In my welcome post to this blog, I reposted content I originally published on a few different blogs. The oldest appeared in 2007. Yet, here we sit heading in 2010 and many of the same issues remain at the forefront. Marketers at pharma companies are struggling with how to engage with patients, doctors and care givers simultaneously. They are still grappling with how to move beyond traditional methods of marketing. Pharma companies are still weighing the prudence of jumping into social media. Three years is a long time to weigh your options—isn’t it time to take action?
Are pharmaceutical companies afflicted with myopia when it comes to marketing? Have they effectively been stuck in neutral for the last three years?
To answer this question, I think it is instructive to consider the arc of marketing outside of the pharmaceutical industry. Four years ago, the idea that a company would engage in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (not yet around) would seem preposterous as a credible marketing technique. Bleeding-edge types were just beginning to see the value of this form of customer engagement and were starting to convince early adopters to try “wild and crazy” things like blogging.
Those first companies were mostly consumer-focused. The logic was simple: their customers were easily identifiable online so it made sense to start marketing in the communities where customers were already engaging. Traditional B2B companies came next. Name brands like IBM and Microsoft were jumping into the mix realizing that social networks were not only for personal use, but were a valuable professional tool as well. In the early stages, many of the tactics were what would now be considered rudimentary—mostly engaging on blogs. Slowly but surely, blogging became Facebook Fan pages, YouTube Channels and Twitter engagement.
The point is: industries with fewer hurdles to clear than pharma have not been at this social media thing for very long. It was a slow grind in those industries so why should we expect pharmaceutical companies to recklessly dive in head first?
Are pharmaceutical companies myopic? In recent years, the industry has moved away from the blockbuster drug strategy and focused more heavily on alliance management. It has started to shift away from treating high-emotion conditions such as baldness to treating diseases with high unmet needs. The pharmaceutical industry has even started to rethink the traditional model of deploying a sales force, trending toward targeted relationship building rather than blanketing every inch of every territory. Even in the world of marketing, companies like Johnson and Johnson and Pfizer (among others) are embracing the potential of social media. All of this indicates one thing: the pharmaceutical industry is not myopic—it just needs time.
