Why pharma should outsource marketing and branding

Jun/15/2008 12:20
images
When the model is broken fix it ! When you can’t fix it and the pieces don’t fit together anymore look to the outside for new pieces. If you go to the DTC conventions and seminars you are sure to see a lot of new faces because pharma feels that in order to be good marketers people need to spend time in sales or other functions. This outdated six-sigma process is due to the belief that marketing is a process not an art and thus you have the problem at hand.

Agency people know this scenario all to well; you gain the confidence and trust of the DTC team you’re working with and then you learn that a new person is coming in to lead the team and you have to start with the Power Points presentations. What’s more the person coming into the position may not have any DTC experience (yes it is happening at pharma) and you become not only a presenter but a teacher as well. The agencies that are only concerned with the dollars they bill will act as teachers and start over but the agencies who have helped build the brand will get frustrated and at some point ask “do we really need this business?”

Here are my top reasons why pharma should outsource marketing & branding:

1. The dynamics of the marketing model have changed dramatically- Gone are the old “cost per thousand” and awareness models. Audiences today are way too fragmented and patients are empowered to use the shotgun marketing approach.

2. Accountability- Move from qualitative metrics (awareness and how people feel about the brand) to hard metrics that really count (new Rx’s). Let’s face it pharma is a sales driven industry and at the end of the day it’s all about new Rx’s.

3. It’s the people-With all the changes in the pharma industry and downsizing pharma may be losing talented people who are passionate about what they do. You can’t stick someone from market research or a sales manager from the field in a managers position in marketing and expect them to follow some stupid six-sigma process to achieve results. It takes 3-4 years to really start running and be able to know your job so well that you can make all the mundane tasks disappear easily and establish relationships with the key influencers within the organization. This is just about the time that some people are moving to new jobs within pharma.

4. It’s better to look from the outside in - Working inside you tend to lose the perspective of customers and what THEY want. It becomes too much about what WE want which overlooks the changing environment of consumer communications & empowered patients.

5. Too may channels- TV, Print, Cable, The Web, Social Media? Who has time for all these channels and do a thorough analysis with recommendations and then measure the results? Why not make one agency responsible for everything based upon their recommendations.

images-1
Of course the key to making outsourcing work is to treat your agency like a strategic partner and not a vendor which means no micromanaging ! That is very hard for most pharma organizations to because if the FDA comes down on them for bad DTC the letter goes to the pharma company not the agency. Another cornerstone to make this work is implementing good risk management and knowing what the boundaries of pushing the envelope are within the organization.

Marketing and science don’t mix in my opinion and essentially you have a company that is driven by science trying to make its marketing a fact based science driven expertise. By using people and agencies who can’t get pulled under the water and who have expertise in reaching todays consumer segment of “I” pharma maybe able to better leverage their DTC dollars for a better ROI.
|