Beyond technology: how pharma marketing will be transformed…..
pharmafile | June 27, 2011 | Feature | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing | digital marketing, pharma marketing
I speak about social media and pharma company communications all the time.
I find myself talking about it not just for my day to day job, or when speaking at various conferences and meetings around the world – I even talk about it when relaxing with friends or visiting my parents. I am, in short, obsessed.
It is strange then that I found writing this article very difficult. Since you’re reading this, I managed it in the end of course, but the effort surprised me and I think this is for two primary reasons.
Firstly, this is a massive and extremely complex subject, constantly moving on shifting sands and wreaking havoc in many industries.
That makes it difficult to distil into an easily digestible article.
Secondly, it has become almost impossible to write about social/new media without falling into cliché.
Even the terms used make me cringe – the term ‘social media’ is now so widely applied and misunderstood as to be almost meaningless.
‘New media’ is even more ridiculous as it is not new; computers have been speaking to each other since the late 1950s, and what many consider social media existed in a smaller but vital form in the late 1960s and 1970s.
My solution to this problem of complexity is neatly overcome with the simplification of the issues into the clichéd – but effective – list format.
So here we are, the three ways pharmaceutical marketing will be transformed by the digital revolution:
1. An end to the transposition of analogue marketing
Many people cite ‘digital’ marketing as beginning in the 1990s, and for the sake of argument, let’s go along with this. The 1990s were indeed a period of intense growth in the field. We now (should) understand that digital isn’t just one channel but a medium that has bred thousands of other mediums.
However, in order for people to feel comfortable, analogue concepts and practices were teleported over Star Trek-style into the digital world. Examples of this are obvious, each of our computers has a ‘desktop’ and ‘folders’, and of course our mail simply became email.
This lead to many obvious marketing ‘re-imagingings’ with direct marketing becoming email marketing and our glossy company brochures being re-purposed as the new company website. Print advertising becomes ‘banners’ and face-to-face personal selling ‘details’ becomes the e-detail, in both self directed, virtual and face to face form.
There has been an explosion of platforms such as search and future utilisation of semantic search, augmented reality (this has the capacity to link our virtual and ‘real’ selves inextricably through daily activity), Near Field Communication (of which London’s Oyster card is just the beginning), the iPad, mobile apps etc.
It is no longer going to be acceptable to merely replicate another age, it will become imperative that pharmaceutical companies begin to utilise technology properly. There are many examples of this.
Will healthcare professionals accept the same form of personal message-based selling package superficially enlivened by the use of an iPad?
The obvious technological benefit of a network constructed through our representatives is the ability to share information in real time across our customer base.
Many companies are primarily engaged in high value/low volume marketplaces, often attempting to dramatically change a care-pathway, while simultaneously challenging the accepted cost/benefit ratio. It would be ridiculous to believe that real-time exchange of ideas, belief and experience across the engaged network will not form an essential part of this.
This is not primarily focused on internally derived value, but based on what is best for the customer – I am most definitely not talking here about CRM systems.
The same principle applies to the utilisation of technology for patient information, collection and management of adverse events and safety data, the immersion of pharma into patient reported outcomes and information, clinical trial management and recruitment and healthcare economics – I really could go on and on, but I won’t.
2. The death of messaging marketing
I recently joined Wharton University’s ‘Future of Advertising’ project, and this has helped make it even clearer to me that the old forms of communicating to our customers have simply broken down. We are entering what can be described as a post-marketing age.
Due to the proliferation of platforms, and the almost complete socialisation of the web, we now have what has been described as a fragmented ‘consumer’ attention.
This is true, but from my perspective it doesn’t quite cover the dramatic change. On top of this we have the combined amplification of the personal network. People have always trusted what people like them have said, now they have access to these trusted networks all the time, wherever they are.
This explosion of the platforms and touch points combined with the ubiquitous nature of the network, have produced the ironic situation marketers like myself are now facing across the industry. There have never been more ways for us to communicate with our customers, but it has never been harder to do so.
That’s because this personalisation of information has spelt the death of interruption, one-way-push style marketing. This is not something that health professionals are immune to, we are all involved. In many ways, the construction of simplified messages based on usage of clinical data for a differential marketing position is an example of this mass marketing. Mass marketing has been described by others now as short-hand for lazy marketing. I am not going to argue.
This delivery of the controlled message will have to be replaced with real-time dialogue across all touch points. Health professionals will not accept information without the right to respond and to understand what their peers think, not just at their place of work or professional organisation, but possibly from around the world as the data is being presented.
You might think this already happens, just think of the average marketing exchange between a pharmaceutical company and the prescriber, influencer, payor. It is still mostly an enclosed experience.
To paraphrase Clay Shirkey, a leader digital and technology writer and observer, “We have systematically overestimated access to information and systematically underestimated access to each other”.
On one hand, this could mean very difficult times for pharmaceutical marketing – as peer to peer information sharing among doctors has been made far easier. A specialist who has fewer than 50 peers in the UK in total was previously somewhat isolated. Now he or she has real time access to thousands around the world, all with a different but credible opinion of you and your medicine.
But on the other hand, this situation could be a massive opportunity, and could realise a marketing fantasy: the ability to communicate a personalised message, to a specific person at a specific moment in time. This message though will have a big difference, rather than being master-minded by a brand guardian agency, it will be derived by the customer themselves.
Does this mean a rudder-less strategy falling on the whims of the crowd? No, this means an iterative communication strategy that responds fluidly to customer insight and real world application. Shirkey also noted in 2010 that “complex societies collapse because when the stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond”.
3.Embracing a world where campaigns are dead and failure a necessary part of success
One of the big social media clichés I alluded to earlier is that you cannot hope to control any form of communication surrounding your brand in the digital age. We have to give this up for a level of influence.
This is obviously true to a large extent, but slightly more subtle and nuanced than is often communicated at your usual digital/social media conference. I feel we understand the basic shift in marketing practice here, but the bigger issues for me are twofold. One relates to content and what this actually means for a new form of marketing communication. The second goes to the heart of modern digital communications: the concept of the perpetual project.
Most agencies whether they are creative, communications/PR, advertising or possibly even that new boutique ‘social media house’ – often feel the need to offer glossy concepts to the client. These are frequently presented as fully formed ideas, nicely packaged in shrink-wrap and shipped to the client. On launch of the shiny new website, integrated campaign, champagne corks can be popped and everyone can congratulate themselves.
Alright, this is often an exaggeration today, however, I am still amazed by how the start of the journey is often celebrated as the end, and that no means of completing this journey are even in place even when this is recognised.
This form of falsely packaged control can be found not only in the construction of assets but also in the way social media listening and mapping is happily replacing one form of market research (often 18 months out of date and an embalmed insect on arrival) with a stratified replication.
This scraping of data and attempt to make emotive sense of the universe through technology is just as irrelevant when performed as a static measure.
Digital is incremental, it is constantly being modified and optimised, failure continually morphing into a closer representation of what success could be.
In essence I have heard this described as ‘perpetual beta’. On top of this is the concept of who rules the communication kingdom. Is content king? Is it now context?
In the end, I personally think it doesn’t really matter as more than a philosophical position. What is undeniable is that we do not want to communicate with people who have nothing valuable to say. Why should we want to do this with companies and brands?
It is the dynamic nature of content development that will stretch pharma. We are only just realising that we are in the business of publishing and that this requires us to tell stories when the goal posts have moved yet again. The iterative nature of digital requires us not only to tell a story about our brand and our company in order to reach out to people, we now have to understand the concept of ‘building a story’. This is done not through an internally defined narrative but undertaken in collaboration with customers.
It is time we started taking these changes to marketing and advertising more seriously.
When describing my job, people in pharma often end up by saying things like “So, you get to go on Facebook and Twitter all day then?”
Naturally I just smile at these remarks – but if I get a chance, I tell them my job is really focused on applying new models of marketing and communications.
For pharma, that is a serious challenge. Unless we become experts in the society and the changing culture that surrounds us, we are in big trouble.
Alex Butler is the EMEA Marketing Communications manager at Janssen.
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