No silver bullet, but a growing arsenal for pharma comms
pharmafile | September 16, 2014 | Feature | Manufacturing and Production, Medical Communications, Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | Lundbeck, comms, eyeforpharma, mcm, selincro, tim white
Digital strategies in the pharma industry have predominately been a red herring, focussing too much on the novelty of digital itself instead of asking what being online can actually do for a business and the patients they cater for.
But there is a new breed of digital and communication leaders who are not content with novelty, and are setting out to genuinely engage with patients via multi-channel marketing.
One of these is Tim White, head of global customer interaction at Lundbeck, who specialises in “driving change and pushing commercial innovation”.
Speaking to Pharmafile in relation to his attendance at Eyeforpharma’s recent Multi-channel Marketing Summit (MCM) event in London, White says he is looking to shake-up the traditional views around digital.
He first started at Lundbeck in early 2013 after spending more than three years at Swiss big pharma firm Novartis. He says: “When I first started at Lundbeck we really had nothing in the way of a social media plan, so I had a little bit of an advantage in understanding this field from working with Novartis.
“So what we actually first did when I started was to become more engaging with the world, and that’s a process we’re just wrapping up now. Fundamentally we’ve asked ourselves: who do we want to be – and what’s the persona of the company?
“I think Lundbeck has a good story but honestly, we’ve not always done as good of a job as we should have been of telling that story, and explaining to a wider audience about just how we are different from other big pharma firms.”
He explains that he wants to use a multi-channel approach – which incorporates digital but also other means of communication – as a way of engaging more with patients and the public about Lundbeck as a company, and the philosophy behind its products.
“There is no silver bullet to achieve this,” he says, “but it’s about having a rational multi-faceted approach to communication.”
Creating a new market
One of the main scopes of White’s remit is to help Lundbeck develop a communications platform – as well as to help shape a new market – for its latest drug Selincro (nalmefene).
This alcohol dependency pill is designed to reduce the craving for alcoholic drinks, and was recently backed by NICE as a cost-effective option for the 600,000 people in England who the watchdog believes can benefit from it.
White is clearly excited by this drug, and believes in its ability to help alcoholics. But he says from a comms point of view, introducing Selincro into the world created a whole new market and a new way of thinking about alcoholism – which not everyone agreed with.
This is because some see having a pharmacological treatment for alcoholism, which is now recognised by many health professionals as both an addiction and a mental disorder, as being the wrong option.
Chief amongst these groups is the Christian charity Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), which White says ‘is not open’ to drug therapy, as they still support their established stance on abstinence. He also says that for years alcoholism has had a stigma attached to it, which leads to a situation where there’s little information out there aroud treatment options for the condition.
“All of this combines to make talking about a new drug for this condition a real challenge. We face that monumental task of building a new market around Selincro, and helping communicate this new treatment option.
“And really, that can’t be done through the traditional route of sending sales reps out to primary care doctors and talking about this medicine. Instead, it has to be done through strong public affairs work and with patients’ associations and governments, along with good multi-channel work and getting to grips with the patient side of what actually it means to be drinking too much.”
He says that there are groups outside of AA that that are starting to open up to this new way of doing things. “They’re saying ‘hey, maybe this is a concept that works’ and could help patients that aren’t ready for pure abstinence.”
He also questions the view of abstinence in general. “To think that the only ‘treatment’ for years was for alcoholics to ‘just stop’ – I mean that’s like saying abstinence is the only way for birth control and well, we got over that decades ago. So why do we still not recognise that alcoholism is a condition we can develop treatments for?”
Lundbeck’s drug works by acting on the brain’s motivational system and is thought to reduce the positive effects of alcohol – therefore reducing the urge to drink. Many older drugs simply cause patients to be violently ill if they drink whilst taking the treatment and was seen as a last resort, so Selincro is a new medicine in regards to its mechanism of action, but also a new way of thinking about treatment for alcoholism.
Lundbeck has long argued that there is a significant unmet need in this area because alcohol dependence is under diagnosed.
It hopes it can place Selincro in the same position as smoking cessation drugs and contraceptive pills as an accepted pharmacological option alongside, or even ahead of the philosophy of abstinence.
Billboard in the desert syndrome
For many years Lundbeck has been focussed on the European drugs market but is now starting to branch out into the US and emerging markets.
Europe however, still plays a major role in the firm’s business, but White must work within the fairly tight constraints of EU legislation that essentially bars pharma from having an organic conversation with patients.
One way around this is the disease awareness campaign, which sees a firm spend money on creating an online game or website that discusses a therapy area they cater for, but do not of course mention any branded drugs by name.
But this is seemingly going out of fashion for those in the industry who want to be able to genuinely engage with patients, and White questions not the campaigns themselves, but whether they are being used in the right way.
“The problem with pharma that I would say – whether it’s in the US or Europe – is if we’re building these massive websites and campaigns that contains content and material that is available on non-pharma sites (that are also independent), then where is the need for pharma to step in there?
“And then you have this whole ‘billboard in the desert’ syndrome where you’ve giving a tonne of money to agencies but really, no one knows what this investment is doing. Honestly, how many people know about a drug company and its products well enough to visit these kinds of sites?”
White explains that patients are much more likely to search on Google, Wikipedia or – in the UK – the NHS Choices website, because these are trustworthy sites with lots of independent information.
“It’s really about using smart content marketing – so actually fulfilling a need – and that has to be derived from insight, rather than just uploading all the information you have on a disease on a site no one will look at,” he says.
“And going beyond this, you have to figure out: where are people having challenges and what are their misunderstandings about a therapy area? Because if, for example, we just do a ‘depression.com’ site or something like that, then how does that actually add any value to the information already available on the market? That is why digital in pharma is such a challenge because we can’t just stick up a billboard and say ‘that’s it’.”
Plugging the gaps
White says that if you apply this new thinking to alcoholism, then Lundbeck can get to people at the right moment when they’re searching for health information for themselves online.
He says firms need to understand why patients are searching for this type of information, and to ask whether there is a need for more content, or if you’re working in a saturated market.
In relation to treatments for alcoholism, White says that there is a definitely a ‘gap’ in available health information that Lundbeck can legitimately plug.
He says that historically there has just been a very ‘broad-stroke approach’ to this condition, and cites the pamphlet at the doctor’s office as an example of low-level information being in the wrong place. “But now because of the internet we can have things that are much more targeted, and it is fascinating,” he says.
“And actually any patient will go online and self-diagnose, and if pharma companies don’t recognise that then they have their heads in the sand.”
Looking to depression, a condition that Lundbeck also focusses heavily on, White says this has become a ‘very engaged patient community’ area online. One reason for this is demographics, given that depression can affect people at any age, meaning teenagers and those in their 20s and 30s who suffer from the condition are also the prime age groups for social media users, and will naturally want to engage more about their mental health.
White explains: “When you look at mental health and the age groups involved, it isn’t like it is with hypertension patients – I mean there are few people engaging about hypertension on social media, given that many of them are over sixty.
“But with those living with and caring for people with depression and Parkinson’s [another condition Lundbeck has drugs for], there are a lot of people that are looking for support, education and services for depression, so I just see it as our duty to be there and to support that.”
But he warns that the industry “must always make sure that what we’re doing is enhancing patient education and not just covert product marketing”.
‘Don’t tick box digital’
White says that pharma has focussed too often on the novelty aspects within digital by simply ticking a box saying “yes, we’ve built a website, job done”.
He goes on: “And the funny thing is, you see pharma going down the same road with apps now – so a team will say ‘let me build an app that tracks pills’, but then you have to ask ‘why are you doing that’? There are thousands of them already out there and probably better than yours. So just what is the value proposition here?”
He says that fundamentally, he really wants to call out to people and ask ‘what are we doing here and why?’
“Is it just to create a novelty that can win us an award, or so we can be treated like a ‘digital guru’, or are you really trying to get products that you genuinely believe in to patients that need them?”
He admits that he had a fairly ‘major shift in thinking’ on these issues after joining Lundbeck last year.
“That’s because I firmly believe in this company and that’s something that’s probably not so common, but we have a company that is staying in therapy areas that are so important right now, and that makes me want to solve a patient need, not check a box and say ‘yep, we built an app or yep, we built a website’.
“When a pharma firm has a 50% profit margin and they are just throwing money at gimmicky events, like the sort of thing we were living though in the 1990s and early 2000s, that’s just not the way we should be doing things today.
“But again, we need to flip it back to that question: are we actually providing value at every step for patients? If the answer is no, then you need to find a new way forward.”
Mimicking Apple launches?
Companies like Apple have to do very little to generate huge levels of excitement for their new products, effectively allowing them to market themselves. Much fanfare and hype is given to each new Apple launch, with entire websites dedicated to rumours about future products.
But will there ever be a day when this is replicated by the pharma industry for its new medicines?
If people can get so excited over what is fundamentally a superfluous gadget, then surely those awaiting new medicines that could help change their lives – or even save their lives – is worth much more fanfare?
One of the problems, of course, is that pharma likes to keep in the shadows when it comes to publicity, and most people on the street would be hard pushed to name more than one pharmaceutical company, or any drugs they develop. But White says whilst there will most likely not be the kind of fervour seen around Apple’s launches, there are still patient groups who are keenly awaiting the next pharma development.
He says: “There was a great film documentary released in 2012 called ‘How to Survive a Plague’ and that impressed me because it really focussed on that moment when the gay community around HIV was very much expectant of new medicines, and what was in the pipeline from Merck [a firm White has worked for and has a long history with HIV and AIDS medicines].
“And you see it a little bit today in oncology as well, but more widely in rare diseases, as there are small populations with no treatments, so these patients are eagerly awaiting these new and often novel drugs.”
But he says that the kind of ‘respect for innovation’ that is coming from companies’ pipelines has “probably been lost because of the reputational issues”.
He says: “If it does come back, then it will only do so if we stop looking at just selling pills and even if pills are still the core of our business, we really need to start communicating about how we are making people feel better, and not just focussing on the product with nice PowerPoints.
“And as an industry we want people to be able to stand up and say ‘I’m really proud to work for a pharma company’ – reaching that goal would be great.”
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