Reshaping pharmaceutical marketing: the new normal concept

It must be recognised that there are two complexities in defining a future scenario, one is the how, the second is the when. If I assume that we will have individual flight instruments, but I do not say when and how many will use them, I am not doing a scenario analysis, but fantasy.

If I assume, on the other hand, that in the next six months at least twice as many people will change their personal mobility in the city, avoiding cars and public transport and using electric bicycles and scooters, then this is a forecast.

So let's define scenarios and, at the same time, what to do in multichannel pharmaceutical marketing.

Difficulties of access, and not only of attention

• The increased engagement of doctors in bureaucratic occupations;

• the multiplication of companies, even small ones with unstable networks, but of increasing overall size;

• the post-Covid-19 situation which requires distancing between individuals and therefore it is foreseeable that the isf will be received in an empty waiting room after a timely appointment;

• the increased commitment of doctors to the care of patients who could not get the attention they needed before;

• the medical profession's need for new means of keeping up to date remotely makes the traditional approach more difficult for informants;the background noise of ineffective platforms.

These are all elements that lead us to believe that access will be the scarce resource in the coming months.

Starting by addressing the issue of access, which does not replace that of attention but adds to it, making the work of information more complex, is a more complex challenge.

We must be careful to always focus on the representative's skills, which are basically the ability to transfer medical and pharmaceutical representative in a simple and direct manner and build a bridge of two-way communication between peers on therapeutic issues, and not start from the new channel and reset the pharmaceutical sales representative in Italy.

Alternative and remote methods

It is a digitalisation, a path we have taken over the years, a little syncopated, and which has now become a necessity for everyone. From passing clinical analysis data via WhatsApp to using video conferencing platforms was a trivial transition. From using small, simple everyday apps to one that shares data between doctors, specialists and patients is a small step. From the occasional use of remote information and update webinars to making it routine and everyday. We have already become experts in these tools, we were before, now we have simply accelerated.

Starting from the doctor's desire to keep up to date, as well as the desire to do so more comfortably, in a way that is more suited to one's working time, this entails an increase in communication channels, each with its own "semantics", each with its own "rules", and therefore different messages, conjugated and declined for each channel.

Be careful to change the format and adapt the content to the message and not do the opposite, i.e. modify the message to make it easier to transfer for each specific channel.

Increasing complexity

Each new communication opportunity is added to the previous ones, very few are replaced. Let's say that in today's world we have seen the telegraph operators of the early twentieth century disappear and fax transmission decline. Everything else that has intervened, from email to Facebook's internal messages, from WhatsApp to Telegram, from Teams to Zoom, from FaceTime video calls to Skype group calls, has all added up. Indeed, if we want, this summation of communication channels that I have mentioned is only a part, as the moments of contact with the brand should be enumerated: here we pass from radio, television and magazines, to the whole internet planet, with its infinite ways of reaching us. There are more products on the market, more nutraceuticals and functional foods, more bureaucratic requirements, more therapeutic, clinical and diagnostic opportunities. In a more complex world it is a mistake to try to simplify, better to govern complexity. Doctors are accustomed by their own profession, which has so many certainties and so many uncertainties, to managing doubt, the uncertain, the hypothetical; only imbeciles are certain of their nonsense, scientists feed on doubts and journalists amplify them. To the outside observer, it looks like a babel of voices and hypotheses, but it is the formation of scientific thought, born of discussion and amplified by communication processes.

Starting from complexity to train people to manage it, informants, area managers, product managers; rethinking the points of contact, not only therefore between isf and doctor but also with the public, pharmacy, patients and stakeholders; looking at processes not as linear but as curves, thinking of relationships not as segments but polygons.

Be careful not to get carried away: if there are many points of contact and the relationship is a polygon, I don't necessarily have to touch all the points in the same project; the quality of the marketing plan is to have an aligned communication plan, not to assume that you can necessarily talk to everyone and through all channels.

After an event as profound as the Covid 19 emergency, no one can imagine that the world of work and in particular the world of medical and pharmaceutical sales representative in Italy will go back to the way it was before. Those who had already foreseen these transformations by adopting multichannel marketing a long time ago or those who were able to move quickly in the right direction will be ahead in the race. But action is needed now.