GSK: Digital Healthcare Services Still Aren’t Designed with the End User in Mind
Kai Gait, Multichannel Marketing Franchise Director at GSK has expressed his disappointment in the industry for failing to properly capatalise on today’s audience-led digital revolution.
Kai Gait, Multichannel Marketing Franchise Director at GSK has expressed his disappointment in the industry for failing to properly capatalise on today’s audience-led digital revolution.
Speaking to eyeforpharma about unlocking the potential that multichannel marketing offers the pharmaceutical industry, Gait warned against today’s obsession with smart phone technology at the expense of other equally important information delivery channels. “This information should be available on all formats, not just mobile, in order to suit the different individual needs out there. I still see a lot of digital tools and services that haven’t been designed with the end-user and their preferred format in mind.”
For Kai, everything pharma does digitally should revolve around the needs of the user. “I think m-Health is a misaligned term these days, because the mobile is mostly used to provide information based upon a contextual query. “Consider the Nike FuelBand, a wearable fitness device. The most basic stats are available from the device itself, but if I have been running and I want to review metrics from my run, then share these with my friends or colleagues, I can upload them onto my smartphone and post them on social media sites. Yet I am not limited to looking at those metrics on a smartphone – I can also get home and log on to the FuelBand website on my desktop to get another level of analysis on my stats. It’s ultimately the same data, just visually giving more depth on differing devices based upon user preference”
Despite Gait’s concern that mobile may be becoming the default position for digital marketers in pharma, he is still a strong advocate for the platform when used intelligently, describing mobile as “the most disruptive new technology in terms of how pharma does business. The explosive growth of mobile devices has opened up whole new realms of communication and whole new markets. Africa is one example; buying a PC or laptop is still too costly but tablets and smartphones are allowing a lot of people to get online. Meanwhile established markets are also seeing growth in the numbers of mobile devices used.”
Kai Gait will be talking about the development of mobile usage and other platforms in more detail at the eyeforpharma Multichannel Marketing Europe Summit in London in November. For more information visit the website here.