In which biotech / pharma internal functions will core marketing activities be increasingly seen in future?

Part one of this 3 part series discussing the re-imaging of marketing within the life sciences industry travelled over the fundamentals of what is marketing as a philosophy vs a narrowly department & the importance of moving away from old fashioned commercial philosophies and how the industry could benefit from full adopting a marketing philosophy.

So, to follow on from last week’s article, there is a really large question hanging over us…

Where do the essential core elements of marketing get done? (and then, who does them & do they even know?)

Considering the 4Ps (Product, Price, Place & Promotion - described last week, see article link above) which is a model that illustrates how these 4 core marketing mix elements interact with each other, does the core of marketing finish when the Product is finished? And so, in the current Pharma model, does that therefore mean the product is finalized by the time we’ve designed registration studies?

And is that even more true if we consider that Price is set by senior execs at first market launch, & accept that we can’t really change too much of the Place our drugs are ‘sold’. So, is the marketing functions responsibility & scope limited to mainly a focus on Promotion...?

Product Managers seem to be pretty much focused on producing promotional materials for HCPs; whether its tracking message impact, or researching market needs to apply the KSMs to or dealing with the various internal meetings & processes to create these HCP-focused materials. Indeed, Project Manager is a better title in the modern Pharma industry vs Product Manager. This is even more true at country level vs regional or global roles. In my mind it’s a pretty bleak picture for the future of these roles - if the trend continues.

I’ve witnessed newer generations of product managers become stifled in the role by internal SOPs, increased risk aversion, reduced L&D investment, increased role of globalisation, brand stewardship & centralisation. Coupled with these restrictions we have a more complex market, with greater challenges to overcome to launch & successfully access patients with genuine treatment advances. I'm not sure I would join this industry again (based on how the entry-level roles are focused vs 25+ years ago) after completing degrees in marketing and hoping to apply the concepts fully in an industry that can (& does!) really help so many patients, carers & families.

But there are reasons for some optimism and shoots of encouragement for those who believe in the marketing philosophy & are happy not to work in marketing! (I don't see too much appetite for major organizational structure change anytime soon).

[Side note: It should NEVER be product manager it should always be Brand Manager, but I default to the more widely used term in the industry & yes I know some companies use "brand" in their marketing role titles but let's be honest we don't really build brands very well! Think of all the major corporate brands and see how they make their brands live & breather & then look at what we as an industry do...I’m not so confident the difference between brand & product will move in our industry until we make significant cultural & control changes. We are still so far away from understanding the concept of brands that we tend to defer pretty much exclusively to patent protection periods as the sum total of a products life cycle & don’t then invest in creating brand longevity with IP extended to less legal structures (trademarks & trade dress, designs etc) & longer time periods that core compound patents. If we can truly consider marketing & meeting the definition of marketing as satisfying market needs then as we widen our offerings to be more solution-focused & including not only diagnostics and digital communications but to relinquish our desire to always control the agenda, debate, outputs etc then we can never really understand that it is the position in the customers mind that is important - not the message we hope they hear - but what they actually feel & believe. This is a whole article on its own!]

After my digression, let's come back to, 'where is marketing done in our organisations currently' and get there by way of discussing some external market trends that might enable the marketing philosophy to have new life breathed into it...If there is a confluence of a few current trends then maybe marketing can truly take its ‘rightful’ place in our industry. And that will be a good thing because we will be making the stuff people need and not be pushing the exact same stuff onto groups (segments) who just don’t want or need it (less clinical benefit as move away from core differentiated data). This idea of "selling" was discussed in the previous article.

So, what trends are we seeing that could act as a catalyst for the industry to acknowledge the need for a deeper & more penetrating marketing philosophy and consequently & more importantly the changes to the way companies are structured & resourced?

With increased precision of diagnosis (tools and tech & AI) and increased understanding of genetics (CRISPR, DNA sequencing etc) we are increasingly in a position to pinpoint with greater accuracy the 'right patient'. We can better group patients into smaller, better defined populations that are truly a 'segment' with a high-level of homogeneity across characteristics that are easy to describe, understand & track overtime. Sound like a core principle of marketing yet?

Levels of scientific discovery & development amaze me & we are seeing far greater success in drug development (not necessarily as a probability of success measure in pre-PoC but more at the societal level of true advances over what has gone before vs me too, follow-on compound tweaking). As more focused research into better defined patient types (driven by clearer disease definition etc) is conducted and projects run through to their inevitable conclusion the kind of "rare disease model" where science focuses not so much on the size of the population to be served but by the need to serve a patient group that has no real treatment options should breed greater confidence that this is a better model for Pharma where we drill into isolated disease-driving elements that can be addressed and either fully blocked over time / corrected / bypassed / switched-off etc. (We saw just last week that Cardiff-based scientists have identified a specific T-cell receptor that finds MR1 in cancer cells & it could have far more wide-reaching potential targets than the great late-2010s breakthrough of CAR-T).

The 2010s saw the start of this new scientific wave of research entering health economies. But, those payer models & internal company pricing models have not sufficiently evolved at the same speed. We are seeing some examples now of companies being a little more innovative in their interactions with payers, with payments related to results, and I really hope that more are adopted and that governments & insurers rapidly alter their systems to make the process of access via procurement & evaluation processes more focused on innovative solutions & not simple transactional level solutions.

Because if they do, then advances & better standards of monitoring & disease / health tracking can also feed into the 'value' of highly targeted solutions to well described & served patient segments.

So, if come back to the science, it is potentially the departments of early science, discovery & clinical development that could be leading the way to a wider marketing philosophy across biotech & pharma. I do love a little irony…

From the image above the 'classic' discovery & development model doesn't really bear witness to the 'market'. It is all about what we have to do to find a compound that works that we can make into a deliverable drug. I'd suggest that 'target discovery' should encompass the market & not just what the lab can make and that this market test runs through all of the stages into drug candidates for greater commercial evaluation, which from the image below you will see the 'market' is also pretty much ignored

And, if these innovative university spin outs can remain autonomous and not become assimilated into “Borg Pharma “ (not a spell mistake, rather a joke for the Trekkies) then we can more clearly define segments, stop execs from global monoliths pushing development program teams to “target” all patients (that’s not targeting!) when they believe the patient pool for the real, clear & obvious benefit, linked to the precise diagnosis & accepted value proposition is simply not big enough for their P&L (those Snr execs need a marketing tutorial!?).

Assuming the clinical development path is faster (smaller patient populations with less alternative existing comparators or with new technologies so good that the number of patients/time needed to show a significant enough benefit is more focused/faster & less costly) & that regulators can deal with the new development model (maybe they can, reference FDA breakthrough status etc) & that payers can accept increasingly innovative pricing models to deal with multi-indication roll-outs over time then it can be postulated that the marketing job is done better far further up the organisation than currently.

Often those who do not sit in the official marketing dept are unaware fully of the role they play in the creation of solutions that the market needs & therefore their role in ‘marketing’. Consequently, the impact of their decisions on those downstream in the organization who sit in marketing departments can be missed & the final ‘brand’ is somehow missing the mark (wrong offering/solution to the wrong segment with an un-matched value/price relationship etc).

To make the brand creation process even more effective we could see marketing specialists working with development teams at PhI & PhII to ensure the registration study design / draft target label etc match market needs AND to work in pricing & market access teams to ensure we consider the value in a better defined population & how payers are set-up & consider value etc. And, what about indication pricing as brands move into different sized / valued segments over time - another huge headache for the industry to work on to get value & pricing right for the market & for the 'market' to have systems that allow for it.

Above when I say marketing specialists, I do not necessarily mean the Marketing Department. I mean whoever is best placed to determine the future market need (this might be people with skill sets / qualifications that have historically been sited in medical affairs departments. Maybe that is the right place to be ‘housed’, I mean to focus on the mindset of people in those departments & the role that they can play). We often see the Product Strategy group or their equivalents involved at this stage but again, from my observations across many years & companies, they are not necessarily tasked with the marketing philosophy as their prime directive. If they were would we see less failures as projects are pushed into highly attractive ($) opportunities when the PoS should be more robustly challenged from what truly is the market need (coming back again to the central definition of marketing).

So, in conclusion we can see that marketing activities occur from discovery & clinical development onwards & permeate all areas of the business, but perhaps not everyone likes to see it or accept it.

The closer we get to the ‘markets’ then the greater the market mind is but we need to ensure it is not isolated to such a late stage when so many decisive actions have been taken & marketers can only 'fiddle' with some of the core elements of marketing.

And, if we keep the market in mind and stick to Drucker’s definition of marketing – essentially making selling obsolete – then our industry’s ethical considerations should be met more easily. Imagine a time when the market comes to us & asks for our brand / offering / experience (without us controlling & pushing the agenda / messages etc). Wouldn’t that be refreshing?

It would also be more like true marketing & maybe it is not so far away as we think. When working on the launch of Glivec many years ago this was the first & only true experience of mine where a market clamoured for access to a drug brand (not often have I, a product manager, had a professor call & email asking for access to ‘my’ drug!). Oh, and as coincidence would have it (or it it?) Glivec was a highly targeted drug with a very specific & identifiable patient segment & correspondingly hugely superior clinical evidence of impact on outcomes vs historical alternatives. The finance director of the time captured the thoughts of many, “so you won’t need a sales team, this stuff will sell itself.”

He was right, but wrong also. We needed a different set of customer-facing teams with different skills to ensure we got “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” (marketing definition from first article).

Going forward, we also need to consider the entire gamut of 'promotional tools' now available to commercial organisations & that the message & discussions need to be far more tailored to each audience segment & a little less Key Selling Message-adapted when not considering historical core audiences of HCPs. We will look at this in in the next article. And, this can make the product / brand manager role far more interesting than it has been in recent years. Let's hope