How can pharma companies make sure they're part of the mix?

“Pake says that in 1995 his office will be completely different; there will be a TV-display terminal with keyboard sitting on his desk. ‘I’ll be able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button,’ he says. ‘I can get my mail or any messages. I don’t know how much hard copy [printed paper] I’ll want in this world.’”

Coming in a time when the typewriter was still de rigueur in any modern office, the first part of Pake’s prediction was far-seeing—and quite correct. The integration of computers into office environments may seem like a self-evident development with hindsight—but I don’t recall anyone predicting the future ubiquity of smartphones or social media 20 years ago. So the first part of Pake’s prediction should be considered one of the more impressive in the history of business prophecy.

The second part of Pake’s prediction—the bit about paper—is more troublesome. In the same 20 years that saw Pake’s display terminal prediction come true, the use of paper in North American offices actually rose. And while paper use in offices has declined somewhat since the 1990s, overall world consumption of paper has grown by four times since Pake made his prediction.

Why the history lesson? Because we as marketers need to get out of our heads the idea that the advent of digital technologies means the immediate irrelevance of more traditional forms of communication.

Evolution, not revolutionWe as marketers can achieve extraordinary things with digital tools. They have transformed the business of health, greatly for the better, and will continue to do so in ways that we can barely imagine today.

But no matter how enthusiastic we are about the shiny new tools in our toolbox, and no matter how much we talk to each other at digital conferences about how digital and mobile and social have grown from mere tactics to Capital-S Strategy, vast swaths of our audience are still consuming vast swaths of content via traditional channels.

Why? Because in today’s world, the speed of technology evolution is outpacing human habits, and human nature. People have been reading and writing and sketching on paper for nearly two thousand years, and on a variety of other non-digital tactile media for unknown thousands of years before that. We’ll probably reach the age of the paperless office and fully paperless content consumption someday, but it’ll most likely be after everyone who reads this article is dead. Any evolution in the fundamentals of ways humans communicate and perceive their world takes a long time—generations steeped in the old ways must pass and new generations be born, often several times over, before such an evolution can be considered complete. Even evolution itself is an evolution—“On the Origin of Species” was first published more than 150 years ago, and still only about six in ten Americans—or so says Pew Research— believe in its fundamental assertion.

According to the AMA’s Physician Master File, 47.4% of all active physicians were age 50 and up as of 2012. So nearly half of our single most important constituency are old enough to remember watching the Apollo 11 mission on television. Also, more than half of physicians regardless of age—55%, according to Kantar’s latest survey—still read articles from medical publications in physical form, nearly double the number who read such articles on a tablet and well more than double the number that read them on a smartphone.

Patients too. While the median age of the American population is 37, the use of healthcare isn’t distributed evenly across that population. According to one published study, only a fifth of the average person’s lifetime medical expenditure will be spent during the first half of his/her life, and nearly half of that expenditure will occur after age 65. That’s not to say that young people don’t consume plenty of healthcare services—of course they do. But older people consume a lot more. And in ten years, older people will still consume a lot more, and those older people will still be old enough to have begun their professional lives well before the advent of the desktop computer, let alone the smartphone or tablet or social media. These are people whose formative years were spent consuming information via traditional, non-digital means, and a large number of them still prefer to consume information that way.

Back to basicsAll this being the case, when considering the proper place of digital media in any marketing mix, we need to go back to basics. The Ur-question for marketers is the same today as it was in 1914 and will be in 2114: Who is our audience, and what is the best way to communicate with that audience? Now, brand audiences are not monolithic—they include all sorts of internal variations depending on the variables of each brand’s labeling and value proposition, not to mention the variability of people and their information consumption habits. That’s why one needs a marketing mix. But if we really know our audience, we can at least draw certain basic conclusions. Such as: if our median audience member is more than 50 years old, it would be foolish for the center of gravity of our marketing mix to lie on the digital side of the scale.

So why the rush to digital? We as marketers are suffering from a cognitive bias—a bias in favor of our own preferences. We are by nature creative and innovative people, and it’s our responsibility to stay abreast of new developments in marketing, so we surround ourselves with the new, the innovative, the transformative. Digital turns us on. So we have a tendency to place our audiences in our shoes, rather than the reverse. We see our audience not as they are, but as we are. In so doing, we run the risk of failing to place our messaging in front of large numbers of people who might well benefit from it, people who don’t correspond to our own biases about media consumption.

To avoid the effects of this cognitive bias, we need to reacquaint ourselves with our brands’ audiences. The emergence of digital media and research tools offers us greater capacity than we’ve ever had before to find out as much as possible about our audiences’ individual content delivery preferences. Then, we can go about the task of defining—or redefining—our marketing mix, incorporating digital and traditional elements as the audience’s nature dictates. That mix will likely include a majority of one and a significant minority of the other, depending on the nature of the audience. But it will always be a mix, strategically appropriate content passing through a carefully balanced recipe of the various forms of media delivery, digital and otherwise.

Every industry can and needs to draft a detailed marketing mix before penetrating the market.

Marketing mix, simply stated, is really just a set of promotional tactics that a product is using to sell and market itself. In the pharmaceutical industry, this can include a broad set of different kinds of promotional activities, things from very traditional tactics such as sales force promotion or sampling, to more recent advances, things like co-pay cards or digital media. A very top of mind concern really for any brand manager or marketing executive is whether they’re investing in the brand promotion in the best possible way, and that has many different dimensions to it.

There are three different things that can significantly change how marketers approach mix decisions. One is better information, comprehensive tracking of promotional activities, and using new data sources are really key elements to measuring promotional impact.

The second item is better analytics. None of these tactics really operates in a vacuum. So you have to take a very sophisticated, multi-channel approach to evaluating them.

The third thing I'm seeing is better execution. While a good plan is a great start. You need to put in place systems, processes that allow for you to uniquely promote at the individual customer level.

By learning how to effectively implement various types of marketing techniques. Most pharma companies tend to use magazine advertising to get to their target market. They rely heavily on television commercials and magazine adverts to get their product into the public eye. Most people are weary of pharma companies to begin with, so perhaps if pharma companies could build on their consumer base credibility and learn to gain the trust of consumers, it would significantly help them when they decide to branch out into the online marketing world. 

agree with expert answers

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Sorry, don't have an expertise in this specialty to answer. Thanks much.

Drugmakers already are, and some--though not all--of pharma's older strategies continue to pay off. But pharma still has some work to do online.

According to an annual survey, consumers are searching more for treatment options versus symptoms, paying attention to advertising and increasingly asking for specific drugs by brand.

Among all the survey respondents, digital-native Millennials were the most engaged generation online, which isn't atypical for that group--but they were also the most receptive to advertising.

Advertising motivated more than half of Millennials (51%) to visit a pharma website, compared with 36% of Gen X and 26% of Baby Boomers, according to the sixth annual Makovsky/Kelton Pulse of Online Search Survey.

Old-school TV was the most influential media among Millennials with 26% citing it as the top ad channel, followed by 19% selecting web sites and 16% choosing social media.

Millennials are also more likely to ask for a drug by name, with 70% having done so versus 61% of all consumers surveyed.

Celebrity endorsements were also more influential when it comes to Millennials--22% trust them versus 13% of the total population--while paid search was also effective with Millennials. The younger group most often said they chose to go to Wikipedia and WebMD after online healthcare searches simply because "it was the first web link."

However, advertising also ranked as influential across all age groups for driving traffic to pharma websites. Overall, 37% of consumers said advertising motivated them to visit a pharma site, which was second only to the 51% who went to pharma websites because their doctors recommended it. Among all reasons chosen for going to pharma sites, advertising also beat out family and friend recommendations at 32%, news articles at 26% and medication discounts at 21%.

One place where advertising didn't do well, however? Pharma-sponsored disease-awareness sites. A wide majority (69%) of those surveyed said they don't trust a website about a disease that is sponsored by a pharma company.

Beyond advertising, the study also looked at healthcare and pharma website effectiveness and other consumer online behaviors.

Tom Jones, senior VP and practice director of Makovsky Health said an important buzzword in health sites right now is "user experience," which includes design, information and ease of use, but takes the view of the consumer through the entire journey across a brand or organization's website.

"We're constantly looking at user experience; it's a big deal," he said. "Companies don't want to just have people come onto their website and then go away. They want to pull them in, they want them to engage, and they want them to stay on the page as long as possible."

WebMD ranked as the top healthcare website that consumers turn to first, at 53% of those in the study. The Makovsky study concluded, however, that ease-of-use trumps trustworthiness when it comes to overall website use.

For instance, only 39% of the WebMD users said they trust the most-popular site, but 56% said it was easy to use. In the case of advocacy groups, 59% said they trust those sites, but only 16% use them, with a less than resounding 29% agreeing the sites were easy to use. Pharma websites ranked last out of the top eight healthcare resources that Makovsky found consumers use most often, with just 12% of respondents saying they use them, even though 32% said they trust the sites and a similar 32% said they were easy to use.

Jones added, in a press release, "In this year's survey, we saw significant shifts in consumer use of government agency health sites--calling out these sources as highly trustworthy, yet at the same time, few feel they are easy to use. Understanding this tug-of-war between trust and ease-of-use, in which ease-of-use ultimately wins, is incredibly important for health communicators and marketers seeking to reach consumers."

Mostly pharma is dependent on field force mean personal selling and its already a part of marketing mix.