relevant business stakeholders early when planning activities to ensure adherence to legal and ethical standards, but also to educate these teams on new approaches and work-through any concerns.
None of this prevents the development of innovative marketing strategies. Once again truly understanding the customer and having clear intentions around engagements provides the context for internal ethics and compliance teams to give advice. When the underlying intentions are not clear, the rationale for data collection and use can easily become vague and introduce risks in its management.
Conclusion
We should not be describing any marketing or customer engagement as ‘digital’. It’s just marketing; understand your market, figure out what they need that you can offer, present it in the most impactful way possible. It’s only ever been marketing.
The future of pharmaceutical marketing lies in breaking down internal barriers and fostering collaboration across departments and the plans they’re jointly creating. By integrating these core functions, companies can create a more cohesive and effective marketing strategy. This not only benefits the company but also enhances the overall customer experience, paving the way for a more successful future in pharma marketing.
Digital transformation can elevate our marketing capabilities to new heights and should be front and centre in every aspect of our thinking and operations. But we should never forget the fundamentals of marketing, it’s the bedrock for all the innovation that’s to come.
In the next article in this series, we will be looking at how digital, data, and technology can help us create true cross functional working, put the customer at the centre of what we do and revolutionise the future of pharma marketing.