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The environment can force changes
May/17/2008 06:51 Filed in: Working in
pharma
For those readers of my BLOG who have never had the experience of being laid off or told your position is being eliminated I can attest that the experience is not one you ever want to go through. However, pharma companies are capitalist enterprises and as such have to make money for their shareholders. This means evolving and changing business models and in some cases elimination of layers of management that only serve to slow down business decisions. Several executives at Eli Lilly are learning this the hard way as the new CEO begins the transition from old management to new management.
Eliminating jobs alone will not necessarily do the trick however. Most pharma companies are matrix organizations which means it can take a lot of time to implement even the simplest of programs but it also means that rarely one person "owns" a marketing program. Accountability is spread over too many people and frankly that needs to change. Those of us who have worked in consumer products, including this author, for example know that often are jobs, raises and bonuses are tied to share data that we receive on a monthly basis. P&G holds brand managers accountable for each product line and if share declines they are often replaced. This rarely happens in pharma because one person is rarely held accountable and some marketers are great at hiding the truth in data overload.
The Rozerem debacle is one example of poor execution and ROI yet the same people for the most part are still in charge of the brand. Noting like spending tens of millions of dollars on a talking beaver and Abe Lincoln only to pick up marginal share. Then there is the failure of the Byetta DTC to increase share at the cost of $40 million according to those who might know on Cafe Pharma.
Believe it or not a lot of good and bad things are going to result from the personnel shakeout in pharma. Managers who are of the old school are realizing that there time maybe over as the healthcare environment has changed but on the flip side pharma may also be losing some very talented people as well. These are the people that want and need change but in their attempts to implement change they have run into road blocks and brick walls. Rather than deal with the stress of these situations they are moving on to other consumer packaged good industries where they don't have to deal with an overbearing regulatory environment.
Datamonitor has even gone as far as to say that lawyers within pharma have not kept pace to changes in marketing and as such they are preventing marketers from doing what is necessary to reach today's wired informational driven customers. Frankly as an online marketer I have always made time to site with legal people to explain what was happening on the Web and why and how we might possibly leverage the new trends. Legal people need to better understand exactly where the company is willing to take risks and where they are not. If inroads are to be made online then risk management will surely be one of the major barometers to implementation.
So expect good things from the recent diet of pharma. The organizations will evolve to meet the challenges posed by the new healthcare environment. Maybe pharma can get back to remembering that the most important thing we do is help people live better, longer and healthier lives. If we concentrate on those objectives the people on Wall Street will be satisfied as well.
Never before has so
many factors forced pharma to change business models
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