In Animal Health & Nutrition, Strategic Marketing is everyone's job

Whether you work in sales, technical services, R&D, finance, regulatory affairs, operations, or any other function in the Animal Health & Nutrition sector, at some point, you're likely to be involved in one or more strategic marketing tasks. That's a good thing and a sign that AHN companies understand that, to create a sound strategy, they need to seek input from the best professionals from all areas of their organizations.

At the same time, it's quite common for professionals in non-managerial positions to feel a little bit lost when they are asked to join a strategy-building effort. After all, the AHN recruits most of its talent from a pool of technical and scientific backgrounds, such as animal scientists, nutritionists, and veterinarians. While those professionals bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the industry, they are typically not trained in business planning, marketing, or strategy in general.

I should know because that was exactly my experience. I trained as a veterinarian, and before joining my first Animal Health company, worked in a couple of poultry integrators for three years. Soon after starting my new career as a technical services advisor for that pharmaceutical giant, I was pulled into various tasks that were not part of my educational background. New product development and testing, discussions about market segmentation and positioning, preparations for launching new products, creating sales training materials, messaging, value calculations, and much more, all without much or any understanding of the business side of those tasks.

My natural instinct was to fall back and rely pretty heavily on what I was taught in veterinary school and my years as a practicing veterinarian in charge of broiler health for my previous employers. It took me a while to learn how to think less as a veterinarian and more as a marketer. It took even longer to learn how to think strategically and even to understand what strategy really means.

the deficit in formal training in business and marketing comes into sharp relief when we are invited or "volunteered" to participate in strategic marketing activities.

Throughout the industry, the same pattern repeats itself again and again. How many sales, marketing, operations, and business leaders of today started their careers with a scientific background and little or no training in business? Obviously, their scientific training gave them important advantages that are prized and sought after by the AHN industry. Many successful industry leaders earned their stripes working in food animal production or in veterinary clinics and that experience of being "on the other side of the table" is also incredibly valuable to the AHN companies.

Despite that, the deficit in formal training in business and marketing comes into sharp relief when we are invited or "volunteered" to participate in strategic marketing activities. Some of us learn and enjoy that different type of challenge. Others hate it and have a hard time grasping why the company spends so much time and money tossing around buzzwords about "customer centricity", "jobs to be done", "vision and mission", and others like those.

Even though not every DVM or animal science Ph.D. will learn to appreciate the value of a well-crafted positioning statement and may scoff or roll their eyes at workshops that aim to define the "essence" and "voice" of a brand, we should all open our minds and understand that those elements of strategic marketing are as essential to the success of an Animal Health and Nutrition company as the intricacies of the mode of action of a novel molecule, the upregulation of immune response by the host animal, or the performance response of an animal to a given treatment.

If you enjoyed this article and would like to participate in a brief survey of the state of marketing in the Animal Health and Nutrition sector, click the link below and share your experience. I will publish the results after the survey is closed so that you can learn what other professionals also think about this topic.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/52SM28B