Just as any other industry, pharma business is also primarily a ‘value delivery system.’ Its each and every employee need to understand and internalize this basic philosophy of the business. This organizational mindset needs to be created by the very top – setting examples for others to embody the same. The top could encompass the promoters themselves, or the professional CEOs – truly heading the organization and not working under the shadow of the promoters, or even the Board of Directors of professionally managed companies.
Although, this mindset should prevail pan organization, pharma sales and marketing functions are usually responsible to deliver a well-thought out set of brand values and associated services to doctors, patients and other stakeholders, effectively.
Against the above backdrop, I shall explore in this article whether it is happening in the pharma industry. If yes, is the ‘value delivery system’ is tuned to a self-serving mode, wherever it is happening? If so, to what extent it is denting the reputation and image of not just of the companies concerned, but of the drug industry as a whole. Before I proceed further, let me elaborate on what exactly I mean by the ‘value delivery system (VDS).’
Value Delivery System (VDS):
Creating more and more customers and retaining them, as long as possible, is the core purpose of any business, as was articulated by the management guru Peter Drucker, decades ago. Thus, like others, pharma organizations, as well, require making it happen in a sustainable way for business excellence.
The entire organization – starting from product and service development activities, right up to the frontline sales and marketing, should always be engaged in delighting the customers with the values they expect – driven by this mindset. It is worth noting that value expectations of pharma customers, are expressed in various ways. These need to be properly captured, analyzed, interpreted, packaged and effectively delivered during each company- customer contact, such as, while interacting with doctors, patients, hospitals and Government.
Thus, the term ‘Value Delivery System (VDS), encompasses an integrated chain of processes within an organization. From this perspective, it should get ingrained in the culture of a pharma company – without any broken links – between the functional areas and the integrated value delivery process.
Who is deciding what patients would value in pharma?
In the real world, ‘customers point of view’ or ‘what the patients would value’ in a product, is decided by the pharma companies – derived generally from the published clinical trial results of the products. Accordingly, these are woven around the brand features and benefits.
The value delivery system of the company packages these in a way that it thinks would generate increased prescription demand and delivers to all concerned. These values, which are overall financial business performance-centric, are mostly ‘self-serving’, and was working very well to meet the internal objectives, until recently.
How to ascertain value for patients in pharma marketing?
One way to ascertain these factors is to ask patients directly. But this process has certain limitations. This was once aptly articulated by Steve Jobs in an interview, where he said: ‘I think really great products come from melding two points of view -the technology point of view and the customer point of view. You need both. You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.’
Taking a cue from it, I reckon, …continue reading…
No comments:
Post a Comment