Reshaping pharmaceutical marketing: multichannel pharma marketing doesn't exist
Every day in the company we talk about multichannel, thinking that it is the frontier of the...
Reshaping pharmaceutical marketing: we don't need a bigger hammer
There are problems that have at their root the choices we have made to solve them.
In the face of a strong awareness that the world is changing and that everything that is happening has a profound effect on business, some pharmaceutical companies I meet are sometimes driven by an instinct to defend the way they have acted and thought up until now, rather than questioning it and developing a new opportunity or a new ability to change it.
In other words, the manager is tempted to make well-intentioned interventions that enhance and develop the current structure. These interventions cannot bring benefits because the internal-external system has changed in such a way that the traditional response to the problem results in the benefits of the intervention being cancelled out. The solutions I see being adopted seem to basically boil down to two.
One is to invest more: increasing discounts, lowering prices, increasing commercial effort or information pressure is often not the solution, but the start of a problem that moves us away from solving the initial problem. If a product is making a loss or selling less, if the network starts to be less effective, increasing sales using the old commercial levers exacerbates the initial problem, depleting the coffers and margins, putting the company structurally in a position, in the future, not to have the financial capacity to develop new products or promote them, generating a bigger problem that could have been solved previously by profoundly changing the unprofitable line.
The other is to disinvest: cutting all promotional and communication costs, in fact maximises the economic results in the short term, but disperses the value of the product, which becomes more and more unrecoverable year by year, it dries up and then will be abandoned and sold. It makes the asset lose value by milking it and letting it die out. Much to the satisfaction of the CFOs.
We are all too tempted to increase commitment in times of difficulty, but this proactive attitude, which in many cases enables challenging or insurmountable obstacles to be overcome (rather than finding alternative solutions), paradoxically contributes to increasing obstacles in others. We are blinded by commitment and do not look around, we do not understand that alternative solutions exist, that previous models are losers and need to be readjusted, and so we maximise our efforts to solve the problem with the traditional systems that worked until yesterday. This is even more evident in pharmaceuticals.
There are managers who think that their boss or management will look favourably on someone who tries harder rather than someone who experiments with solutions; there are managers who believe that, after all, while he is implementing the cure, before the problem really explodes he will be sitting in another chair and someone else will be sitting in his; there are managers who, because of their 'attitude to fatigue', are unable to demand anything more from their subordinates than greater effort and not support for solutions.
In pharmaceutical marketing, this "muscular and repetitive" versus "flexible and adaptive" attitude is much more common than in other sectors. The attitude of working within fixed rules that are largely consolidated with business methods that have been substantially unchanging for decades, and which have always given more than satisfactory results, pushes many managers, who have little experience with different sectors, to act in a traditional way even in the face of cyclopean changes such as those we have before our eyes.
In addition, the silo structure of the pharmaceutical industry encourages a spatially limited perspective in that each function knows its own problems and adopts solutions to solve them, but no one really sees and shares the general strategic policies and does not see how their solutions interact with the others implemented by the other sectors except at the level of results. So the regulatory department finds a solution for smart-working, and so does IT, and so does sales, but the effect is absolutely chaotic and the result is disastrous. So they decide to go back to the way they used to work.
On the one hand, conservative visions are toxic and self-limiting, they send mixed messages about change and lead colleagues to lose faith in the future and thus put into practice - I repeat often unconsciously - survival-oriented actions. Nevertheless, during crises, innovative directives appear confusing - and of course they often are in principle - and scary, they send a message of uncertainty and impotence, they do not bring short-term results. And they are easily abandoned as soon as an improvement is discerned, to return to previous conditions. So we are caught between conservation and transformation.
How should you proceed? It depends, but of course I can give you a little advice:
- Come out clearly and 'decide' to change by giving clear, unambiguous signals;
- Secure at least one group of allies within the structure;
- You can't bring everyone on board, you can't save everyone;
- Secure the endorsement of upper management, if not, it is better to secure it;
- Issue a challenge, an aspiration, a 'meaning', a why;
- Make transformation a cultural process;
- Get help from the vision, indeed from a "visionary" vision;
- Don't be afraid to go back and change a part of the way, the goal is the destination not the path;
- Things only start to turn if you have an endowment of time and resources at your disposal;
- Trust in systemic thinking processes (we will come back to this);
- Act small and escalate.
If until yesterday the solution to selling more was always to get more informants, why should it be any different today? Simply because the conditions in which pharmaceutical sales representatives in Italt operate, the context of citizen and patient health, the listening and attention of doctors, the working models of competitors and, finally, the technologies available have all changed at the same time.
If the problems are nails we will continue to use hammers and need bigger hammers, but if the problems are nuts and bolts, bigger hammers will not help. Did you know that companies like Merqurio see themselves as an 'additional toolbox in the hands of marketing'? And that they run courses on how to use the new tools? And that these "tools" are solutions that are effectively available even in what we might call established contexts?
The innovative solutions for pharmaceutical marketing in Italy are there and have been 'scientifically' tested, they work. Post Covid-19, you don't need bigger hammers, you need new tools and new skills. Use a richer toolbox, Merqurio can offer you that.
Salvatore Ruggiero
Salvatore Ruggiero nasce a Napoli nel 1964, si definisce un imprenditore seriale. Oggi a capo del gruppo Merqurio, di cui è stato anche fondatore. Sposato con Giuseppina, ha due figli e nel tempo libero, tra un'escursione e un'altra, tra un film ed un altro, è alla ricerca della ricetta dei biscotti perfetti.