6 challenges facing pharma communications
pharmafile | August 18, 2011 | Feature | Medical Communications | communications, emerging markets
Brian O’Riordan looks at how the pharma industry is adapting to the changing world of 21st Century communications.
1) New customers in emerging markets
When Andrew Witty took over as chief executive of GSK in 2008 he soon set out his ambitious plan for the company’s future growth. He, like his counterparts in big pharma, are hoping that emerging markets can sustain industry growth for the next ten, twenty years and beyond.
But in order to capitalise on these emerging markets, pharma must change its business model, and its outlook.
Witty summed it up by saying his company wanted to move away from producing “white pills for the Western markets”, and move into new therapeutic areas and technologies, and treat diseases important in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
But actually following up on this ambition is a long-term strategy. GSK is doing this by digging beneath the blanket ‘emerging market’ term. The first sub-group that it and other companies are now targeting are the Middle-income countries (MICs), such as Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Thailand. These have a relatively large and affluent middle class, and offer a significant, fairly well established market for pharma companies.
At the same time, many MICs also have large numbers of people living in extreme poverty, and healthcare demands frequently overwhelm underfunded healthcare systems.
Meanwhile there is a larger tier of Least Developed Countries (LDCs) where poverty is more widespread, and the health needs are once again very different – and often hinge on basic survival.
GSK established a Developing Countries and Market Access (DCMA) unit in July 2010, which aims to increase patient access to GSK medicines and vaccines while allowing the company to establish itself as a long-term presence in developing countries.
Country managers for GSK’s businesses in LDCs now report into the new unit, enabling them to take a more consistent and integrated approach to increasing access in these countries. The unit is also working with GSK country managers in other developing countries to increase access through flexible pricing and other approaches.
GSK and others are broadening their portfolios to make them more relevant to the needs of these countries, and are beginning to experiment with tiered pricing. This work also requires collaboration with governments, international agencies, academic institutions, patient groups, NGOs and communities.
This model is clearly very different from the likes of Europe and the US, but will be increasingly important for pharma to understand as the century progresses.
2) The switch to more specialised medicines
The development of our understanding of disease is leading pharma in the direction of ‘personalised medicine’, with many breakthrough specialist drugs emerging from industry pipelines. This is a major shift not only in the dynamics of R&D, but how medicines are used – and how much they cost. The industry and payors are still working through these problems, illustrated best in the battles between the UK’s NICE and pharma over high cost drugs.
Specialised medicines also require a more expert sales and marketing effort, and companies entering these fields need to be seen as credible and in it for the long term. One company which had thrived via this business model – Genzyme – experienced the downside when manufacturing problems left it unable to supply Fabryzyme and Cerezyme, and left it open to rival products and having to deal with a huge public relations problem.
3) The growth of patient power
The ‘consumer society’ and the internet are two of the strongest forces propelling the development of patient power, but this movement looks to still have a long way to go. In England, the NHS has been struggling to rebuild itself around patient needs for some time, but there are many barriers, including cost, and how to build in meaningful patient choice to help encourage better services.
The pharma industry knows if it aligns itself with these aims, it will be very much ‘on message,’ but the complexities of patient care, healthcare systems and politics should be heeded with caution.
4) Fewer blockbusters, smaller budgets
The mighty revenues that big pharma pulled in from its greatest blockbusters, such as Zocor, Losec, Lipitor – allowed companies to re-invest billions of dollars in sales and marketing. Today most of the new generation of major products will only earn a fraction these products did, and marketing budgets are most constrained.
Marketers no longer enjoy bottomless resources, and are under increasing pressure to demonstrate Return on Investment.
5) Changing relationships with doctors
In June AstraZeneca announced that it would no longer pay for doctors to attend international conferences.
The move is just the latest development in the industry’s shift away from providing all-expenses-paid trips for doctors to international medical congresses.
Once widely accepted, the practice is now much rarer, tainted by accusations of ‘schmoozing’ and inappropriate relationships with doctors.
Speaking at a recent conference in Istanbul, AZ’s chief executive David Brennan said his company would stop paying for international trips, but would still pay doctors to speak at local conferences.
Brennan said the company’s main focus in all of its educational and promotional activities with healthcare professionals is to provide quality educational programmes. “We believe that by making these very clear commitments about how we promote our products, we can gain an advantage from doing the right thing,” he added. “I know from my own experience as a sales representative, you will encounter people who will ask for gifts, or other inducements and will threaten to take their business elsewhere, if you don’t acquiesce.
“But we have made it clear that our sales force have to say no,” he said, adding that his sales force must now do the right thing, ‘not the easy thing’.
Brennan is the current president of international pharma organisation the IFPMA, which is looking to improve pharma’s reputation around the world.
Brennan pointed to recent research suggesting pharma is still not trusted by some stakeholders. Pharma’s payments to healthcare professionals have come under the spotlight in recent years, with a series of recent investigations under Americas’ Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), increasing scrutiny greatly.
AstraZeneca is itself currently under investigation in the US in connection with the FCPA. It says it is ‘co-operating with these inquiries’.
Clearly major international corporate governance issues like this are not going to go away, and most companies are taking this seriously.
But in large global organisations, just one isolated example of bad practice can blow up in the face of company leaders, with consequences for their reputation.
6) Making sense of the digital world
Pharma companies know that the internet age and digital marketing are changing the wider world – but nobody quite knows how it is changing pharmaceutical marketing, causing anxiety and uncertainty about how to proceed.
Now that the internet, smartphones and other digital devices are firmly entrenched in many people’s lives, there is a general consensus that pharma must have a presence in the digital world – but quite how, and to what extent is unclear.
Another big question is whether or not pharma can really get its voice heard through digital channels, where there are so many competing voices online.
The prevailing wisdom is that pharma must have a ‘conversation’ with its stakeholder online – but freewheeling, spontaneous online conversations are not the industry’s forte. So can it really be done?
Bayer is an example of a company which has just launched a new Facebook page, with the hope of engaging directly with visitors to the social network.
A video message from Bayer chief executive Dr Marijn Dekkers, welcomes users and invites them to click the ‘Like’ button and become part of the Bayer social media world.
“As an innovative company, we are proud that Dr. Dekkers is the first chief executive of a DAX corporation to seek a dialogue with Facebook users,” says Michael Schade, head of communications at Bayer. “Facebook enables us to make contact with 700 million community members that we want to speak with about our mission ‘Bayer: Science For A Better Life.’ In the future, fans of the page will be able to read and comment on interesting information about science, sustainability and sport. We will also include stories from around the Bayer world.”
The company says its dialogue with users will go beyond traditional PR activities. “We aim to demonstrate to people the responsible approach adopted by the inventor company Bayer and the diversity of its activities,” Schade adds. These aims are laudable, and do seem to meet the company’s top line need to promote its corporate image in a global medium.
Bayer is already well established on Facebook, Twitter and the other social media, with German-language careers platform ‘Karrierebibel.de’ recently rating the company’s careers page on Facebook among the five best of its kind.
The group’s new Facebook presence is managed by Thomas Helfrich, a former business journalist who took over responsibility for social media and corporate messaging at Bayer AG at the beginning of this year.
Are conversations really possible?
Pharma companies may struggle to place a very clear value on comms spending in this area. The idea that pharma can engage its stakeholders in meaningful conversation or dialogue on the web is also very optimistic. Sadly, web-based conversation is frequently ill-tempered, childish and superficial. This is not necessarily the place where pharma will be able to communicate the nuances of pharmaceutical R&D and its value to patients and society.
On the other hand, one of the most appealing aspects of Facebook and Twitter is that pharma, like other groups, no longer has to rely on the mass media to convey their messages to their audience.
But there are downsides. A poorly maintained, out-of-date site is probably worse than no site at all, and this means resources must found to manage these interactions – even if they are only ‘conversational’ and relatively low level importance.
Finally, Pfizer’s Facebook page was recently hijacked by a computer hacker, underlining the vulnerable nature of pharma’s online presence. There is little doubt that pharma must have a presence in the digital world, but notions that relations with key stakeholders online is faster, simpler and more incisive will often be wide of the mark.
As in any environment, real relationships and dialogue takes time and commitment to build up.
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