Reshaping pharmaceutical marketing: from resilience to flexibility

Resilience means the ability to withstand impacts, shocks without suffering a disastrous breakdown, or to withstand pain, grief and overcome it without being psychologically destroyed. In short, to absorb the blow and return to one's previous state, or with minimal damage.

Pharmaceutical marketing, picking up where we left off?

Choosing to carry on, using our resistance, our resilience, our ability to hold on, is not the most heroic choice. It is evident that in contemporary culture adapting is not a nice word, on the contrary, resisting to the last man is. Even against all the lessons that the battles have taught us, today we want to win this one by resisting and not adapting to the new reality, to these damned variants of the Covid-19, to the pattern of closures-openings, to the time lost in adapting, to the resignation of living in isolation.

Hybrid working is becoming a reality, as we return to filling our offices in an alternating and syncopated manner. But unlike remote working, to which the pandemic has forced us, this time we are in control. This means that we have to think about the implications, focusing on the skills and culture we need for successful hybrid working models. Of course, we have used the new tools with old communication models, and we have abused them. Now, fed up, it seems that the only option is to go back to before. The new modes of communication are, we know for sure, more effective, more efficient, more timely, fairer and more polite, but we tend to go back to the world as it was. We know that, even perhaps yesterday, we should have imagined and started building a new mode of communication using these platforms.

The way in marketing is evolution

Adaptation and flexibility are two words that must guide us in the transition to post-Covid19, if there is a post. The way in marketing is evolution, always keeping the basic concepts: to give value to the end customer, to intercept the interests and needs in order to provide products and services that our company has decided to produce, and in pharmaceuticals this is, if possible, even more true.

Adaptation to the new reality (and not to the new variants of Covid-19) is strictly necessary in order to be able to build modes of communication with the doctor that are always effective over time. In the pharmaceutical sector, which is particularly stable and conservative, the attitude to change is low: this gives those who know how to seize these opportunities extra competitive advantages. Merqurio has always fought on this front, proposing solutions that appeared to be innovative or worse, revolutionary, and which instead were simply contemporary, as has been demonstrated in current times.

For example: Is access to the doctor more complex? I find ways to be where the doctor can find me. Is interest an increasingly rare commodity? I find ways to build useful and engaging stories. Average daily visits are falling? I find ways to get to the doctor with a non-frontal inter-cycle. You need flexibility, not resilience, and new solutions. This is what Merqurio has always proposed.

According to Piaget, intelligence is a form of biological and psychological adaptation to change, to evolution. Sometimes reference is made to the fact that crisis in Japanese is a word composed of difficulty and opportunity; I prefer to quote Gramsci: 'Crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old dies and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum the most varied morbid phenomena occur'. It seems to me that there is no need to wait for the storm to pass, it is more 'intelligent' to 'come out of the interregnum of the crisis' and start adapting to a new and broader model of pharmaceutical marketing in Italy, closer to the new needs and interests of the medical class and patients.