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INTRODUCTION; WHO SHOULD READ
For roughly three decades now, one of the key drivers of the US economy has been the
biotech/pharmaceutical industry (we’ll call it “biopharma” in the remainder of this paper), by
virtually any measure ...including jobs and market capitalization created, patents granted,
therapies introduced or improved. And given that the segment continues to be one of the top
two attractors of venture capital, there’s no reason to expect a change in this scenario
anytime soon; despite the dramatic progress already made, there are still numerous
diseases to cure, or at least manage with improved quality of life. In the outsider’s view, biopharma marketers have an easy time of it: they simply announce
that their new drug or device has gained FDA approval, and their captive channel of
physicians and surgeons – who are of course always on the lookout for new therapies –
immediately beats a path to their door. In this model, the ultimate consumer – i.e., the patient
– was all but irrelevant to the process. Real-world biopharma marketers, of course, know that this model no longer applies – if
indeed it ever did – and that anyone operating in that fashion would end up literally leaving
millions of potential revenue and profit dollars on the table, which inevitably translates to
reduced funding for research and development of future therapies. They see their world as a
multi-channel universe with a tremendous amount of clutter that must be cut through ...and it
is to them that this paper is addressed. INDUSTRY CONTEXT AND TRENDS
There are two major ways in which the marketing world of today differs from that of the
1970s. The first is the dramatically greater involvement of patients in their own care. If prior
biopharma marketing may have treated patients as nearly irrelevant to the dialogue –
because their actions were determined exclusively by wisdom received from their omniscient
doctors – that would be a huge mistake today. Today’s healthcare consumer acts much
more like (s)he does in buying a car or any other high-ticket item: researching alternative
treatments and potential suppliers, seeking reports from users of the therapy under
consideration, and coming to the provider dialog armed with challenging questions. The second major difference stems from the mid-1990s, when President Clinton’s FDA
dismantled the long-standing prohibition of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising. This gave
marketers and their agencies the opportunity – soon to become a competitive mandate – to
learn how to communicate with their ultimate buyers, despite those buyers’ obvious lack of
medical knowledge. The decision had the unintended consequence of reshaping the industry next >>
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