The ascent of pharma marketing

Pharmaceutical companies with a chief marketing officer are thin on the ground, but their number will shortly see a slight increase thanks to a new appointment at Pfizer.

The pharmaceutical company has recruited Andreas “Drew” Panayiotou from Verily, the life sciences business of Google’s parent company Alphabet, to the new role of biopharma global chief marketing officer.

He will join a short list within pharma of companies with a chief marketing officer, despite the job title – and the responsibilities it comes with – being commonplace within the consumer sector.

Pfizer: Pharma needs a business strategy for a digital world

Pic by Brayden Law on Unsplash

The unprecedented rate of digital acceleration seen in the first two years of COVID-19 has set in train an age of digital transformation.

In my last article, I outlined the inflection point facing the pharmaceutical industry in digital health and the digital transformation of its clinical and commercial operations. This time I’m going to focus on one company and its view on pharma’s digital commercial strategy.

After an initial, and very necessary, frenetic response to the global pandemic, changes within pharma’s commercial organisations have yet to entirely settle, but there are many signs of new and future directions.

Benchmarking patient experience and pharma CX

Pharma’s use of communication channels is not meeting expectations, with only telephone helplines managing a better than “fair” ranking in our latest survey.

For this we benchmark the customer experience (CX) provided to patients by some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world through the lens of our powerful CXQ® metric.

The research also finds that digital channels have definitively taken over as the primary source of pharma-created information. Within this, patients’ favourite channels were company websites, social media, or sponsored forums, as they increasingly seek information on their own terms to suit their digital lives.

How its customers experience pharma

How pharma interacts with its key stakeholders matters – the customer experience (CX) that companies provide patients and healthcare professionals (HCPs) – can improve patient outcomes and increase business value. It’s a win-win for companies that are willing to prioritise this area.

As the sum of all perceptions about a firm’s services, products and people, CX has moved centre stage for pharma’s commercial organisations in recent years. The huge increase in digital interactions caused by COVID-19 has further challenged pharma to better understand and meet their customers’ changing needs. To successfully achieve this requires rethinking the overall ‘customer engagement model’.

To find out how well global pharma organisations were approaching this shift during the acute phase of the pandemic, and what they will need to do in the future, we surveyed over 600 patients and 2,000 HCPs. Respondents came from Germany, France, the UK, Spain, Italy, and the US, with some of the HCPs also drawn from Canada. Their answers were put into our Customer Experience Quotient® (CXQ®) framework so that we could benchmark the companies involved.