Isn’t it Time for Disruptive Innovation in Your Pharma Marketing?

An Accenture survey of 200 sales and marketing executives at large pharmaceutical companies found that 11 percent were planning a wholesale redesign of their sales and marketing organization in response to constrained budgets and the revolution in stakeholder engagement. A third of analytics executives and 36 percent of sales executives surveyed said their company has room for “significant improvement.” 1We agree. Successful marketing must be linked to revenue and profit, not gut feeling, subjective outcomes, or even sales (which don’t always equate to profits or market share), but by real-market-data driven analytics. This provides companies with a thorough understanding of their customers, their own and their competitors’ products and drivers, and the current regulatory, economic, and policy background. Only then can they develop an integrated marketing plan designed to drive growth. Reinventing your marketing with analytics is particularly important given the following industry disruptors:

 

 

As patients become more informed and empowered they become more demanding. Today, more than 70 percent of patients with online access use the Internet to find health information. Forty percent diagnose their own condition and then have a physician confirm.2 The more information they have the more they begin to make value-based decisions about their treatments and reject higher-priced drugs if that is the only engagement they have with the product. If pharma does not join this online dialogue with their patients and influence it, they will lose the opportunity to shape it. Thus, it is vital that pharmaceutical marketing address patient centricity.

 

Digitally enabled marketing is here but most pharmaceutical companies aren’t ready.3 Despite access to unprecedented data and innovative digital approaches that can be used to drive better health outcomes by influencing customer behavior, few pharmaceutical companies are exploring digital-engagement models. Instead, they are relying on a product.com, some eDetailing, and social media, none of which are driving the results they could realize if they fully embraced digital marketing.

 

 

To remain competitive, pharmaceutical companies need to “think beyond the pill.”3 That means going beyond the therapeutic uses of their product and focusing on the bundle of services they provide with the pill rather than the pill itself. “The engagement becomes the product,” says Joseph Kvedar, director of the Center for Connected Health at Partners HealthCare. “The therapeutic is almost a giveaway or marketing expense. There aren’t many better ways to develop a relationship with a patient than through a prescription for a medication to treat a chronic illness.”

 

 

Both access to and the quality of real-world data are increasing exponentially, spanning everything from electronic health records to social platforms, healthcare claims, demographic trends, and genomic insights. The advantage of competing on outcomes is that it focuses competition on what really matters to patients: delivering high-quality care in a cost-efficient fashion. Transparency of patient results can align incentives so that payers, providers, suppliers, and patients all work toward the same goal, making it possible for the market to effectively manage the tradeoffs between cost and quality. In this world of outcomes-based competition, drug companies and device makers that cannot demonstrate that their products genuinely add value will suffer. Winners, by contrast, will be those that build a sustainable competitive advantage through better access to and analysis of realworld data; deeper insights about how to improve outcomes; and more effective collaborations and partnerships to develop value-adding innovations.