Here's a great video that talks about the continued emergence of social media.
Even though it's 6 month old (an age on the social media trajectory), the facts and figures in it are eye-popping.
At this point, social media is still predominantly a tactical channel, but what I love about it is its ethos; customer driven (like diffusion), not promotional message driven. In effect the New vs the Old pharma marketing model.
Read more....
Here's a sneak preview of our draft video. Would love some feedback!
New Pharma Marketing from Matt Rowley on Vimeo.
Read more....
There’s an interesting debate that’s been ongoing about pharmaceutical companies’ approach to data publication. Unusually it’s actually spilled over into the mainstream media (BBC Radio 4 news) and is captured in a head to head article called Is the conflict of interest unacceptable when drug companies conduct trials on their own drugs? (BMJ 2009; 339:b4949 and b4953).
The protagonists of the argument are Ben Goldacre (arguing YES to the proposition) and Vincent Lawton (arguing NO). You can access their viewpoints via the hyperlink in each of their names.
Having heard yet another pharma spokesman be made to sound like a henchman of an evil empire on the radio, I had a closer look at each of their arguments.
Read more....
When I talk with people about the New Pharmaceutical Marketing and how it's based on Diffusion of Innovation, they say "Hey, makes sense. Like it." It explains a lot of the problems that old pharma marketing couldn't tackle and gives us a way to attack many of the new ones.
My suspicion however, is that they may subconsciously think "But is this really totally proven, or is it a marketing fad? I mean, every one else is still doing it the old way."
"Diffusion of Innovation" sounds sexy, but it’s no passing fad. It is based on years of work around the laws of adoption of innovation, on the concepts laid out in Everett Rogers seminal book The Diffusion of Innovations.
While there is new thinking in today’s frameworks, the reality is that the enormous evidence base behind the ideas that we discuss is actually very well established. And, though it’s sometimes overlooked, a vast amount of the work we cite and build upon was conducted in medicine, in healthcare.
Read more....
We all like to think about how we can encourage or speed up adoption of a brand or idea. What we rarely think about is how to stem the flow of people "de-adopting" or discontinuing it's use.
You only have to think about this if things go really wrong. Don't you?
Not so! Truth is that even for the newest brands and ideas, people are discontinuing as other people are becoming true adopters. The more you can stem the tide of this discontinuance, the steeper your overall adoption (and sales) curve will be.
So if you're really serious about making a product launch successful, or perhaps trying to remedy a brand disaster, you need to have a proactive look at where and how your discontinuance will, or is, happening.
We've written a little paper about it which might give you a few more ideas, which you can download by clicking here
Read more....
The chart above is from a peer reviewed publication Babor E et al. Psychiatr Bull, 1996.
Look at how influential 'representatives' and 'advertising' are versus 'colleague recommendation', and contrast that with what's at the heart of traditional pharma marketing strategy.
Read more....
The chart above comes from this article on Pharma Marketing Blog. A first reaction would be to blame the downturn on the same thing everything else is being blamed on: the credit crunch / financial meltdown. However, the dip started in 2006, so while this may become a contributing factor, it isn't the main cause.
Anyone working in pharma will know that thinner pipelines and higher market access hurdles mean companies have been looking for efficiencies. My belief is that under this lens, traditional promotion - of which TV DTC has to be the most obvious example - is starting to look like the emperor with no clothes.
Read more....
So far in this blog when it comes to the future of pharma marketing, I’ve mainly talked about us working to a better understanding of how pharma marketing really works - by adopting elements of diffusion theory and word of mouth (WoM) marketing.
There is another big change that’s already happening in pharma, and as with WoM it also shows how the consumer model aped for so many years is woefully inadequate – it’s Market Access.
“Back when I were a lad” learning the pharma marketing ropes in the 90’s, reimbursement and pricing was simple. The answer was always “premium price” regardless of the question. The only tricky bit was figuring out how much you could charge for something first in class. You called the pricing guys in at the last minute to do some research and put a price on it, and hey presto.
Such a scenario is clearly laughable today. As professor Michael Rawlins, head honcho and chief ball-breaker at NICE put it:
“The industry has to accept that just because new drugs are licensed does not mean that the health service wants or needs to buy them.” Ouch. But as a tax (or insurance) payer though, you’ve got to admit he’s on the money.
I realise this isn’t news to many in pharma. These days we’ve all got departments focusing on ‘market access’ or ‘managed care’; some companies doing better jobs than others.
But here’s my challenge – how long should it stay like that; with a marketing department and a market access department? Sure, you might need a small army of people to go smoothing the numbers with to HMOs or Primary Care Trusts, but at a central strategic level there is no real division.
It’s still about marketing strategy, it’s just that we’ve finally added in price and access (volume) into the equation, along with the customers most interested in these points.
For us old-timers (hey, I’m still in my 30’s!), on first sight this can be a little scary: new customers with new jargon to deal with who seem hell-bent on not paying for our products. The way I like to think of it though is as one big negotiation and the fun bit is that it isn’t necessarily all about price.
Let me give you an analogy. I was talking to someone a few weeks ago who sold her car on ebay. By self-admission she is a neat-freak who had every skerrick of information on the history of that automobile, as well as a ton of photos detailing its condition. The car was in good order and so she put it on at a premium price.
In the auction it went at full asking price to a bidder who said that the reason they paid top-whack was because, sure it looked like a good car, but she was the only seller who had fully answered their gazillion questions and so they were comfortable to buy at that price.
The same thing can work with payers. Have the right data answering their troubling questions (like, just how much better than generics is it?) and you too can snap up a great price. Other levers to think about with your access strategy include the patient segment you’re going to target and proof of the buckets of money you can save them elsewhere in the system.
It takes a little practice to start getting this thought process in train, but rather than thinking of it as menacing hoodoo, we need to see it as a fun strategic challenge that’s part of the role. The “kids” growing up as product managers today no longer see the distinction. Get on board or get outdated – it’s the future I tells ya!
Read more....
News on the Merck/Schering ENHANCE study popped into my inbox today, and the explanation of where the acronym ENHANCE came from gave me a wry smile.
As you would have no doubt have guessed, ENHANCE stands for
Ezetimibe aNd simvastatin in Hypercholesterolemia enhANces atherosClerosis rEgression
Obvious really.
We need some rules on these acronyms. The FDA don't seem to be approving many molecules, so maybe they could get stuck in here.
Sticking the word 'enhance' in the title and picking out the middle two letters is bad enough, but the N in the middle of an 'and' while ignoring anything out of 'simvistatin'? Apart from that I'm aware of at least one other trial with the same acronym. Surely not a case of clumsy marketing?
Read more....
The buzz phrase 'word of mouth marketing' has been pretty hot over the past few years and understandably so, after all, 'colleague recommendation' is regularly cited as the greatest influence over a physician adopting a new therapy. Also WoM has the allure of being cost efficient and contagious - very sexy indeed.
However, while the flashy 'WoM' turns heads and gets all the attention, it's the greyer figure of 'Innovation Adoption' that I've come to realise is really the big player sitting quietly, but omnisciently, in the background.
Of course, it's not actually an either / or situation with these two. 'Innovation Adoption' describes the whole process that someone goes through in adopting an innovation (like a new medicine), and Word of Mouth can be a player in a number of the steps within the process.
Where I'm going to with all of this is that in the quest for a marketing model that describes how pharma marketing really works, Word of Mouth is a lot better than the poor rip off the outdated consumer model. However, it's really Innovation Adoption that's the daddy, and it might sound a little strange, but I've been getting pretty excited about it.
This has been going on for a while now (should I tell my wife?) but some recent work with a client in the telecomms industry rekindled the fire. On the face of things you might say telecoms and pharma don't have a lot in common. But by applying adoption of innovation principles to their product, we not only got some great insights to their challenges and opportunities, but also saw a lot of direct parallels between the industries.
All driven by the fact that both sectors are in the business of driving the adoption of technical innovations, not selling a new brand of frozen peas or alco-pop.
Read more....
