The
turmoil on Wall Street yesterday was indeed a wake up
call for a lot of people and further indication that
we are not out of the stormy waters yet. I decided to
look at three pharma/biotech companies to see which
have weathered their own storms. In short what I
found is that Lilly stock has never recovered from
the loss of patent on Prozac in 2001, Pfizer is in a
major downward spiral as worries about their pipeline
persist and Amgen, yes Amgen, has been able to not
only weather the storm but maybe getting ready to
sail into great territory.Read
More...
A couple
of weeks ago I received an eMail from an MBA
candidate at IU who wanted to know what it is like to
work in pharma. It seems that she was contemplating
an offer from a pharma company and before she
accepted she wanted to know how someone who had
worked in the industry felt about a career in pharma
marketing. I told her that there is a lot of
potential to make a difference in patients lives but
that the challenge is the desire to make these
changes against a bureaucratic system that often
beats people down until they have been "absorbed into
the collective".
Read
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Data, data
and more data. Today's pharma marketers are inundated
with data of every type but what good is it if the
data is not actionable or does not provide realistic
insights into consumer behavior? Not much and in an
era of too much information vendors and in-house
market research people have to be able to both ensure
that the research they are doing is relevant and then
share the research with the brand team and agencies
and come to a consensus on what this means for future
brand marketing initiatives.
Read
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According to
statistics 25% of the workweek is spent in meetings
and the odds that a person in a meeting doesn't know
why he's there is 1 in 3. Anyone who
has works in pharma knows the frustration of doing,
and redoing, Power Point presentations for endless
meeting upon meeting. I have sat through endless
meetings where slide upon slide of data is presented
to the point it that you start falling asleep. Here
is an except from Mr Kotter's book"A sense of
Urgency". If
you want a summationclick
herefor his
very short video.Read
More...
One of the
biggest challenges, I believe, that is holding back
pharma companies marketing is the lack of a "sense of
urgency". Anyone who has worked in pharma can tell
you of the endless meetings that are needed to make
basic decisions and the constant need for buy in
requiring hours and hours of Power Point presentation
work. Take a look at this video fromMr Kotter author of "A Sense of
Urgency"and let
me know your thoughts.
There are
two companies that are adding consumer marketing
capabilities and I am watching them closely because
they just might teach pharma how to do it right. One
is Amgen which is on a DTC roll and the other is the
team of Lilly and Grey Advertising, which together
have produced some of the best branded campaigns on
the air right now.Read
More...
Three industries
have seen truly massive declines in their reputations
since Harris first asked industry reputation
questions eleven years ago in 1997: Oil companies
have fallen 56 points from 24 point positive to 32
negative; Airlines have fallen 48 points from 66
positive to 18 positive since 1998 (they were not
included in the 1997 survey);
Pharmaceutical companies have fallen 45 points from
60 positive to 15 positive this year. That does not
put pharma in good company right now as these are all
industries consumers love to hate.Read
More...
Oh..oh..here it
comes! Viagra, Cialis and Levitra now readily
available online via an online consolitation? Well
according to an article in theMayo Clinic Preceedingsthere
is “safety in prescribing PDE-5 inhibitors for
erectile dysfunction that was similar between a
US-based, state-regulated Internet prescribing
system and a multispecialty primary care system.
Does this mean that you soon might see an online
consilation form on Cialis or Viagra.com websites?
Don’t count on it. .Read More...
While many believe
the pharma industry is in a recession it’s
interesting to note that some pharma companies appear
to be doing very well while others are still
struggling. For example investors seem to be excited
about the new Amgen osteoporosis drug on the horizon,
even though they have not filed for FDA approval yet.
Amgen stock has been climbing despite the news that
the FDA has asked them to add stronger warnings on
one of their key drugs, Aranesp. Of course Amgen is
warning the Street that the sales decline from
additional warnings on Aranesp will continue into
next quarter but the possibility of a new blockbuster
is enough to move the stock upwards.
Meanwhile on the other coast Pfizer has not really
recovered from the failure of their replacement for
Lipitor and Lilly’s Cymbalta still has not come close
to sales of its past blockbuster Prozac. Where are
the gold rings and can pharma acquire enough gold
rings to sustain current business models or are
radical changes needed?Read
More...
The prescription
market for prescription ED drugs is still growing.
For the month ending June 2008 US sales were $165.9
million with Viagra the market leader with $89.6
million followed by Cialis with $52.8 million and
Levitra in third place with $23.6 million. Since
January 2008 the US ED market has increased +33.3%
and since January 2007 the ED market in the US has
increased 47.2%.Read
More...
The disconnect
between slow, plodding scientific research and the
demands of Wall Street are on stark display in the
world of Alzheimer's drug development "Wall Street
either overly hypes a new discovery or damns it too
soon," complained Rudolph Tanzi, director of the
genetics and aging unit at Massachusetts General
Hospital in Boston and a leading Alzheimer's
researcher.
"This was just the
first wave of drugs, and it would be terribly bad for
the field and for patients to make quick assumptions.
There are many other drugs in the pipeline, some of
them a thousand times more potent." In fact, the
Alzheimer's Assn. has decided that there are finally
enough drug candidates in human trials to start
convening ICAD annually, after meeting only once
every two years since the conference started in
1988.Read
More...
You might wonder why
the drug industry keeps taking it on the chin but
this article fromWired Magazineis
enough to get people talking and venting about
drug pricing and pharma companies in
general.On Thursday,
the Joint Economic Committee will open hearings in
Congress on dramatic price hikes for drugs used to
treat children, with a focus on companies such as
Questcor and Ovation Pharmaceuticals, which in
2006 bought rights to a drug that treats heart
problems in premature infants, and increased the
price 1,800 percent to $1,875 per three-vial
treatmentRead
More...
Marketing budgets
are being cut by blue chip marketers, DTC budgets are
being cut and if you think this is the worst “you
ain’t seen nothing yet!” With the pharma industry in
black hole of transition to new business models that
will finally work and Genentech blind sided by
Roche’s bid to buy the whole company many marketing
people had better start updating their resumes as
rumored deep cuts in marketing may finally become a
reality with an industry struggling to be profitable
and develop new drugs.Read
More...
The pharmaceutical
industry by conventional wisdom is resistant to
economic downturns, because people need medicine in
good times and bad. But data from market researcher
IMS Health and Wall Street analysts indicate that the
rate of prescription growth has fallen steadily since
early last year and in recent months has slipped in
and out of negative territory. How bad can it get?
Well a Marketing Director recently told me “this is
not a recession, it’s a depression for healthcare
marketing”.Read
More...
Pfizer managed to
add another $5 billion to their bottom line yesterday
by announcing that they have reached agreement with a
generic company to end litigation over patent
disputes. The agreement still has to be reviewed by
the the FTC which has taken a hard look at anything
involving drug companies but if it stands Lipitor
will not be generic here in the US until 2011.Read
More...
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.Read
More...
From the Pfizer
round-table on Chantix comes this quote “real-world,
post-market reports aren’t the gold standard of
clinical research and shouldn’t be interpreted as
such”. If you think that is puzzling than the
acknowledgement by Joe Feczko, Pfizer’s chief medical
officer, that the suicide issue appeared largely in
the spontaneous reports that trickle in from the real
world as opposed to in clinical tests will definitely
make you scratch your head.Read
More...
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