The Pharmaceutical Industry is in the midst of a perfect storm of disruptive change.
To survive and thrive, companies must reinvent their marketing using analytics, particularly when it comes to their primary customer – patients.
Here are three important areas to focus on:
As patients become more informed and empowered, so too do 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.
The more information patients 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.
Pharmaceutical companies have traditionally organized their customer engagement models around their products, not their customers. Even when they do consider the customer, they are primarily thinking of prescribing clinicians, not patients and payers.
Customer-focused companies seek out opportunities to transparently engage all their customers in the most appropriate channels based on the needs, values and behaviors of each group.
This means articulating desired outcomes from the customer perspective at least five years before launch, if not earlier, examining real-world evidence to identify unmet needs, and pinpointing patients who would benefit most from the product.
The tools typically used to inform decisions in Pharma include brand awareness, brand and competitor perceptions, message recall and message evaluation, share of voice, prescription intention, prescription adoption, brand share, brand-switching behavior, brand loyalty, detail follow-ups, quality and quantity of calls, call satisfaction, rep quality perceptions, and company image perceptions. While they all have their place, they will not, on their own, significantly increase market share.
Given the numerous analytics tools available today, relying solely on these data points to inform marketing decisions is paramount to marketing negligence.