Mals Musings: Time to send pharma marketers back to school
*Why all pharma marketers should go on professional marketing training courses.* With so much said about training and development, is it time marketers started
By on Sep 6, 2010Why all pharma marketers should go on professional marketing training courses.
With so much said about training and development, is it time marketers started taking some of their own medicine?
We work with clinical, medical, and finance professionals who have all undergone proper professional training. Even our sales forces undergo weeks of training on skills and technique.
What about the marketers?
I think its time all marketers went on a professional marketing training course.
I know this will instantly get pharma marketers protesting about the peculiarity of the pharma world and about the fact that most professional marketing training is FMCG training in disguise.
Some interesting points. Nonetheless, I maintain that it is time for pharma marketers to undergo mainstream marketing training.
Why does it matter whether pharma marketers undergo training? After all, they have not done too badly in recent history.
I often wonder why professional marketing training makes sense for all other marketers, except for pharma.
We all have customers, competitors, products, and services. We are all try to create the optimal mix to please customers and deliver value to shareholders.
I am sure that pharma will benefit from joining mainstream marketing training programs.
For a long time, the environment we operate in has evolved at a nice and manageable pace. As a result, we have been able to use the bible of pharma success as a template, with a few tweaks to accommodate minor differences.
So we have a generation of pharma marketers who have learned marketing on the job, and it has worked relatively well.
What happens if the rules of the game change dramatically?
If the environment stops playing by the rules we have agreed on for decades.
Brian Smith in his article The future of pharma: managing complex markets argues that pharma marketing needs to discard conventional thinking and prepare organizations for bursts of sudden, dramatic change.
How will we cope with the new reality? What are the conventional approaches we need to discard?
The truth is, the world is changing like never beforethe economic climate, financial sector, consumer attitudes, and political environment, just to name a few. Whats next?
In times of uncertainty, we need professionals who are principle- and theory-driven.
Only those who understand why and what can navigate the choppy waters ahead.
The old school marketers tied to the tricks of yester year will be ineffective, as they pull the usual levers to no effect.
The marketers we need will have strong theoretical underpinning; they will understand how industries cope with various challenges and will be able to adopt and adapt initiatives for the pharma world.
The insular outlook of old pharma is a recipe for disaster.
Tweaks on last years plan will leave some firms in a ditch.
Its time for an overhaul and a total rethink.
The professionals who will lead this drive need diversity in thought and experience.
They need to be professionally trained marketers who have shared a lecture theater with colleagues in FMCG, the financial sector, and the motor industry.
These marketers will be diverse and well trained while still demonstrating a thorough understanding of the pharma environment.
Pharma is special, so special that it needs to broaden its horizons to maintain its special status.