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What Pays More: Creating ‘Innovative ‘Customer Experience’ Or ‘Innovative Drugs’?

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More innovative a drug is, the better is its business success rate. This was the general perception of around 92 percent pharma professionals in the past three years. Whereas the fact is: ‘Having the best product doesn’t guarantee sales anymore’. This was established by a research study of the ‘Bain & Company’ - covering multiple therapeutic areas, and was published on October 14, 2019.

It showed, when physicians prescribe a drug – its efficacy, safety and side-effect profile initially account for only 50 percent to 60 percent of the physician’s choice, with a declining trend over time. Interestingly, the other 40 percent to 50 percent of it, is based on a range of ‘physician and patient experience factors’, which pharma players need to target in innovative ways to differentiate their brands.

Many pharma companies are now experiencing the harsh reality that more innovative drugs, backed by traditional sales and marketing support are not yielding desirable financial returns. Head scratching has already started among astute pharma professionals to understand its reason for remedial measures. Thus, the number of executives who agreed with the above ‘Bain & Co’ study that: ‘Having the best product doesn’t guarantee sales anymore,’ increased to almost fourfold – from 8 percent to 28 percent in the next three years.

Thus, in this article, I shall explore whether innovation in creating a ‘unique patient experience’ during a disease treatment process, is as important, if not more than a ‘new drug innovation’. Curiously, high failure rate of most pharma players to innovate in this area, isn’t discussed as much as high failure rates in the development of innovative new drugs.

‘Customer service’ innovation – high failure rate – falling short of expectations:

Again, another article - ‘How Agile Is Powering Healthcare Innovation,’ published by ‘Bain & Company’ on June 20, 2019, brought out some interesting points related to this area. Let me quote a few of which as follows:

  • 65 percent of ‘customer-service innovation’ fall short of expectations of the target group.
  • The number of health care executives recognizing the need to respond quickly to changing customer-needs, has increased from 38 percent in the past three years to 60 percent for the next 3 years. But, most of them ‘lack the methodology, and even the language to implement it in practice.’
  • ‘Having the best product doesn’t guarantee sales anymore.’ Thus, healthcare companies face growing pressure to innovate in providing unique ‘customer experience’.
  • The critical point to note, customer needs evolve continuously, and leading companies respond rapidly with innovative new solutions catering to changing market demand.

As the core purpose of working for ‘customer-service innovation’ is linked with creating ‘brand loyalty’, let’s have a quick recap on ‘brand loyalty’ really means for pharmaceutical products, in today’s context.

‘Brand loyalty’ for pharmaceutical products in modern times:

There are many similar definitions of ‘brand loyalty’ for a pharmaceutical product. The research article – ‘Brand Loyalty as a Strategy for the Competition with Generic Drugs: Physicians Perspective,’ published in the Journal of Developing Drugs, on August 30, 2016, defined ‘brand loyalty,’ and articulated its advantages.‘ I am paraphrasing a few of which, as below:

  • The extent of the faithfulness to a particular brand, which is a major indicator of a long-term financial performance of companies.
  • The main advantages of brand loyalty can be defined as greater sales and revenue, a substantial entry barrier to competitors, increase in a company’s ability to respond to competitive threats and lower consumer price sensitivity.
  • ‘Brand loyalty’ can protect against price competition, including branded generics, as it gives confidence to physicians on the perceived effectiveness and safety of a brand – which they usually won’t be willing to compromise with for lower prices.

This brings us to a key question. Are traditional pharma methods of creating ‘brand loyalty’ getting replaced by the key consideration of creating a ‘unique customer experience’?

Creating ‘brand loyalty’ through ‘patient loyalty’ – a new equation:

It’s a fact today that traditional pharma methods of creating ‘brand loyalty’ is getting replaced by the key consideration of creating a ‘unique customer experience.’ This, in turn, is increasing the need of building ‘patient loyalty’, both for a pharma brand, as well as respective companies offering these brands. This is a new equation, where offering a ‘unique treatment experience’ to patients assumes a critical role more than ever before. This needs to be clearly understood by today’s pharma marketer, without any ambiguity.

In traditional pharma marketing, physicians remain, virtually, the sole focus of the branding exercise, as they appear to be the only decision makers of writing a brand prescription. Patients, in general, hardly used to have any role to play in that process. In this scenario, brand loyalty for the doctors – assuming the absence of any malpractices, is primarily driven by the following three much known factors:

  • Physicians’ unprejudiced buying-in a brand’s value offerings
  • Evaluation of opinion leaders and the doctors’ professional counterparts,
  • Quality of disease treatment outcomes.

Nevertheless, before getting into this area, let’s have a quick look at the primary drivers that pharma marketers have been using to boost financial performance of a brand.

Traditional sales boosters of a pharma brand:

The primary drivers that pharma marketers have been using to boost financial performance of a brand can broadly be classified as follows:

  • Multiple ways are followed to make important doctors write more prescriptions,
  • Increase the drug price, whenever an opportunity arises.

These factors still remain important, but aren’t just enough to deliver sustainable performance over a period of time. Thus, a new dimension needs to be added to it.

Add a new dimension to create brand and corporate loyalty:

With the emergence of increasingly more informed and demanding patients, there is a need to create a ‘loyal patient population’, by offering them primarily a ‘unique treatment experience’. And this is the new dimension.

For this purpose, off-the cuff approaches or strategies based on mere gut-feelings are unlikely to work. As I indicated in one of my articles, marketers need to acquire deep insights on their customers to make sales and marketing decisions more informed, than what it is today. Currently available state of the art technology can be a great enabler to facilitate this process.

This is easier said than done, because answering the question – how does a drug company create ‘brand loyalty’, is indeed a tough call. Nonetheless, many different industries have realized, since long, that offering a ‘unique customer experience’, is critical to create a pool of ‘loyal customers’.

I also had written earlier, pharma is still a late learner in accepting various new normal, in a holistic way. Accepting this reality, a sharp focus on creating ‘brand loyal doctors’ in various innovative ways, I reckon, will serve this purpose well. It’s only recently, a few companies have started working to offer such ‘experience’ to patients in the disease treatment process - end-to-end. Ironically, a large majority of them prefer to talk about it more than actually translating the same into reality.

Benefits of ‘brand loyalty’ through ‘unique customer experience’:

There are several advantages of building pharma ‘brand loyalty’ by offering ‘unique customer experience, without diluting the focus on ‘increasing prescription generation through doctors’. The benefits, I reckon, include, both new – innovative products and also branded generics. Let me give below one example of each:

  • Innovative new-products – positive word-of-mouth promotion: Satisfied patients having ‘unique end-to-end treatment experience’ with a new, innovative brand, are very likely to share it with others. This may be done by using different modes of communication, including various social-media platforms. This, in turn, may help both – add to take-off speed – post launch and create a snowballing impact on the brand adoption thereafter.
  • Branded generics – extend the product life cycle and increase growth: Patients who are loyal to a particular branded version of a generic molecule, are quite likely to refuse any change to a cheaper equivalent, even if recommended by the physician. Moreover, they will advocate for this brand to others, using different communication platforms, as indicated above. Continuation of this process will extend the life cycle of the branded-generic, with increasing growth and market share.

Conclusion:

Now, it’s time to get back to what we started with - What pays more: Creating ‘Innovative ‘Customer Experience’ Or ‘Innovative Drug?’ From the above perspective, it emerges that bringing innovative product to markets is, of course important. However, to ensure its sustainable financial success, other innovations, such as creating ‘a unique end-to-end patient experience’ with the brand, in all probability, would weigh more. This is an area which did not receive much attention for a long time, moving beyond the creation of increasing numbers of ‘brand loyal’ doctors, for business success.

Today, increasing consumerism in the health care space, besides pricing pressure, unfavorable perception and sinking image of the industry, is creating a strong headwind – impeding desirable growth of many pharma players. Such a challenging business scenario has prompted a few of them to innovate in designing a differentiated ‘customer experience’ – in a true sense.

Although, a large number of companies are talking about it, most are mere lip-services – a ground-swell in this area is yet to take place. The industry priority, in general, still weighs heavily in developing innovative products, and creating ‘brand loyal’ doctors, rather than cultivating ‘brand loyal patients’, alongside.

By: Tapan J. Ray

Disclaimer: The views/opinions expressed in this article are entirely my own, written in my individual and personal capacity. I do not represent any other person or organization for this opinion.

A New Pharma Marketing Combo Places Patients At The Center Of Business

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As discussed in several of my previous articles, most pharma players need to walk the talk on ‘patient-centricity’, coming out of prevailing high decibel lip-service. This is not an easy task, and far from being every company’s cup of tea.

Effective implementation of patient-centricity by an organization, entails understanding of behavioral science by today’s pharma marketers. Many of them, I am sure, have already studied it in Business Schools. Be that as it may, by harnessing this scientific knowledge, the insights that they will acquire on primary and secondary pharma customers, will be unique. The important cues that will come out of the insights, will help them create well- targeted strategic marketing game plans having a cutting-edge. When implemented on an ongoing basis, this will help catalyze a win-win business environment, for reaping a rich harvest over a long period of time.

In today’s article, I shall dwell on the increasing relevance of an interesting combo of behavioral science – predictive analytics and patient-centricity, for a sustainable business performance. This is especially for the millennial pharma marketers to try and implement. With blessings from the top management, this model will help them jettison – the increasingly counterproductive – ‘gratification model’ of pharma business, imbibing ‘patient-centric ones’ – that patients themselves can feel and will appreciate.

The basic requirements to make it happen:

The basic requirements of the pharma companies to make it happen is to gradually move away from its core strategy of ‘buying prescriptions’ that often happens through contentious means. No doubt, it has the power to create a temporary strong brand push. But is definitely not sustainable, as these usually go against patients’ health and economic interest.

For a sustainable demand for a pharma brand, pharma companies would need to design a strong ‘brand pull’ in the new paradigm. This would prompt drug companies acquiring deep insights on how to leave a cherishing treatment experience with the patients for the brand. This would, consequently, have a strong-positive rub-off effect on the corporate image, as well. Likewise, a doctor would also like to know, how to create similar patient-experience with his treatment, to draw more of them in the future. This is diametrically opposite to generation of demand for a brand through ‘payment to doctors for prescriptions.’

Pharma marketer’s understanding of behavioral science is necessary:

This is because, it helps to get targeted deep-stick studies done on the way pharma customers, such as doctors and patients, behave. The span of the behavioral study should commence from the onset of a patient’s search for a disease treatment process, right up to when the individual gets an ‘after treatment experience’ – good, bad or average. It is, therefore, necessary for a drug company, to become more patient-centric, rather than self-serving, for achieving the desired goals of pharma business, consistently.

This wisdom would enable pharma marketers developing the following five broad insights for being ‘patient-centric’:

  • Understanding the process of thinking of a type or a group of patients about making their treatment choices. It could often mean not going for any treatment at all, or not adhering to prescribed treatment.
  • What makes patients behave the way they do, while undergoing a treatment?
  • Understanding both mental and physical feelings of patients while suffering from certain disease conditions, for effective engagement with them.
  • What type of holistic treatment experience the patients would value most to cherish.
  • What type of treatment experience the doctors would value most to provide to patients to enhance their practice and professional reputation.

While doing so, pharma marketers would need to clearly harmonize the two areas – one pertaining to doctors, and the other involving patients. This is important for the purpose of a clear focus on a comprehensive brand strategy formulation, based on well-analyzed data.

The key point to note, however – a creative blend of behavioral science with new-age pharma marketing tools can bring a sea change in the business performance of a company, along with providing a delightful treatment experience to patients with its drugs.

Generation of a huge pool of customer behavioral data is the starting point:

The first step of making a patient-centric organization is the generation of a huge pool of data on customer-behavior dynamics. That said, making predictions on the company’s customer behavior for future outcomes of the brand performance, from this data pool, would involve the use data analytics, which for this purpose will be ‘predictive data analytics.’

The use of ‘predictive analytics’ in pharma marketing:

In my article titled, ‘Data: The New Magic Wand For Pharma Business Excellence’, published in this Blog on October 01, 2018, I discussed the importance of well targeted data-based decision-making process, across the pharma functional areas. Taking this idea forward, let me explain here the critical role that ‘predictive data analytics’ can play in acquiring insights of the trend of behavior of the customers, especially patients and doctors.

Simply put, ‘predictive analytics’ is a type of advanced analytics, which are used to get deep insights and making well-informed predictions, based on both past and current data feeds. In pharma, especially for the subject that I am discussing, it pertains to insights on doctor and patient behavior related predictions, encompassing the entire span of a disease treatment process. Skillfully executed, this will strengthen, at least, two critical success factors in the pharma business:

  • Acquiring predictable insights on the targeted customers’ behavioral trend and pattern any given time-frame.
  • With such customer insights making the organization ‘patient-centric’ for more effective engagement with its customers.

Combining the above two points, I can well say, by analyzing a huge pool of data from behavioral-science-based information – ‘predictive analytics’ helps acquire deep insights on predictable customer behavior, with high precision. These are so useful, not just for better engagement with doctors, patients and other stakeholders, but also in making the organization patient-centric, in true sense. Nevertheless, many still question - Is ‘patients centricity’ really feasible in the pharma industry?

Is ‘patient centricity’ really feasible in the pharma industry?

This question was also raised in the 2017 paper titled, “Patient Centricity and Pharmaceutical Companies: Is It Feasible?” -  published in Vol. 51(4) of the Therapeutic Innovation & Regulatory Science (TIRS). The paper captures patient-centricity as integrated measures for listening to and partnering with patients, and placing patients’ well-being at the core of all business initiatives. It represents a holistic approach to the disease management process.

The concept brand-oriented patient-centricity is not too difficult to understand. But, I reckon, the difficulty lies somewhere else. It is to fathom where and how a pharma player can predictably add differentiating value, for those patients who need a right kind of treatment. That’s why, the question of feasibility of ‘patient-centricity’ is being raised.

There is no doubt that such an effort presupposes considerable insights on patients’ behavior, alongside the requisite expertise to predict these, for different time-frames, with a great degree of precision. This not an insurmountable task, either, particularly in today’s paradigm – with state-of-the-art ‘predictive data analytic’ tools. This prompts me to believe, it is very much possible to make a truly patient centric organization, assuming that there will exist a strong will to survive in the business and prosper!

Are ‘predictive data analytics’ different from other analytics?

Yes, the following two key points make ‘predictive data analytics’ quite different from other data analytics:

  • General data analytics usually help acquire insights on the past and present.
  • Whereas, predictive data analytics help looking at near-mid and long-term future, regarding most probable customer behavior pattern and trend, with great accuracy.

Currently, with the ability to generate relevant and real-time big data pool, together with application of machine learning, data-mining and statistical modelling – predictive analytics have the power to help acquire future insights. This insight is totally data-based, sans any gut-feel. Thus, effective use of this process can enable pharma players effectively predict trends and behaviors of doctors and patients for meaningful engagement with them for their chosen brands.

Has potential to create a win-win outcome: 

To ensure a game-changing payback from this process, crafty dovetailing of the following three steps, complementing each other is critical:

  • Generate a huge pool of real-time data on doctors’ and patients’ behavior pattern, for a pre-selected time-frame.
  • With the knowledge of behavioral science, help analyze them with predictive analytics.
  • Understand from the results, the trend of behavioral dynamics of selected customers from the brand perspective.
  • Frame rewarding business strategies to create a win-win situation, involving both – the pharma players and the patients.

Some pharma players are on the ball:

One of the key reasons for imbibing patient-centricity, is the proliferation of ‘me-too’ types of brands – both patented and generics. It has started happening even in the market of high-priced oncology medicines, with not much difference in price between them.

In this situation, predictive data analytic tools can help understand multi-variable relationship between patient’s needs, their interaction with physicians, the oncologist’s prescriptions to them, type of physician-engagement of drug companies and patients’ experience before, during and after the treatment. This is not an easy task, nor all pharma companies have wherewithal of doing this, to gain brand market share, significantly.

With predictive data analytics, many pharma companies are keeping eyes on the ball, using it in different business areas, such as drug discovery. But not many of them, are using this combo-approach to make a patient-centric pharma organization. It is just a matter of time, I reckon, that global pharma will decide to move in this direction – fortified with deep pockets, but with a battered reputation, and facing a hostile pricing environment, across the world.    

Conclusion:

Customer insights, acquired through the crafty application of behavioral science, have immense potential to make sales and marketing decisions more informed, than what it is today. In tandem, it will help create a ‘worth remembering’ treatment experience for the patients with the brand used.

From this perspective, I reckon, skillful application of behavioral science to generate a huge pool of data, and their analysis with ‘predictive analytics’ will go a long way to create a truly ‘patient-centric’ organization.

When executed by a well-integrated expert team of market research, medical affairs and pharma marketing professionals, this new marketing-combo-approach has the potential to fetch a game-changing performance outcome, placing patients at the center of business. The net gain to the organization will be much more than the sum total of what each of these steps can ensue individually – remarkably enhancing corporate reputation, in tandem.

By: Tapan J. Ray     

Disclaimer: The views/opinions expressed in this article are entirely my own, written in my individual and personal capacity. I do not represent any other person or organization for this opinion.

‘Made-to-Measure’ Marketing for ‘Made-to-Measure’ Medicines

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We have entered into a new era of innovation in medical science where ‘one size fits all’ type of treatment is making a sizeable space for a new ‘made-to-measure’ variety of the same. Such medicines are being developed particularly for life-threatening and rare diseases, where individual genetic differences in patients play a key role in the choice of therapy.

The marketers of such drugs, at the same time, will need to make sure that the right sets of messages are delivered to the right person, in the right way and at the right time, for brand success. This isn’t a piece of cake, as it will be akin to finding out a needle from a haystack. It would call for craftily ferreting out from an enormous database, both the patients’ and the prescribers detail profile virtually in each stage of the treatment process.

Such information would form the bedrock for effective brand value creation and its delivery, to achieve best possible business results and also patient outcomes. Thus, ‘made-to-measure’ marketing would be a whole new ball game for many pharma marketers – a  completely different situation that, very often, they know little about.

In this article, I shall dwell on this subject. Let me begin with a brief description of the emerging ‘made-to-measure’ variety of treatments.

‘Made-to-measure’ treatment:

There are many serious and life-threatening disease conditions where ‘One Size Fits All’ sort of treatment approach doesn’t work too well. One such dreaded disease is cancer. Conventionally, following standard treatment guidelines, doctors generally opt for similar treatment for patients suffering from the same type and stage of cancer. Interestingly, it has been conclusively established over a period of time that this approach often yields different outcomes to different patients.

With the progress of genetic science, the researchers have unraveled this mystery from the genetic difference of patients. This understanding heralded the dawn of a new era of targeted or ‘made-to-measure’ drug therapies. These are called “personalized medicine” or “precision medicine”. According to the National Research Council, “personalized medicine” is an older term with a meaning similar to “precision medicine.”

Personalized medicines:

According to the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), understanding a patient’s genetic makeup and ascertaining how certain gene changes during cancerous tumor growth, doctors can now choose more effective treatment options for each patient. In other words, based on genetic test results, oncologists can now opt for a customize treatment, based on each patient’s specific needs. Such drugs can block or turn off the signals that tell malignant cells to grow and divide, keep cells from living longer than normal, or kill the cancer cells altogether.

Moreover, by performing genetic tests both on the cancer and normal cells, doctors can also:

  • Find out the chances of a person developing cancer and selecting the screening strategies to lower the risk
  • Match patients with treatments that are likely to be more effective and cause fewer side effects
  • Predict the risk of recurrence, which means the return of cancer

The new era began in 1998:

The era of ‘personalized medicine’ for cancer, in all practical purposes, commenced in 1998, when the US-FDA approved the targeted therapy, Herceptin (trastuzumab). Breast cancer patients having high levels of a biomarker, known as “HER-2,” are more likely to be susceptible to this drug.

Since then, the development of targeted therapies has grown rapidly. As reported by the American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC), published on January 31, 2018, one in every 4 drugs approved by the US-FDA over the past 4 years was a personalized medicine, and the agency approved a record-breaking 16 personalized therapy in 2017. The same year, US-FDA also approved the first biosimilar of a personalized medicine - trastuzumab-dkst (Ogivri) for HER-2-positive breast cancer patients. This biosimilar was developed with Herceptin as its reference.

The February 2018 report of Research and Markets titled, ‘Personalized Medicine – Scientific and Commercial Aspects’ says, the aim of ‘personalized medicine’ is to match the right drug to the right patient and, in some cases, even to design the appropriate treatment for a patient according to his/her genotype. I deliberated on genotype-based treatment in my article titled, ‘A Disruptive Innovation to Fight and Cure Intractable Diseases’, published in this blog on October 30, 2017.

At this point, let me hasten to add that the development of personalized medicine raises some ethical issues, as well. Currently, this debate is mostly limited to the area of genetic testing.

Personalized dosage:

An article published on March 23, 2015 in the ‘FDA Voice’ of the US-FDA states, since the 1990s, the agency is also working on personalized drug dosing. This is because individuals differ in how they eliminate a drug. Some eliminate it much more slowly than most other people, and thus are susceptible to overdosing, while others eliminate it much faster, and may not get the desired therapeutic effect. There are biomarkers to identify people who may have these unusual results. Personalized drug dosing makes sure that drug efficacy for such patients are not compromised, or they are not at high risk of any severe side effects.

Marketing ‘personalized medicine’ a whole new ball game:

All this vindicates that ‘personalized medicine’ is not just a flash in the pan. With each passing year, it’s moving ahead at a brisk pace. In this emerging scenario, what happens to marketing of these drugs? Will the marketing of ‘personalized medicine’ remain just the same as the conventional one, or it warrants radically different cerebral inputs?

The opportunities for personalization in pharma marketing are immense. ‘Personalized medicines’ offer a greater scope in leveraging its potential that is yet to be fathomed, meaningfully. Broadly, this will mean targeting customers or potential consumers even at the individual level, to add greater differential value.

This, in turn, will involve making the marketing content, the message format and choosing the effective value delivery platforms, virtually ‘made-to-measure’ for the target audience. Marketing interaction of this ilk, has proven to offer a cutting-edge experience to the target groups with greater outcomes, in tandem, yielding superior financial results to the concerned pharma players.

Recent reports:

On December 18, 2017, Cambridge BioMarketing – one of the world’s leading rare disease agency highlighted, as personalized medicine continues to take hold, it will be more important than ever for healthcare companies to incorporate the ‘hyperpersonalized’ experience in marketing and communications. Patients’ voice has already started becoming more important than ever before, in various facets of pharma business. In 2018, one may expect to witness more pharma companies tapping the experts who can help explain the life-changing benefits of a treatment for the patient, effectively – the report predicted.

Moving forward, patients embarking on new treatments will be better empowered to take charge of their well-being. Physicians and nurses will also be better connected to their patients, along with other care providers, with the support of enhanced digital connections and mobile apps. Interestingly, one can find it happening in several developed countries, especially, in areas like rare diseases, where ‘personalized medicines’ will be used more – underscored this agency.

On January 22, 2018, quoting the same Cambridge BioMarketing, FiercePharma also reported, more ‘personalized medicines’ also mean more ‘personalized marketing’ – and the ‘hyperpersonalization’ trend goes to extremes. Crunching data gathered from multiple sources, such drug marketers need to identify small groups that could be receptive to specific messaging. Advanced data and analytics, would facilitate the marketers to whittle down their targets and tailor messages to consumer audiences, sometimes as small as one person – the report asserted.

Conclusion:

As the February 2018 report of ‘Research and Markets’ highlights, increase in efficacy and safety of treatment by individualizing it, has benefitted in financial terms too. Available information indicates that ‘personalized medicine’ will ultimately be cost-effective in healthcare systems. This would also eliminate the need for various assumptions in the process of diagnosing a disease.

Thus, conventional pharma marketing based on the mostly segmentation strategy used for blockbuster molecules may not work for a ‘personalized medicine’. Instead, ‘personalized marketing, focused on smaller and exclusive markets – identified based on robust research and analytical data, will be the name of the new game for business excellence in this specialized area.

Thus, I reckon, as we move ahead, ‘made-to-measure’ marketing will no doubt be one of the key success requirements to make ‘made-to-measure’ medicines’ – a money spinner.

By: Tapan J. Ray  

Disclaimer: The views/opinions expressed in this article are entirely my own, written in my individual and personal capacity. I do not represent any other person or organization for this opinion.

Providing Unique Patient Experience – A New Brand Differentiator

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“Pharma industry, including the patients in India are so different from other countries. Thus, any strategic shift from conventional pharma brand marketing approach – going beyond doctors, won’t be necessary.”

The above mindset is interesting and may well hold good in a static business environment. But, will it remain so when ‘information enabled’ consumer behavior is fast-changing?

“Shall cross the bridge when we come to it” – is another common viewpoint of pharma marketers.

Many might have also noted that such outlooks are not of just a few industry greenhorns. A wide spectrum of, mostly industry-inbred marketers – including some die-hard trainers too, subscribe to it – very strongly.

Consequently, the age-old pharma marketing mold remains intact. Not much effort is seen around to reap a rich harvest out of the new challenge of change, proactively. The Juggernaut keeps moving, unhindered, despite several storm signals.

Against this backdrop, let me discuss some recent well-researched studies in the related field. This is basically to understand how some global pharma companies are taking note of the new expectations of patients and taking pragmatic and proactive measures to create a unique ‘patient experience’ with their drugs.

Simultaneously, I shall try to explore briefly how these drug companies are shaping themselves up to derive the first-mover advantage, honing a cutting edge in the market place. This is quite unlike what we generally experience in India.

As I look around:

When I look around with a modest data mining, I get increasingly convinced that the quality of mind of pharma marketers in India needs to undergo a significant change in the forthcoming years. This is because, slowly but surely, value creation to provide unique ‘patient experience’ in a disease treatment process, will become a critical differentiator in the pharma marketing ball game. Taking prime mover advantage, by shaping up the change proactively for excellence, and not by following the process reactively for survival, would separate the men from the boys in India, as well.

Patient experience – a key differentiator:

A recent report titled, “2017 Digital Trends in Healthcare and Pharma”, was published by Econsultancy in association with Adobe. This study is based on a sample of 497 respondents working in the healthcare and pharma sector who were among more than 14,000 digital marketing and eCommerce professionals from all sectors. The participants were from countries across EMEA, North America and Asia Pacific, including India.

Regarding the emerging scenario, the paper focuses mainly on the following areas:

  • Pharma companies will sharpen focus on the customer experience to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
  • ‘The internet of things (IoT)’ – the rapidly growing Internet based network of interconnected everyday use computing devices that are able to exchange data using embedded sensors, has opened new vistas of opportunity in the pharma business. Drug players consider it as the most exciting prospect for 2020.
  • Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) have started filling critical gaps in pharma and healthcare technologies and systems. Their uses now range from training doctors in operating techniques to gamifying patient treatment plans. Over 26 percent of respondents in the study see the potential in VR and AR as the most exciting prospect for 2020.

Commensurate digital transformation of pharma industry is, therefore, essential.

Prompts a shift from marketing drugs to marketing outcomes:

The above study also well underscores a major shift – from ‘marketing drugs and treatments’ – to ‘marketing outcome-based approaches and tools’, both for prevention and treatment of illnesses. This shift has already begun, though many Indian pharma marketers prefer clinging on to their belief – ‘Indian pharma market and the patients are different.’

If it still continues, there could possibly be a significant business impact in the longer-term future.

Global companies have sensed this change:

Realizing that providing a unique experience to patients during the treatment process will be a key differentiator, some global companies have already started acting. In this article I shall highlight only one recent example that was reported in March 01, 2018.

Reuters in an article on that day titled, “Big pharma, big data: why drugmakers want your health records,” reported this new trend. It wrote, pharma players are now racing to scoop up patient health records and strike deals with technology companies as big data analytics start to unlock a trove of information about how medicines perform in the real world. This is critical, I reckon, to provide a unique treatment experience to the patients.

A recent example:

Vindicating the point that with effective leverage of this powerful tool, drug manufacturers can offer unique value of their medicines to patients, on February 15, 2018, by a Media Release, Roche announced, it will ‘acquire Flatiron Health to accelerate industry-wide development and delivery of breakthrough medicines for patients with cancer.’ Roche acquired Flatiron Health for USD 1.9 billion.

New York based Flatiron Health – a privately held healthcare technology and services company is a market leader in oncology-specific electronic health record (EHR) software, besides the curation and development of real-world evidence for cancer research.

“There’s an opportunity for us to have a strategic advantage by bringing together diagnostics and pharma with the data management. This triangle is almost impossible for anybody else to copy,” said Roche’s Chief Executive Severin Schwan, as reported in a December interview. He also believes, “data is the next frontier for drugmakers.”

Conclusion:

Several global pharma companies have now recognized that providing unique patient experience will ultimately be one of the key differentiators in the pharma marketing ballgame.

Alongside, especially in many developed countries, the drug price regulators are focusing more on outcomes-based treatment. Health insurance companies too, have started looking for ‘value-based pricing,’ even for innovative patented medicines.

Accordingly, going beyond the product marketing, many drug companies plan to focus more on outcomes-based marketing. In tandem, they are trying to give shape to a new form of patient expectation in the disease prevention and treatment value chain, together with managing patient expectations.

Such initiatives necessitate increasing use advanced data analytics by the pharma marketers to track overall ‘patient experience’ – against various parameters of a drug’s effectiveness, safety and side-effects. This would also help immensely in the customized content development for ‘outcomes-based marketing’ with a win-win intent.

Providing unique ‘patient experience’ is emerging as a new normal and a critical brand differentiator in the global marketing arena. It will, therefore, be interesting to track how long the current belief – ‘Pharma industry and the patients in India are so different from other countries’, can hold its root on the ground, firmly. Or perhaps will continue till it becomes a necessity for the very survival of the business.

By: Tapan J. Ray   

Disclaimer: The views/opinions expressed in this article are entirely my own, written in my individual and personal capacity. I do not represent any other person or organization for this opinion.