Can we re-imagine marketing in Pharma & what could be the impact on customer-facing teams?

I've wanted to write something for a while on the topic of marketing in the Pharma / biotech industry. I finally got round to it after being asked to design & run some marketing courses for a few companies seeing a need to change their model & approach (or indeed new GTM models) in general but especially with regard to customers experience with customer-facing teams and an increasing use of non-personal communications.

What began as a seminar / workshop-based "teaching" session has evolved into something wider. Across 3 articles I'll try to address the larger question in the title. This first article focuses a little more on the differences between marketing & selling; a fundamental necessity to build to the other aspects in parts 2 & 3.

Part One: Marketing or Selling: What is the Pharma industry current organizational focus?

Marketing has been defined in many different ways. Which to some degree illustrates why the Pharma industry might not have one way of looking at or ‘doing’ marketing.

As I’m a long in the tooth marketer I go back to the definitions I learned long ago as I don’t think they have been bettered as a basis for fundamental & core understanding of the concept. 

“Marketing (management) is the process of planning & executing the conception, pricing, promotion & distribution of ideas, goods & services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives” (AMA, 1985). This is often condensed to, “marketing is the art of creating and satisfying customers at a profit” & into the 4Ps of the marketing mix; Product, Price, Place & Promotion linked to the simple definition, “marketing is getting the right goods & services to the right people (target market) at the right places at the right time at the right price with the right communications and promotion.”

Ultimately, marketing definitions variously define marketing as a process, a concept, an organizational function, activities & a management philosophy.

Now let us consider how the Pharma industry ‘places’ marketing within its structures, processes & philosophies…

Ask yourself where is the Product (not brand) created, where do the initial ideas come from (the market or the lab), who creates them, tests them, refines them, what targets are the organizational functions (& which ones are they) at the core of the process focused on at that time, where is the decision-making on taking certain ideas vs others made? (and so on).

How much freedom to choose to most country-level markets have on the Place where they distribute their final drug products to their customers (clinical teams & ultimately patients/carers)?

Once the corporate pricing & reimbursement committee has decided on the final drug product Price & corridor how much freedom (& ease and speed of process) do you have as the regional brand lead or country product manager to influence the price in your market with your customer groups?

If you are (relative to the entire organization) a new country-level product manager or brand lead how much ability do you have to create Promotion that is 100% targeted to the customers in your market? Or considered another way, how rigid are your internal brand stewardship guidelines, how much room do you have to influence global strategy & branding guidelines, icon & brand colour development, promotional concept design & development etc? And, how flexibly do your internal colleagues interpret the local market promotional codes & allow for debate and consideration of alternatives that aid the building of a strong brand with strong & differentiated promotional messages? (making the assumption everything is supportable & linked back to the registration studies conducted way before launch & local marketing teams came on board)

Having spent 25+ years in various sales, marketing and strategy/general management roles all around the world in this industry I believe that the further you get away from the discovery & clinical development process the less ‘marketing’ and the more ‘selling’ we, as an industry, do. I’m not a fan of the model & am increasingly being asked to work with client organizations to change the mindset, skills & processes of the customer-facing teams (medical & commercial, local & global) to bring less ‘selling’ and more ‘marketing’ into the tiny pieces of the Pharma world that I can reach.

So, in my simplified argumentation every employee in the ‘commercial’ side of the organization (so, yes, I include medical affairs along with marketing, market access, sales & supply chain etc) is ‘selling’ stuff.

If you have just read that and are thinking of stringing me up from a lamppost for suggesting medical affairs should have commercially-led objectives, KPIs etc may I suggest to keep reading & keep your open mind to the concepts & not how the industry rules/conventions currently exist. (I will come back to it!)

So, in my view, marketing is essentially a management philosophy. Before it gained prominence, we had the selling philosophy. As we had agrarian economies before industrial economies. The mindset of selling was, we can make ‘x’ really well, we’ve got lots of raw materials & the more we make and sell the better our scales of economy & profit so let’s get a bunch of guys and sell tons of this stuff as fast as possible. No reference to what consumers wanted. More about what we can make. 

Advertising also is not marketing (it does, however, fit within the 4Ps as part of Promotion). In the days of selling we became really good at differentiating one generic soap powder from another. It was all pretty much the same stuff in the box but we had to find a way to sell more than the other companies. Sound even slightly familiar?

What is one of the first things nearly all of us do every morning on waking? There are a few options, but I bet high on the list is teeth brushing. One hundred years ago this simply didn’t exist as a routine. No one ever conducted market research & ‘discovered’ a huge need or want for toothpaste. What the advertising guru of the age, Claude Hopkins, did was to create a huge craving for toothpaste, linked to some distinctly dodgy scientific rationale (that the Pharma industry would never be allowed anywhere near) about a film on teeth that once removed makes your smile looks nicer. (see My Life In Advertising). He did, however, pioneer the use of message testing & tracking…

I’d suggest that much of what is called marketing by people in Pharma is more like the examples above than it is aligned with the concepts & definitions of marketing described earlier. I’d love to hear your views. 

Let me develop these ideas a little further…

Marketing is almost the opposite mentality of ‘selling’. 

Peter Drucker said, “There will always, one can assume, be a need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.” (Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices)

If we operate with a truly marketing organizational philosophy then we decide we are in the game of finding a need & satisfying it. We research where there are gaps, needs, desires now but more importantly in the future, then we set about finding a solution for those specific consumers (a segment). We create designs test & refine, prototypes to test & refine etc and we go back to our prioritised “segment” with our solution (we target them). And, because we have given them what they need (different from want) we don’t need to “sell” it to them - we message the key essence that helps find a position in their heart & mind and they will become brand loyal (forever!). That’s the theory & certainly as years have gone by the concept of loyalty has changed hugely, but fundamentally this concept of marketing holds true. Think about some of the brands you love & how you came to be so brand loyal.

Now I ask, from those pictures of ‘marketing’ and ‘selling’, has the Pharma industry ever fully adopted marketing? Or can we not let go of selling? The pushing of a pre-determined & finished product onto an audience trying to maximize sales without consideration of their needs?

If we had a true marketing philosophy throughout the organizational structures & layers then at the customer-facing end of each company (including medical affairs – I said I’d come back to it!) would we see different, better, more valuable interactions, more aligned objectives & project priorities with experiences for all parties that exceed what we see today? Please let me know what you think.

Wouldn’t it be better for health economies, patients, the industry and you, as essential contributors to your organization's success, that we get greater marketing (the philosophy, not the department) involvement in what we do/should be doing. We can re-imagine marketing in our industry, but with every long journey someone must take the first step.

The next article in this 3 part series will take these ideas and link them to some changes in science & the development process/focus that could actually accelerate the re-imagining of the marketing philosophy & process in our industry.