Reshaping pharmaceutical marketing: you don't launch products on the market to your consumers

Even today, in pharmaceutical marketing, there is no one who does not adopt the term market to refer to the indistinct plethora of prescribers, or patients, or customers. Even today, most marketers consider it evolved to use the term customer to describe the doctor or the patient from time to time. Even today, products are still launched in the market.

Are products launched on the market for customers to buy or prescribe? No.

In the following, I may refer from time to time either to the company itself, or to a prescription product, or to a supplement or OTC, and where necessary I will point this out, although I would like the concept to be applied more generally.

The market is the representation of an indistinct anonymous mass (or subset of it, but still a mass) that consumes; on the contrary, we propose and address groups of customers-citizens-users-patients (people) who have a face and a need.

How would you like to be considered as a market when you buy a medicine for your diabetes or cystitis treatment? Also: in what market does a pharmaceutical company operate, with whom does it compete? Is it a market for all patients with diabetes? In what market does a cystitis supplement compete?

If we start to revise and reject the term market itself, then we can better speak of a set of patients-people who have similar needs, and this in other markets is generally much more difficult to identify and define. An artisan wine producer or a multinational food company are probably focusing their attention and presenting their products to a similar market segment but with different needs. But are we sure we can talk about market segments in pharmaceuticals in the same way, or do we probably need to go deeper? That is, are you considering people with different needs?

Launching is another highly contestable term. If you have a market stall, you bring in the products you want to sell, display them, negotiate individually with each customer and value the recurring relationship to create trust. He does not throw the products at the market (can you imagine the scene?), but rather shows them off and tells about them by meeting the customers, talking to them to convince them that the right ones for them are his.

Pharmaceuticals are solutions to needs. In the case of diabetes or the cystitis product exemplified above, we are proposing solutions to a problem that no one would dream of prescribing or buying unless there was a need. If he did not have a need, he would not need a solution and would not buy, i.e. consume. So what we are not launching on the market are not products, they are something that takes away pain and suffering, that can make us live longer and better. To me, it seems at least reductive to compare them with commodities, such as table salt (which also exists at a premium now).

Customer is therefore improper in pharmaceuticals. The "consumer" is defined as the last link in the value chain, the one for whom everything is made, where everything ends, the one who is the object of our product and who our product uses until it is consumed. Of course, Porter's insights are still relevant in many respects, but I would say that the concept of the value chain needs to be revised a little today, and certainly in the pharmaceutical industry.

The terms I have mentioned in contemporary marketing have almost disappeared or have been completely revised in their use and meaning. In the new definitions of marketing, I would point out, quietly, that the term customer no longer appears, so why use it in the pharmaceutical industry? In addition, we take into account the fact that many customers who buy a product do not do so on the basis of unambiguous personal choices (for example, the purchasing manager or the hospital pharmacy manager) or, for example, buy it for their own company to make a profit (distributors and pharmacies, among others). There are also those who make decisions for purchases that others will have to make (doctors and specialists). Finally, there are situations in which the consumer has not made any decision (the patient in hospital, the elderly, children, animals). Do you still see a single market and a single consumer in this network?

The new industrial paradigm is to refer not to the market but to groups of potential customers who have a need to whom we offer a solution, and to focus on the relationship between them and not on the economic transaction.

At Merqurio we have long seen the world of relationships as predominant over the role of the individual interlocutor. We have invented a way of expressing this concept using polygons. In short (we will deal with this issue in another article), the figures with whom we relate in order to tell and listen can be identified in categories-types, which have multiple relationships between them. Drawing them out, a polygon will emerge, which is the network of people who are important in our promotion and their inter-relationship. In a complex, indeed chaotic world (but we will come back to this in a future article), it is not possible to simplify without losing the meaning of the whole promotional process.

This is a strategic thinking model and not an operational one, it does not simply impact on the next marketing plan but involves the whole thinking of the business.

Designing a communication plan focusing on one type of interlocutor can sometimes be reductive. Sometimes, this is because it has always been done this way or because, having informants, I obviously visit doctors. The reality is more complex, and I invite you to take note of it. There are projects and models that we have developed in Merqurio that make it possible to create relationships with several figures at the same time: doctors, pharmacists, scientific societies, public and private hospitals, healthcare companies, territorial structures, patient associations, patients... Hence the need to try to represent communication processes with polygons as we do in Merqurio. This vision, which is not intended to be holistic but simply representative of a complex reality, allows us to build a set of messages and convey them to the various interlocutors through the right channels.

We are not consumers of drugs and we are not a market and you don't have to throw products at us. We are people before we are patients and we have needs and aspirations and we want to be heard.