Reshaping pharmaceutical marketing: from dominance to collaboration

The trend: 'from domination to collaboration' I think is one to consider, precisely in terms of its impact on corporate culture and consequently on marketing.

I read in an old book by Piantoni, a great Italian marketing expert, this sentence: "the business idea should be understood as dominance of the territory, based on the dynamic and unstable coherence between a product system, a market and a structure". This basic definition, taken up by contemporary consultants, stipulated that the business idea was aimed at dominance through competitive advantages within a market with respect to the components: product, market, internal resources.

Dominance has been the strategic focus of all enterprises. A confirmation of this assumption is reflected in the way the language of management has been coined. To win, to attack, to face the market; or to lead or rule the market (how many market leaders do we have...), or to control it; even to command or have a monopoly in the segment; to win or beat the competition; to launch or impose the product. A vision of virile strategy, of the master over the people, with the submissive suffering the powerful and muscular action of the winner. Dominance was - and for many still is - the primary objective of enterprise. And we have metrics to measure it: from market share to share of voice, which help us to keep the bar centred in the realisation of dominance objectives.

To dominate a market also means to be the master of the rules, to be able to modify and adapt them, to generate profit by selling goods and services to consumers in a framework of rules favourable to this objective. Again, domination is the imposition in a relative and focused sphere of a process that from the production of a product, thanks to internal resources, brings it to the market. The market is seen as a unicum on which to act. A market which, in the specific case of the pharmaceutical sector, is defined by the molecule or combination or by the pathology or therapeutic area. This is the vision of market dominance that Normann referred to. And it is old and outdated.

But there is, subtle and not very evident to the fleeting reader, a clear reference to "based on the dynamic and unstable coherence of a system", which instead caught my attention and on which I focused some research. And, forgive me if you already know this, but I felt the need to go deeper and discover how revolutionary the concept of 'dynamic and unstable coherence' and learning in the company was in the 2000s and still is. Learning which is destined to change organisational structures, and which is indispensable in innovation and therefore in the processes of adaptation to this unstable dynamic coherence,

It is no longer from dominance that profit is generated, but from collaboration. You can dominate a market, you can build your own barriers, you can fill the shelves, you can do dumping, but if the customer does not feel close to you, he will end up preferring a new company - even a small one - that has understood the evolution of the need.

It only takes one blogger to destroy a brand. So what to do? Pay more bloggers to increase the noise, as I have seen done in a multinational company? Or is it better to listen and redesign the entire marketing and make peace with consumers? Even in the pharmaceutical sector, we have to get into the customer's business: discovering and listening to the customer and letting ourselves be surprised by his wishes, anticipating his needs, is the true corporate culture today. Close to the customer, with the customer at the centre.

In a recent webinar I had the opportunity to listen to and discuss with actors from pharmaceutical companies and patient associations and to see how much is already being done (or discussed) to bring into the company a vision or rather a culture of listening and proximity to the patient. When we read of the patient at the centre, it is not to put him as a target, but as the point of maximum relationship between all stakeholders in the process of active and passive communication. In the future, pharmaceutical marketing in Italy is what I have been listening to: a marketing made up of relationships, of trust, mutual listening, taking charge of needs, confrontation of different positions and responsibilities between all the players in the pharmaceutical information-promotion and communication process.

In a world where everyone talks, it is not possible to imagine a one-way communication from the industry to the doctor via the informant during an office visit, and then to the patient via the doctor. Too much has changed, everything has changed, and it is so obvious that I would not dream of going into it. The reaction to this change is listening and the multi-channel relationship.

Listening, as pharmaceutical marketing in Italy has always started from therapeutic needs and is moving on to the needs of sick people, their loved ones and carers.

The relationship in that all the players: clinicians, specialists, general practitioners, hospitals, pharmacies, public government structures, public and private hospital healthcare facilities, scientific societies, patient associations and finally patients are a dynamic 'market' to be related to industry. A market in inverted commas, in that it is made up of every single person who participates in it. And dynamic, in the broadest sense, in that it is made up of several relationships, connections and forces, and is therefore by definition unstable. Such a context cannot, therefore, be governed or, worse, commanded (beware of those who think they are "market leaders"), but can (I dare say must) be flexibly and dynamically followed and anticipated and, above all, listened to.

But how should the company react and prepare for a change that is already underway? There are many ideas and you will see that we will cover them in the next articles.
The internal training process for whistleblowers from pure frontal to hybrid, which during the confinement and slowdown due to Covid-19 has often taken off, is a good start.

Allow me to make a caveat, however: the courses must be useful, and above all held by those who know the subject well, the practice. Would you go to pipe lessons from someone who has never played the pipe? So, when it comes to transforming your informants into hybrids, ask those who have been doing this job every day for years. Badly done courses are harmful: they give the impression that the subject is elusive and vague, and confirm the doubts we had on the subject before starting.

In our pharmaceutical sales representative training courses we focus on relationships, collaboration and understanding needs. These are all obvious things for a good sales representative, but they have to be recalibrated and reorganised in the hybrid communication process, which is more remote on the basis of the doctor's actual aptitudes. The pharmaceutical sales rep has learnt and absorbed for years the modality of "cataloguing-individuation" of the doctor starting from the observation of the waiting room, of the desk, of the style of relationship. Today, thanks to the new courses, he must learn to distinguish and adapt the channels and contents on the basis of the multichannel relationship.

It is difficult, and we at Merqurio can help pharmaceutical sales representative in Italy in this transformation.