Competing in the New Digital Era

By Q3–2015 Facebook advertising revenue was up 45% year on year to $4.3 billion while Twitter’s was up 60% to $513m. Interestingly, much of this was not because marketers were becoming more social savvy, but because the social channels were becoming more like the traditional media. For example, Facebook launched a TRP tool to sell its reach, the same way as traditional TV and all platforms focus heavily on video – a traditionally passive one-way format. Becoming more digitally driven is critical to the lifeblood of organizations. Clearly, for newer ventures like Uber and AirBnB, unencumbered by traditional legacy approaches, being a digitally driven organization is relatively easy. What about Pharma? How can Pharma adapt? Digital is being embraced by Pharma marketing already, but is it really being used effectively?


Some firms consider digital simply as new channels for engaging with their stakeholders, while others consider it an entirely new way of doing business. While both are arguably correct, wide variation in definition and scope of projects can cause misalignment internally. This misalignment tends to result in piecemeal projects and imprudent efforts that lead to overlooked opportunities and false starts. To market effectively in the digital era, companies need to plan well, and that planning offers many challenges as well as opportunities for companies doing this well. Let’s examine some of these for marketing teams and consider what this means for the present year.

1. Understanding and delivering superior customer experience and value
Ensuring you meet your customers’ needs and expectations, and provide value to the customer along with a superior customer experience, is critical. Today’s customers have much higher expectations from companies and expect to get all their needs met 24/7 online. They want access when they want it – on demand. They want the experience to be targeted precisely to their needs. And they want it to be easy. Are your digital services able to meet this need? Customer personalization and customer intimacy are key to ongoing success. The Internet of Things (IoT) can offer many opportunities here for many conditions, especially conditions such as Diabetes. More connections are occurring than ever before between people and devices, creating rich opportunities for customer engagement. And when teams get customer experience right, the winners will ensure that there is consistency in delivering that strong customer experience.

2. Defragmenting the channels
This ties in well with the previous point. There are so many channels and many teams have been building up a fragmented picture of the customers: website interactions, market research data, CRM system interactions, IoT interactions, and so on. Marketers need to be able to join the dots and create a 360 degree view of the stakeholders across all the channels. They need to be able to pinpoint the needs and values for each and every individual customer by taking this data and combining it to add valuable enriched insights.

3. Maths, magic and big data
In the era of big data, great opportunities are opening up for Pharma marketers who tie fragmented data sources together. There is a lot of digital data and companies, including Eularis, who specialize in Artificial Intelligence and big data, are crunching huge amounts of digital data from many disparate sources – including social media, web data, veeva.com data and much more – to uncover how the Pharma teams need to focus their efforts to individuals to reap far stronger financial results. It is a shame, however, that many teams do not understand how to plan and use this appropriately. Many are attempting ad hoc patchwork attempts on one portion of data and then another in a piecemeal way that devalues what they could achieve with proper comprehensive planning of all data sources together. More and more firms are seeing a widening gap between the data they are collecting and what they can do with it. Teams need to find ways to use both internal and external data more effectively.

Something Eularis is now doing is applying Artificial Intelligence algorithms to a company’s digital data to ensure that not only their general marketing strategy but also all their digital data is analyzed with AI. In doing so, teams can also elevate their digital planning from descriptive analytics (as one gets with Google analytics, Radian 6, Hubspot and Marketo) to taking that data from all of these data sources and getting it into the appropriate AI algorithms for far stronger insights for digital strategy planning. Companies that get this right generate a minimum of 12% higher profit than those that do not, and create sustainable competitive advantages.

4. Pricing disruption
Most drug failures that are unrelated to clinical issues can be traced to poor pricing. Most pricing is done in the same way it has been done for decades, and yet the world has moved on. Now, instead of the focus being solely on efficacy, safety and minimal side effects, we are moving to pricing via value and outcomes. Companies are paying lip service to these but, in reality, have not changed their pricing approaches. By utilizing new data around these, and combining them with machine learning algorithms, we can create far more precise pricing to attract more customers and achieve higher profit for the Pharma company. Companies should be considering shaking up their pricing approaches to Artificial Intelligence based approaches.

5. Digital disruption from within
Uber disrupted taxis and car transport; AirBnB disrupted hotels. What are you doing as a Pharma company to disrupt from within before an external company disrupts you? These companies mentioned above had it a lot easier than it will be for Pharma, yet already disruption is happening from within.

A case in point is Pharma company Aprecia’s drug, Spritam, which was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and uses the company’s trademark ZipDose technology – i.e. 3D printing. Soon this will be commonplace but will require massive changes in Pharma processes if they want to compete.Pharma companies should be getting their entire workforce to think digitally so that innovation is fostered from within and build it into their DNA. Perhaps create some company-wide approaches to involve everyone, such as holding company-wide hackathons and/or digital factories.

An example of this is the Grants4Apps initiative that Bayer already does. Other companies are also using this kind of crowdsourcing-based initiative with digital start-ups to bring more innovation into the company to achieve objectives. This will become more and more common in 2016 and beyond. We know of several Pharma companies starting to do this now and the results have been impressive in the countries they have been held.

6. Strong internal teams
The skill sets required in finding and keeping internal teams that can digitally transform a company keep increasing, and finding the right team to build great user experiences is important. The teams need to understand the digital space well and must be able to convert digital aspirations into practice in the real world. Many companies are now creating a Digital Strategy Officer to ensure that digital is part of the companies DNA.

7. Becoming agile
Projects need to be fast and teams need to be able to adapt quickly. Most of our clients understand this and like to work speedily, but if your team is not interested in speed, typically this is because they are not confident in their ability and procrastinate to be safe. The irony is that it does the opposite and creates more issues that compound unless addressed quickly. Teams that do not understand the need for speed and agility will be left behind. Processes need to be put in place to implement a cyclical dynamic where test and learn mindsets are created. These can include automating some approaches; monitoring, sharing and collaborating to ensure previously siloed processes are now shared and integrated to facilitate rapid results. Teamwork and cross-functional collaboration is important.

8. Ensuring success
By adopting strong nonlinear-based algorithms and integrating many different data sources, we can now monitor, track and manage our marketing investment better than ever before. Eularis use various Artificial Intelligence techniques to do this, and the combination used depends on the data sources available. As companies become more digital and more customer-focused, this will be critical. The analytics conducted need to be more than simply good algorithms – you need strong insights. For that you need a strong data science team alongside a strong Pharma commercial and strategy team to make sense of the data uncovered.