Fixing the trust deficit with the public
To the applause of fellow drug-company officials today, Merck CEO Dick Clark told executives that the industry needs to fix its trust deficit with the public. This is like someone on the Titanic saying "I think we have a leak" after the ship is half under water! However acknowledgement of the problem is a great first step. To many critics, Corporate America's pharma companies seem shockingly out of touch, blind to the deterioration in public confidence. A seemingly endless stream of bad news alleging widespread dishonesty is chipping away at the trust vital to a free-market system. Here are some great first steps to restore patient trust....
Restoring Trust:
1. The CEO has to have small town-hall meetings with employees to explain his/her vision of how we are going to restore trust which includes "being more transparent with everything we do". Think and act like our customers are in meetings with us.
2. Acknowledge your mistakes: Don't try and fight the negative perceptions of the pharma industry. Acknowledge your past missteps and ask for forgiveness and tell the public what you are doing to ensure it never happens again.
3. Understand that building trust requires time: It's not going to happen in a week or a month and could take a long time to win consumers trust. During that time identify the key influencers and reach out to them to ask "what can we do to convince you that we are worthy of your trust?"
4. Get your executives using social media: Have key executives use Twitter and develop a BLOG to let consumers and customers know the challenges you face. The key here is transparency and speed of response without having your legal people reword your posts so that they are corporate talk.
5. Explain the current environment in simple easy to understand terms: Let the public know that it costs close to a billion dollars to develop and launch a new drug and that only one in 7 or 8 make it market. Inform and educate them as to how much you are sinking into R&D versus marketing and promotion.
6. Talk the talk then you have to walk the walk: This means that you should be establishing a database of all your customers (patients) who are using your products so that you can quickly inform them about new potential side effects and results of clinical studies. It also means that you should keep them updated on which insurers have your product on formulary and which do not.
7. Share your resources: Have an online town-hall meeting to talk about what you are doing and ask your patients for feedback on everything from packaging to DTC materials.
Restoring trust in pharma is not going to be easy and is going to require time but with the right approach it can be done. Pharma just needs a good plan and trust officer to ensure that a plan can be put together, implemented and measured.