Reshaping pharmaceutical marketing: the VUCA world, adapt or perish

For years, indeed decades, marketing structures have been able to draw up (and largely comply with) reliable medium and long-term marketing plans, having at their disposal fairly valid and above all stable information on demand, customer needs, competitors, and product evolution and development. In the pharmaceutical industry, certainly more than in other sectors.

What has happened has been disruptive, and although many people reduce themselves to convincing themselves that we are gradually returning to normality, today we find ourselves faced with a highly unstable, dynamic reality that is permanently difficult to interpret. Everything that has come along in the last decade has opened up new opportunities for doctors, patients and companies to come into contact, to relate, to keep up to date in the world and without the problems of time, logistical and language barriers.

This change of landscape, as well as opening up new horizons, has (unfortunately) also developed greater fluidity, dematerialisation, and rapidity of global competition, which has led the environment in which we work to have four new characteristics: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, the acronym for which is VUCA and has long been studied by the military as far as I know. Adapting and moving forward in a VUCA world is a must for new pharma managers.

Adapting to a VUCA world (not a market, of course) can have an impact on operational and strategic marketing. Since we are talking about pharmaceutical marketing here, we will summarise the strategy aspects for now by stating that a VUCA world requires a leader who is adaptable to change, who leads in uncertainty without losing core values, who reviews his positions towards competitors-competitors, partners-suppliers, customers-consumers collaboratively.

There is much to be learned about pharmaceutical marketing in a VUCA world. As mentioned above, the acronym VUCA stands for "volatility", "uncertainty", "complexity", "ambiguity", so let's take a closer look at what each item represents in pharmaceutical marketing in Italy.

Volatility is generally understood as a relatively unstable environment, in which we have sufficient information, but it changes frequently and is difficult to predict. It can be the effect either of known turbulence, or one of a series of effects acting simultaneously in such a way as to influence each other, causing unpredictable changes in the environment in which we operate. In short, volatility is having valid information but in an environment that changes unpredictably as a result of multiple pushes.
Uncertainty, uncertainty, is the incompleteness of the knowledge available to us and the difficulty of understanding the causes and effects that create change. This difficulty arises from the fact that the future is difficult to predict on the basis of current knowledge based on time series. We cannot, on the basis of our experience, define the future because the data we have today are incomplete.
Complexity, complexity, can be defined in the number of causes and their effects that are involved in a problem. The level of complexity is correlated with the relatively growing set of forces modifying the environment (some would say the market): the increase of players, regulations, stakeholders. Understanding the governance of all these forces that in turn become both cause and effect is complexity.
Ambiguity, ambiguity, relates to the meaning we can give to what is happening around us. Ambiguity arises from the fact that we can give different meanings to the same event, because there is a lack of unambiguous interpretation of them even within the same organisation. Or that we ourselves have difficulty in interpreting the consequences and making sense of the change. What we mean by ambiguous meaning is also the obvious difficulty in understanding a changing world full of chiaroscuro.
If, like me, you recognise yourself in one or more of these difficulties today more than before, then we are in a VUCA environment. And this, of course, requires a different management of marketing and a different ability to intervene in the processes that govern it.

In the pharmaceutical industry, which has always been an extremely stable sector, where the standards, processes, examples, rules to be followed were known and had a historical sequence, the transformation into a VUCA environment is a very disruptive novelty. From following unwritten but known rules, to having to know how to adapt to situations and grasp their positive and negative aspects. A total game-changer, a change of vision and attitude to which the pharmaceutical industry was not accustomed. And the strongest players, who had more power and experience, found themselves in greater difficulty than the newer, younger and smaller players who had the advantage of being able to adapt specifically to their size.

Let's see what attitudes we need to hold now in a new world, and what vision we need to have today in approaching the VUCA world of pharmaceuticals:

Managing volatility means working in unstable conditions with continuous and sudden changes in the industry, in one's therapeutic area, in the relationship with one's medical and other stakeholders.
Managing uncertainty means working with incomplete and imprecise data, using new metrics, finding new ways of listening to doctors and the local area, going beyond the usual data used and discovering new ways of understanding needs.
Managing complexity actually requires working with non-linear cause-and-effect processes, so working with network-based rather than point-to-point pharmaceutical marketing models that generate complex responses to complex worlds.
Managing ambiguity means going beyond classic schemes, getting help in using alternative solutions for a changing pharmaceutical world by adapting communication to the individual doctor for each channel.
Outsourcing, consultancies, agencies and service companies with in-depth experience in transformation processes will help you in this new, umpteenth adaptation of the of contemporary pharmaceutical marketing in Italy.

Merqurio has worked to support the increasing complexity of pharmaceutical marketing projects, making them operationally more "simple", "measurable", "linear", "flexible". I believe that these answers were valid yesterday, today they have become necessary.