The future of pharma marketing
The pharmaceutical industry has undergone significant changes and restructuring that have caused the sales force to downsize and reorganize, and research and development teams to reconsider the blockbuster approach to new drug development. With these changes, marketers must also change and adapt to new market realities.
By on Jun 18, 2008The pharmaceutical industry has undergone significant changes and restructuring that have caused the sales force to downsize and reorganize, and research and development teams to reconsider the blockbuster approach to new drug development. With these changes, marketers must also change and adapt to new market realities.
Baba Awopetu, Manager of Brand Strategy, EMEA at Stryker, says that because pharma tends to think of its marketing needs as being unique and different, the industry has seen little cross-fertilization of expertise from other industries to date. Pharmaceutical marketers tend to be people who all they have done is pharmaceutical marketing and generally they tend to come up through the sales force, he says.
Blurred boundaries
Awopetu believes the boundaries between industries will blur and over the next five to ten years marketing departments in the pharmaceutical industry will include people from more varied backgrounds.
The pharma industry is starting to face some of the same challenges other industries have already tackled, he says. Pharma will be looking for people to help solve its problems and new kinds of required skills. The technical pharmaceutical selling and scientific aspects of the job will get smaller and the actual authentic marketing part of the job will become bigger, which will make it much easier and more attractive to bring pure marketers in from other industries.
Awopetu says theres a growing realization that its unlikely that the best marketers come from an industry, like pharma, that enjoys such big margins and in a largely protected market, as opposed to more highly competitive environments with tighter margins.
He also predicts that that the roles of product manager and brand manager will be split more distinctly in the future and that those marketers coming in from other industries will be more likely to fill the brand management role.
One of the other challenges is that, of course, as sales forces reduce in size, their role is going to be adapting significantly moving forward, he says. That means when we look at marketers in the industry today, 70-80% of the so-called marketing and brand building is sales force focused. But as the influence and role, as well as size of the sales force diminishes somewhat, there will be more of a need to utilize multi-channel approaches in terms of the way brands are built and the way products are marketed.
Innovating value
Awopetu says there also will be a need to look for innovative, out of the box approaches to try to deliver value. He believes that will mean more specialization and less of what we have at the moment, which is agencies driving strategies in conjunction with brand managers. In the future, he says, marketers will be held more accountable for driving and developing brand building strategies.
Project sizes also will shrink, along with sales force size and expense, with a greater emphasis and focus on profits, Awopetu predicts.
That means winning will require a more sophisticated and differentiated strategy than is required today, he says. When you have an environment where youve got big profit margins, marketing can be very sales focused, but as the purse strings start to get tighter, we will probably see more of the kinds of innovative approaches like Takeda in the UK took. They went from a sales force of 300 to one of 45, who were more business managers than reps.
The shift to bringing marketers in from other industries has already begun, Awopetu says. Over the past few years, he notes, Novartis has appointed some senior marketers from organizations like Pepsi and other FMCG environments.
This is one of the ways that the industry will probably help to bring about a shift in culture within its marketing teams by bringing in senior leaders from external industries with different philosophies and ideas, he says. They will then recruit and develop people more in a hybrid format, aligning with their FMCG experience along with stuff that is relevant to pharma.
Fine tuning
Not only will marketers themselves be different, but with more granular marketing data available in the future, it will be easier to understand which programs, strategies and tactics are actually working and which are not, Awopetu says.
In terms of structure, he predicts more trans-European teams and global marketing organizations, instead of having individual marketing teams in each country. This, Awopetu says, will allow marketing teams to shrink significantly by leveraging skill sets across divisions.
All of these scenarios, he says, are already beginning to happen in patches throughout the industry, but widespread. One driver, Awopetu says, is the heightened awareness around corporate social responsibility.
Questions are being asked about value that has been delivered to customers and patients, and about the way organizations conduct themselves, he says. Theres a lot of negative publicity about the pharma industry and part of the reason is because marketers have been focused on one thing solely and thats been selling. Theyve not focused on managing the wider environment that theyre operating in the different stakeholders. Theyve not sent out consistent and clear messages about the value that they offer to patients and an ethical focus to the industry.
Awopetu says this will be particularly important for the industry as it moves into emerging markets in areas like Asia and Africa, where there will need to be different kinds of sensitivities than are necessary in western societies.