The future big pharma: An oxymoron?
Jan/28/2007 04:13 Filed in: Pharma
Business
How many marketing people does it take to market a new prescription medication? At most pharma companies probably too many. When I was a product manager for consumer electronics I had direct responsibility, including P&L, for over $500 million in sales. What I have seen is that most brand teams within a pharma company have four people to do a job that can be done by one.
Here is what I believe you need on a branded pharma marketing team:
-Product Manager: Overall direct responsibility for the brand including financials, marketing and sales. Has to ensure that message development is integrated within the brand team members.
-Health Care Professional Marketing Manager: Responsible for marketing to HCP's including message development and evaluation of branding within the HCP area.
-Medical Marketing: Thought leaders & CME development.
-Patient Marketing: DTC Marketing execution to targeted patients.
The other support functions, such as medical, regulatory, legal, business to business and PR should be resourced to be cross functional so that they can support other brand teams. However, they could be grouped by speciality such as Neuro or Oncology. Of course there are some things that would have to happen to have such a small team. First pharma would have to allow agencies to become more of a strategic partner so that they can do what they were hired to do without micromanaging managers. Agencies would become an extended part of the brand team and be held accountable to quantitative measurement criteria just like other areas of the brand team. The Product Manager would have to shoulder the responsibility for the brands financial targets including the direct management of profitability and expenses.
With such a small brand team something else might happen that would surprise a lot of people...implementation with speed and quality (now that's novel isn't it!). You wouldn't have to have a dozen meetings to coordinate information within the team. When you give more people direct responsibility for their jobs a remarkable thing happens they tend to take more ownership and pride in what they are doing.
Sales people also are going to see their jobs redefined. Physicians want to talk to peers about new medications and clinical studies not programmed robots. I believe that more detailing will be done online and the sales persons role will evolve to a Regional Medical Coordinator. This person will have a medical background and act as a facilitator for the brand among the medical community bring together successful treatment guidelines so others can share what has worked and was has not. Imagine a meeting sponsored by a branded prescription product in which physicians do all the talking about how patients have responded to treatment and what to look for while patients are undergoing therapy. The brand can act as a conduit to share information within the medical community and thus work with the brand team to address issues which may impact the product.
Sometimes for change to work effectively it has to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. However that evolution can't take too long as the environment in which we work is changing too quickly. It takes vision but the right leader can make it happen so that pharma can do what we intended it to do..allow patients to lead a better quality of life.
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