The global management guru Peter Drucker, in one of his management classics – “The Practice of Management”, published in 1954, that created the discipline of modern management practices, had underscored the following:
“As the core purpose of any business is to create a customer, a business has two, and only two functions, marketing and innovation. Only these two produce business results. All the rest are costs.”
The Harvard Business Review also had rated ‘The Practice of Management’ as Drucker’s best book on the managerial profession. Far more crisp than the larger compendium on Management, nicely balanced between precept and example, this book is eminently practical yet of genuine intellectual breadth. If Drucker’s work holds anything of immediate value for you, you will most likely find it here…”
Thus, Peter Drucker’s above concept is so fundamental that the pharmaceutical business can’t be any exception to it, in any way. That the old customers need to be retained, and the new customers are to be created on an ongoing basis, even in the modern times, still remain a basic requirement.
Nevertheless, the marketing process of doing so needs to change, according to the changing market dynamics. Continuation of playing the same notes from the grand old marketing playbook, with minor alterations here or there, would no longer suffice to keep pace with the changing market, and to effectively address the new stakeholders’ needs and wants.
Need to recompose notes of the playbook:
Both the current processes of pharma marketing and the patent claim for any type of drug innovation that the majority of the global pharma companies is currently following, have become highly contentious over a period of time, to say the least.
Even otherwise, in my view, both these processes have already hit the ceiling of the famous ‘law of diminishing returns’, where very simply put, the level of profits or benefits gained is less than the amount of money or energy invested.
Therefore, the question that comes up: Are the notes of the pharma marketing and innovation playbook fair, right, inclusive, and sustainable? However, in this article, I shall focus only on contemporary pharma marketing, and the opportunities that are coming up along with waves of changes in the business environment.
An example of ‘Change the logo’ saga:
Going by my personal experience, I have worked with many pharma marketing professionals, some of whom are still working in the industry. Post recruitment in the new company, having gone through a rigorous screening process, most of them would probably give a similar feedback that an anonymous quote captures as follows:
“The optimist says, ‘the glass is half full’; The pessimist says, ‘The glass is half empty.’ The marketing consultant says, ‘The glass needs resizing and a different logo.”
On a lighter vein, I am using below an example of one ‘change the logo’ approach. This is just one of many of my real life experiences. This may give you a panoramic view of how things generally are. The stretching of the same old marketing paradigm beyond its elastic limit is rather common, of course, with some sporadic digital tweaking. Nonetheless, the notes in the marketing playbook remain almost the same, producing the same tunes for some, and noise for many others.
This ‘logo change’ saga may sound quite familiar to many of my ex-colleagues of not so distant past. This approach exemplifies the limitations of a new recruit for a senior position to identify the core issues that would lead to the organization’s performance improvement.
It does not surprise me at all, when I find some top managements, who were an integral part of that selection process, promptly buying these shallow, and at the most peripheral ideas. It is quite evident that some of these top management members also suffer from similar analytical and management myopia. It is needless to mention that such things usually happen during the ‘honeymoon’ period’ of the new recruits.
Accordingly, the ‘logo change’ takes place in no time, paying a huge sum to the creative agency. Commensurate hype is simultaneously created around the new logo, backed by massive efforts to communicate its ‘ethereal design’ to as many targets as possible, often with no tangible outcome. Alongside, attempts are also made to change as many old things as possible, generating a multitude of seemingly high-voltage activities, though the performance on the ground remains unchanged, or rather deteriorates.
I fully understand, there is nothing wrong in changing anything, including a logo, that is not working or has outlived its time. However, when this assumes the top priority of a new and a top recruit, immediately after assuming office with a new responsibility, it somewhat doesn’t gel, and very often does not achieve the desired purpose.
Pharma marketing over-dependent on the likes of ‘Surrogate CMEs’?
Today, when there is a need to hear more from all the major stakeholders, one sided ‘telling my story’ mostly to the doctors continues to occupy a major part of pharma marketing, besides company sponsored or allegedly surrogate ‘Continuing Medical Education (CME)’ even for old branded generics............
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