Reshaping pharmaceutical marketing: the Black Death and sunset starlings

An interesting scientific article on the collective behaviour of animals, i.e. on the coordinated actions of groups of individual animals in the absence of an obvious leader, enabled me to recognise a common thread between elements that I had dealt with but had not related, and I would like to share these reflections with my readers.

We are familiar with some collective behaviours, but observing them always arouses astonishment: starlings at dusk in the evening, drawing beautiful shapes in their flight for no obvious reason; schools of fish animated by their own spirit, fluidly retreating to avoid the predator. The distinguishing feature of these patterns of behaviour is that interactions between individuals give rise to higher-level patterns of organisation (or appearing to be such), and hence behaviour that, although unguided, appears to be fluid but regulated social systems, able to act abruptly on crisis or attack. The study of collective behaviour focuses on how individuals influence themselves and are influenced by others in a strictly reciprocal way, taking into account the causes and consequences of inter-individual relations on multiscale interactions in which the message of one is a feedback from the other. In short, how individuals influence each other in a very rapid biofeedback that leads to instantly reconfiguring and remodelling mutual relations and behaviours and creating an organism of a higher order that has its own new rules that are not the sum of the individuals but rather the immediate relations between them.

What does this have to do with pharmaceuticals?

During previous historical epidemics, we can say that the social system changed, but to a large extent it also slowly returned to an ex ante stabilisation. At the time of the Black Death, in London, universities were closed and students sent home to study with their books. When it was over, the students returned 'in attendance' as before, let us say as if the plague had been incidental in the human-social behaviour of the time. The changes that emerged were at the level of direct contact - families, towns, communities - as the pattern of relationship and transmission was severely limited and slow.

But I believe that this is not true in the current case of Covid19, as the communications and pre-existing technologies we adopt have an impact on global patterns of behaviour and do not only affect families and regions but the whole global social network. And the process is accelerated by the strong innovation that now pervades and alters collective processes and social relations at a speed that could not be imagined before.

The doctor has become a hybrid during this two-year period. The patient has become hybrid. But implicitly, and not necessarily thoughtfully, each doctor has thought about articulating the specifics of how best to do his or her job both on-site and remotely. All together, doctor-patient-physician, and the surrounding world have changed the relationships between them.

The doctor probably preferred non-synchronous or batch communication patterns to phone calls that interrupted him in the course of ordinary work. The doctor probably had to organise his work to keep a rhythm that would allow him to maintain the relationship with patients, clients and informants without adding anxiety and pressure, while maintaining or even implementing productivity.

Productivity has increased because micro-transactions have been created: messages and communications that succinctly give the doctor the opportunity to stay in touch by getting down to business. Pharmaceutical companies to a large extent are reorganising themselves to continue to provide doctors, patients and health systems with information and updates about their products. As the pressure of scientific information will increase in the post-Covid-19 era, if only because of the discontinued or delayed launches of new products, pharma marketers are faced with a double challenge: to adhere and tune their communication model to the new one - which the doctor has now established - and to be able, in these micro-transactions, to value the content and not put pressure that could be considered annoying or spam. Now the doctor has also acquired a specific awareness: the digital channels have accelerated the interactions with patients and isf and therefore he is reluctant to go back to what he was before, and international and national analyses confirm this. I hope this is clear.

As the process becomes more consolidated, it will be the industry's own behaviour that will change, and the doctor's behaviour will change accordingly, in an interaction that we can assume is a new normal.

The limited resources and the complexity of the market force increasingly targeted, brief and qualified communications which will prevent pharmaceutical information from being generalised as before. The selection of the doctor, therefore, becomes the new priority.

It will require a new vision based more on archetypes similar to those already used for b2b and b2c. Indeed, it is easy to assume that this identification, rather than segmentation, will be dynamic, i.e. that it will adapt over time to the response that the doctor makes to the solicitations that arrive from the various channels: the frontal visit, the remote visit and the digital activity in conjunction. The propensity to listen to the specific message will be done dynamically with platforms that we have already put in place in Merqurio and that start from a correct definition of the doctor archetype and the placement of each doctor in the right cluster.

It sounds complex but don't worry, medical personas (R) will help.

Pharmaceutical relationship marketing will benefit greatly by transforming what is often talking to the doctor into talking to the doctor, listening and systemising the doctor's response to information pressure. We will know how to talk to the doctor by choosing the right notes and adapting the communication in a personalised way, and this will be increasingly appreciated. Less cost for the company and more result in terms of physician response, simply by implementing dynamic re-orientation based on response to stimuli.

The speed with which things are changing, adapting to the new scenario is reminiscent of collective behaviour, where interaction between individuals immediately modifies everyone's behaviour, and the timing of this transformation is not comparable with what we have been used to. It has to be read with the dynamics of collective behaviour.

Pharmaceutical companies will have to adapt to respond to these new demands of doctors and scientific information with the same timeframe in an unprecedented effort. Only the implementation of marketing automation models and medical personas (R) can adapt to this speed and offer answers in communication with the doctor.

If you don't do it, someone else will.