Pharmaceutical marketers – put your head in the clouds
pharmafile | April 17, 2012 | Feature | Business Services, Manufacturing and Production, Medical Communications, Research and Development, Sales and Marketing |Â Â Alex Blyth, Cloud Computing, MSI, digital, iPod, ipadÂ
The moment has arrived for the pharma industry to embrace online planning tools.
The convergence of reliable and secure cloud-based computing, growing cultural acceptance of doing things online, and the arrival of user-friendly interfaces to allow everyone to undertake complex tasks (think iPad), means that there is at last a viable solution to the age-old problem of cohesive, co-created plans – just as the industry needs them more than ever.
The pharma industry has never been more focused on return on investment. That means that excellence in planning, especially launch planning, is right at the forefront of most pharma marketers minds.
As the old saying goes, if you fail to plan…
Excellence in planning requires:
• Identifying the opportunities for the company and the opportunities to help patients move along the pathway to be successfully treated on your product
• Understanding the value of those opportunities, and aligning your strategy to those opportunities.
In a global marketplace with global brands, there are several barriers to achieving excellence:
• Gaining a clear understanding of how the market is broken down
• Understanding barriers, opportunities and threats, and then making sure everyone at every level has a clear understanding of what you need to do.
That is difficult enough at country level – much more difficult if you happen to be in a global planning function, looking to roll out a global launch. The sheer number of people in an organisation who have input into a plan can be daunting: business intelligence and other members of the marketing team, channel owners, sales manager, market access manager, key opinion leader management, digital, medical – the list goes on.
Then there are the departments which have to review the plans and forecasts, such as finance, management teams etc. As many as a dozen different functions can be involved in the creation, refinement and sign-off procedure.
This can involve a lot of time and hassle getting the documents to and from people, as well as the inevitable version control problem it creates. You can add to that the complexity of understanding variations at region and at country level, and allowing regional and local marketers to feed into the plan so that it will be effective across all markets.
And then you have to try and contain all of that sometimes contradictory input in a plan which maintains the core essence of the brand.
It is a colossal task, and one which is not made any easier by a seemingly rigid adherence to undertaking it in the same old way each time: Powerpoint decks flying backwards and forwards, with little version control, and still less awareness of where contradictions lie, and how they might impact on the overall effectiveness of the plan.
Fortunately, we are living right now at a moment in time when three things have aligned to present us with a solution to the problem – and it can be found online.
Constant stream of consciousness
Let’s go back to a global directors looking to roll out global launches. They will have their own core plan which will incorporate research done across multiple countries. Their first challenge is to wrap that strategic insight into a core global strategy which may have regional and local variants.
Then, once they are actually formulating their plan, they will get people involved from those regions and localities to give their input into the planning process.
So it has already gone through three levels: global strategy through to regional strategy, and then local input, which is where you will get the ‘my country is different’ scenario. Sound familiar?
It is very hard to have a consistent theme and keep unity behind the brand’s core essence, while at the same time involving local and regional experts. No one wants to hear the classic ‘Europe is one big country’ attitude, so they have to allow the process of input.
But how to keep control of that and keep the product on track so that everyone is aligned behind the common value proposition? In addition, because they have a responsibility to make the launch work at a country level, local marketers will often commission their own research, which will inevitably overlap with work the region has commissioned, which will in turn overlap with the work that global has commissioned.
It’s hardly the best use of resource, and those pieces of research can end up competing, leaving you with competing forecasts and competing strategies which don’t align. Pulling together all the individuals’ work into a cohesive whole requires a common thread, in order to achieve a consistent stream of consciousness.
Up until now, that thread has been people firing about emails and Powerpoint decks, which instead of a consistent stream of consciousness, creates a web of complexity. That complexity is partly a result of political factors, where local countries are trying to pull down their targets, while global is trying to be seen as successful and make the brand a big hit for the company.
It is also partly a question of wanting to be in control of the strategy that genuinely works for a particular market, and resisting a strategy enforced by global that is either too broad, or that doesn’t fit with that individual market.
The challenge is to get everybody to follow and objective process that keeps constant alignment across the organisation and holds everything together. And three factors have come together to make that possible with the use of online planning tools.
Into the cloud
Technology has played a big part in allowing this to happen, in that until now it’s not been realistic to have genuinely shared online plans. Instead, individuals inputting into the plan have had software on their computer, which has updated to a central server when they change things and then plug back in – with all the problems of differing assumptions and version control.
Cloud computing is the first thing which has made this new approach possible. By having a central plan which everyone works on at the same time, each person’s input is assimilated in real time, so anyone else coming to the plan is seeing the latest version.
That not only accelerates the process, but it makes it much more effective, too. Because everyone knows their input is fitting into the whole – and they know what their role is – they will have the same focus on what the end product is going to look like.
The second factor which has enabled online planning tools is partly technological, and partly cultural. Rationally or not, many people have had a bit of a phobia about putting sensitive planning content online. But over time, as security technology has improved, we are all overcoming this unfounded fear.
After all, we all do our banking online, and that includes pharma companies. Clinical trial systems are all online now, and culturally we are all much more accepting that the cloud is secure, which has largely put to bed those fears.
The third factor is the development of simple interfaces to achieve complex results. This balance between simplicity and complexity is important: there must be sufficient rigour to trust the outputs, but it must be simple enough to produce the inputs in the first place.
This has moved ahead in leaps and bounds in a very short time – just look at the iPad. Who would have imagined just two years ago that such a user-friendly interface would enable people to be doing so much, in such a technologically sophisticated way?
Out of the happy convergence of these three factors has come the feasibility of truly online planning tools which will for the first time, genuinely allow that constant stream of consciousness to be maintained across the whole planning process.
That means that also for the first time, the person who owns the ultimate plan is able to see what is going on at any moment, can always be in control, and will be able to spot any inconsistencies and contradictions as they happen in real time.
It means they can build a core patient flow, and send that out almost as a template which is used by each country, who can alter it for their specific market, while still following the core template.
More importantly, each market, and the centre, can use the planning tool to communicate with one another. So, for example, if there are certain assumptions that need to be validated in Italy, the Italian marketer will get a message that these are the assumptions which need to be reviewed, and local knowledge applied.
Flexibility is key
Of course, we have all come across online and technology-based solutions which are very rigid, and which don’t allow for the way that either a particular individual or a corporate culture works.
Any online planning tool has to be set up in such a way that allows the user to reflect the values and culture of the organisation. So some companies will have a more directive approach, stipulating that certain parts of the plan are simply not for changing.
A more collaborative approach would be to have a traffic light system which indicates the level of confidence in the assumptions, with red lights indicating that input is invited. A decent online planning tool will allow for both types of approach, and all points in between. That flexibility is vital if it is to achieve buy-in from, and be of use to, different pharma companies.
You need a system which allows input whilst at the same time maintaining control. The perfect planning tools will allow real-time sharing of insight across regions and individual markets, and it will enable real-time validation of assumptions made during the planning process – all in the context of a process which sticks to a consistent brand proposition and strategy.
It comes down to consistent marketing excellence having been applied across every country and every region, so that you’re comparing apples with apples when you are looking at the returns you might be getting in one country versus another. That might be very relevant if you’re making tough reimbursement strategy decisions, perhaps not going into some markets because you can’t get the price you want.
Coupled with that is the question of how much resource you choose to put into different markets, which likewise requires that ‘apples with apples’ comparison.
By having a standardised, company-defined process that everybody follows, you can also then validate things more effectively. If everyone has been going through the same planning process, they get the benefit of having these real-time checks that they go through the plan.
Enabling growth
The convergence of those three factors that have enabled true online planning applications – the fact that we have the technology to create them, the growing comfort and confidence in using them, and the fact that they are now user-friendly enough for everyone to use – coupled with the recognition that coherent and cohesive planning across organisations is more vital than ever, means that the online planning app’s time has come.
People have recognised that marketing excellence isn’t just about nice-looking outputs. It’s about enabling growth across the organisation; it’s about the tangible impact on the company. In effect, marketing excellence, and as part of that planning excellence, has become a question of commercial and business effectiveness, it’s about getting the best out of the brand.
To make that happen, more effectively and more easily, requires a new set of tools which harness the best of new technology and the best of current planning expertise. And for that, we must now look online.
• By special arrangement with CELLO Business Sciences, InPharm readers who work for manufacturers of life sciences products can take a look into the future of planning, by enjoying a sneak preview of the industry’s first cloud-based seamless marketing tools.
To take advantage of this offer, contact: jpoland@BusinessSciences.com, quoting ‘InPharm App Offer’ in the subject line. Also for further reading visit here.
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