Not many pharma companies, especially in India, undertake any ongoing data-based analysis to gain insight on expectations and change in behavioral pattern of their customers, particularly doctors and patients. Many developments are taken as obvious, such as, when busy practitioners don’t want to give much time to a medical rep for brand detailing, if not any time, common spontaneous inference remains – ‘they are too busy.’ These responses are mostly without any data backup. Thus, meaningful efforts in finding ‘productive alternatives’ continue to remain elusive.
As making personal calls to some top medical practitioners becoming increasingly difficult, non-personal outreach for them tend to significantly go up. It often happens without any quantifiable assessment of how each of these targeted doctors is responding to even the non-personal outreach of the company.
That this is happening, was captured in a world-wide survey by ZS Associates in 2016. It highlighted: ‘The number of digital and non-personal contacts that the pharmaceutical industry now has with physicians exceeded its number of sales rep visits to doctor offices.’ It is worth repeating, this finding comes from a global survey.
Lack of insight in this area, could give rise to an avoidable disconnect between many pharma company’s core communication strategy, and what individual doctors would like to hear from them and in what way. Unless this issue is addressed sooner, it could be a strong invisible barrier to brands’ success, if not the image, too. Thus, in this article, I shall explore its implication, the key factors driving this trend, and most importantly, how to bridge this gap. Let me start with the well-established trend of increasing volume of non-personal contacts and hasten to add, by ‘non-personal’ I mean situations where a person is not physically present.
Increasing volume of non- personal outreach:
In these days, personal interaction of medical reps with doctors, despite being traditionally important, is just one of the many channels for delivering requisite content to them. With increasing difficulty in getting top prescribers’ time, for effective brand detailing, many more non-personal channels are fast opening up.
Today, even in the Indian context, more than half of the total outreach volume of many drug companies, especially to such prescribers, are taking place through non-personal promotions. These include activities, such as:
- Both, general and personalized e-mails
- Mobile alerts to achieve various different objectives
- E-detailing
- Continuing Medical Education (CME)
- Speaker program with associated arrangements and fees
- Sponsoring medical events, seminars, symposia
- Advertising in medical journals
Whereas, a little less than 50 percent of the total outreach by volume, still take place through in-person interactions with medical reps for brand detailing, as studies indicate. Interestingly, for known products, such contacts are often no more than just brand reminders.
The productivity of such calls needs to be measured and quantified, just as what is required for various non-personal channels, including digital – the contact volume of which is fast increasing for several companies. Curiously, despite this prevailing scenario and in some cases, a declining performance trend notwithstanding, higher promotional budgets continue to be available, based on hope and supported by optimistic forecasts.
The key reason attributed to this trend:
The article titled ‘What healthcare professionals want from pharma’, published in …continue reading…
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