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Pharma Blog
The Rubik's Cube of Marketing
Jan/10/2007 06:32 Permalink
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I deal with a lot of vendors and agencies who are doing business with my company and want to do business with my company. In working with these agencies it's nice to have a seasoned account manager who understands the environment in which DTC marketers work but when they leave, as they often do on the agency side of the business, I find that their replacement has a lot to learn about the pharmaceutical matrix environment in which most of us work, better known as meeting hell.


Speed is a competitive advantage in ANY industry except big pharma. Most of us work in a matrix environment which is a fancy word for meaning that you have to have at least 6 meetings just to go to decide what to have for lunch. Most of us are used to coming to work in the morning and opening up Outlook or Notes and seeing that we are booked in back to back meetings all day. Some meetings are useful but you would think in this era of PDA's, eMail and voice mail that we could launch one program without having to go through the maze?

What's it like? Well..a lot of us get, what we feel, are really great ideas to reach our audience with a great program. We just know that it will work but before we can even think about implementing this idea we have to support it via a PowerPoint deck that we have to create. Once the deck is done our Managers then go over it and tell us to change this and change that so that it barely resembles what we wanted to say. So then we go into the second round of PowerPoint hell and once again our Manager wordsmiths the slides and again we need to get on our managers calendar to get it approved. So maybe 2-4 weeks has gone bye we are still pumped about our idea but our manager has managed the presentation to a point that it doesn't get people excited. We then have to start the presell within the organization which can take anywhere from one to two months. Again people will make you change your slides and give you reasons why you "can't do that" here. So you incorporate their feedback by once again changing slides and have a meeting. At this meeting you maybe excited at the thought of your idea coming to fruition but you then learn that we have to do some market research to determine if this will work and that is another 6 months of the matrix world.

By the time everything is done your tired from trying to manage internal processes that were developed so anyone, even people without marketing experience, can do your job. Ohhh..and by the way there are a lot of people that are great at manipulating your data so even if it market research supports what you want to do someone can find a reason to say "I don't see that".

I tried once to implement with speed and quality and ran into more obstacles than a basic training confidence course. The problem with lack of speed is that by the time you implement tactics the market has changed and more importantly your competitors strategy may have changed. It has been my experience that there are not enough marketers willing to challenge the system and review processes so that they can be implemented with speed. They get absorbed by the culture and become part of the collective (just like the Borg in Star Trek).
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While we continue to read about new marketing programs on the Web by people like P&G, Ford, and Apple Pharma seems content to use their old models and be an idle spectator. We would like to change but we need to do some market research to determine if change is a good thing.
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