Eyeforpharma emarketing Berlin 2010 take-away No. 4: Regulators don’t always say No March 17, 2010
Posted by Kay Wesley in Marketing.Tags: Marketing, pharma, regulations
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Delegates from last year’s eyeforpharma eMarketing Europe had indicated that more insight into the thinking of regulators would be very helpful, so Heather Simmonds of the UK’s Prescriptions Code of Practice Authority bravely took the stage to discuss the changing landscape, both in the UK and across Europe.
The very different interpretations of what constitutes “promotion to patients” by different countries does not help companies trying to establish a European strategy. France and Germany consider the mention of a drug name to be “promotion” whereas the UK guidelines allow and even encourage companies to provide “reference information” i.e. factual information about medicines, to consumers, provided it is balanced, accurate and not misleading (check out clause 24 of the ABPI Code of Practice 2008). She observed that in the UK many pharma marketers are currently not doing what they are allowed to do within the code, so why ask for codes to be broadened?
Consequently different countries are reacting differently to the proposed European Directive on information to the public about prescription only medicines – effectively this will relax the rules in some countries and tighten them in others.
The codes in many cases are already in place and just need to be interpreted for online. For example, information you can provide in a closed meeting to doctors can probably be provided in a closed website to doctors.
It only becomes an issue when the translation is not direct – for example, a passing question and answer in conversation, becomes a permanent record when written in a forum or blog – and as soon as that permanence is established it must be treated as a document and comply with the relevant code of practice.
Context is also important: a piece of patient information in one context might be balanced and neutral, but choosing a phrase from that information and displaying it differently might be deemed promotional.
Heather’s plea was to involve the regulators. They want to help us achieve goals of better medical education and healthcare and the discussion can be about not “can we or can’t we?” but “how can we?”
Notwithstanding this debate, the question still stands: in a global channel, if a piece of content is for a “global audience” whose national rules apply? It is not practical to consult every code in the world just in case a citizen of that jurisdiction comes across the content. Further, during a panel discussion, Silja Chouquet of Whydot.com asked “Who has lied about being from the US to gain access to one of their consumer websites?” A handful of hands stayed down – the US delegates, of course.
Eyeforpharma eMarketing 2010 Berlin take-away No. 3: The basics are still important March 15, 2010
Posted by Kay Wesley in Marketing, Search, Websites.Tags: Marketing, pharma
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In my last post I talked about providing good customer service being of paramount importance. The first, most obvious way to serve your customer is to give them what they want when they ask for it. These days we “ask” with Google, and as Jens Monsees of Google Germany pointed out, if you’re not there when they Google you, you’re product is not “on the shelf” so why should they buy you?
Aaron Uydess spoke his usual customer-focused sense and had a nice chart mapping customer needs against business needs, and recognising that we should focus our online services in the sweet spot where customer needs and business needs intersect. It is possible – we have content we want to share and we can organise it in ways that HCPs want to access it. Aaron encouraged us to “do small things and do them really well”. For example, offering a service to doctors so that they can download useful patient content and email it to their patients as a service from themselves. This is just one of the offerings of the NovoMedlink portal, that allows users to rate content and share it with colleagues.
Laurence Sherman (@meducate) of Prova Education pointed out in characteristic pithy style that in digital education as in all online communication, we have to be interactive, entertaining and engaging. It is not sufficient to expect doctors to read text documents online. He asserted that we can offer relevant eCME at the point of care that can stimulate better clinical practice. He also told us that finally the EACCME (the European Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education) has indicated it is providing credits for online CME in Europe. (Ironically enough the EACCME’s own website looks like someone has hit “save as HTML” on a Word document…happy to lend a hand if you like, folks).
Given that 1.5bn people the world over use search (mostly Google), and that health topics still rank highly (Peaks in 2009? “Swine flu” was second only to “Michael Jackson”), regardless of whether you engage in social media or not, you should most certainly (said Jens Monsees) sort out your Google profile. Get your digital assets in order (by which I think he meant build a good site), search engine optimise it and, for the places you can’t compete organically, buy Google keywords. Pretty basic stuff. But still important. As far as doctors and patients are concerned, this is still MUCH more important in terms of sheer visibility than social networks. But watch this space.
Eyeforpharma eMarketing 2010 Berlin take-away No. 2: Customer service has arrived March 12, 2010
Posted by Kay Wesley in Marketing.Tags: Marketing, pharma
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Just as other industries have been forced by customer attitudes, commoditised products and squeezing margins to focus on the customer needs instead of product features, so pharma must now. And digital channels mean our customers are butterflies: alternative content, messages, relationships are just a click away. We have to deliver REALLY excellent service if customers are going to want to deal with us. Digital is, in fact, making us better service providers.
So at eyeforpharma we heard a great deal about simply delivering what people want. We are not satisfied with our efforts yet – 68% of the audience said that the pharmaceutical industry does not generally provide good customer service.
Online, some of our best efforts are largely Web 1.0, which is fine. Therapy area portals, a “one-stop-shop” where physicians can get all the information they require on a given disease or therapy area, still top the list of “wants” from doctors. There are some great examples out there, some pharma-sponsored, some not, some involve an element of discussion, some do not. For example – Pfizer professionals, Merck Engage, Doctors.net, Univardis, Doccheck, InCirculation.net, Novartis Oncology, BMJ Doc2Doc….
Kate Wagstaff of Ferring described providing clinical paper summaries for GPs on a GP portal once the sales force had been withdrawn from the product, Desmomelt. This simple service increased intent to prescribe from 28 to 79%.
Tom Pryzgoda and Tony Bondi of Abbott showed us several great examples of services to patients. One that stuck in my mind was the “cool, edgy” iPhone app for young Chron’s disease patients, helpfully showing the location (and as I recall, the quality) of public toilets in the local area – the app is called, naturally, flushit.
Irina Osovskaya of Janssen- Cilag pointed out that we’ve gone from “information overload” to “interaction overload”. For Concerta they have constructed an award-winning multi-channel campaign in ADHD – from disease awareness website to sales aid. Irina also quoted Ian Maclaurin, Chairman of Tesco (often cited as a best-practice customer retention story): “Customer loyalty is not about how customers demonstrate their loyalty to us, it is about how we demonstrate our loyalty to them.”
More tomorrow on getting the basics right in delivering good digital customer service.
Meanwhile, at eyeforpharma for a bit of light relief we had a little game to steer your brand through digital marketing decision-making. It’s now online so you might like to play Brand Bunny. Enjoy!
My top 5 take-aways from eyeforpharma eMarketing 2010 Berlin March 11, 2010
Posted by Kay Wesley in Marketing.Tags: Marketing, pharma
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With nearly 300 other pharma marketers and communicators I turned up in a chilly Berlin last week to attend eyeforpharma’s 5th Annual eMarketing Europe Summit. There was a cautiously optimistic mood about the place, a sense that we’ve moved from “should we?” to “how shall we?” on a number of fronts. There was a mixture of pharma company and vendor presentations of varying originality and interest, but all in all I learnt some stuff and met some very interesting people.
Here are my top 5 take-aways:
- Pharma companies are now (finally) serious about digital.
- Customer Service has arrived.
- The basics are still important
- Regulators don’t always say No
- Social media, vital and impossible?
I’ll post my five top take-aways over the next few days, as well as sharing some other bits and pieces from the event. Check out the Twitter hashtag #efp to see all the comments from the two days.
Take-away 1: Pharma companies are now (finally) serious – digital is a global strategic imperative.
Does anyone else feel a sense of déjà vu? In the late nineties/early 2000s many pharmaceutical companies recognised the potential of “eMarketing” and hired eMarketing leaders from “outside” and built central teams to rollout this new sales panacea. These leaders (yours truly included) did some pilots, demonstrated ROI (sometimes) put up some (good and bad) websites, moved to other jobs.
Times became tougher, eMarketing was not yet running through the veins of the organisation and these large central teams were ‘quick wins’ when cutbacks were required. We rationalised this by saying that eMarketing was part of all marketing now, we didn’t need specialised teams. Did we?
Then we watched our customers moving ahead without us, comfortable in their networked, hyperlinked world, with new channels emerging every day. Paralysed and without rules of engagement, we gradually lost control of the message, the channels, the conversation. We looked on in dismay, and then…
At eyeforpharma it was evident that in the last couple of years the forward-thinking companies have decided it is untenable for every brand in every country to work out this plethora of channels and conversations alone.
Two types of global organisation have emerged – the global digital strategy team, working across brands at a European or worldwide level, developing those rules of engagement, this time with the (apparent) support of a leadership that recognises that the game has changed.
The second is the global delivery team, what Garrett Dalton from Roche called his “in-house agency”, finding economies of scale in building best-practice delivery platforms, tools and templates, that can be used across brands and geographies. The way to get affiliates to use the central service? Make it very good: Garrett has 95% satisfaction ratings within the company.
Interestingly those that have a global strategy team, by and large, also have a global delivery team.
Pete West of Pfizer demonstrated how his regional eMarketing platform has created a presence for his brand Tygacil based on the needs of affiliates who did not have the means or expertise to build it themselves. He showed how integrating this with other customer touchpoints such as meetings, emails and rep visits created more interactions with his key messages, increasing intent-to-prescribe from 28 to 41%.
Real, strategic investment in platforms, capabilities and digital best practice – that’s more like it!
Soon, we might even soon stop asking if doctors are using the internet. As I commented in my own talk, can we get over it please? Doctors are people, aren’t they? They use the phone, they drive cars, they use the internet. Is it time for Manhattan to drop that “docs online” statistic from its otherwise-very-useful Taking the Pulse report? I think so. Let’s move on.
Tune in tomorrow for take-away 2.
Why pharma should stop worrying about Web 2.0 February 10, 2010
Posted by Kay Wesley in CRM, Marketing, Websites.Tags: Marketing, pharma
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Now there’s a thing.
Shouldn’t you worry about Web 2.0, when that means all your customers are talking and gossiping and complaining about your brand/company, without anyone listening/checking/correcting them? What’s going on? Aren’t all the experts telling us that reputations are built and destroyed in these places and we should be paying $£€millions for a Social Media Strategy?
Well, my point is this: Web 1.0 is still there and is probably more important right now if your target audience is physicians.
Remember, the read-only Web? The look-for-information-and-if-the-brand-is-doing-its-job-right-you’ll-find-it-Web?
Google your brand/clinical trial/therapy area. Now Google it in each of your major country markets…What do you see?
- An out-of-date Wikipedia page?
- An ad/page from an alternative therapist telling you you don’t need your brand?
- An ad/page from a Law firm offering to help you sue your company?
- A competitor’s ad?
What should you see?
Your (local language) home page, giving useful information and services about your medicine for each audience or stakeholder, perhaps?
If doctors, payers, patients, providers, journalists or anyone else wants to know about clinical trials or drug therapies, what do you think they do?
That’s right, 90%+ of them Google it. That’s it. And if they don’t get good service from you at this point – at this “request for information” interaction, what do you think they think of you?
In FMCG terms, if you’re not in the top 10 (some would say the top 3), you’re not “on the shelf”. Why should I buy your product if you can’t be bothered to put it on the shelf?
The healthcare professionals we speak to (mainly specialists) say that they are at the “dabbling” stage in social media but boy, do they want information to be on hand when they need it. Almost every one of them says – “I just want a one-stop shop where I can go and find out all I need to know about the therapy area or drug I’m interested in”. Pharma has that content, and we should provide it. Simple.
Here’s a non-pharma example. I Googled “budget accommodation near Heathrow” and this was the top sponsored link:
Cheap Hotel In Heathrow
Travelodge.co.uk/Hotel
Quality Budget Hotel In Heathrow From Only £19. Book Online Now
Click through and enter “Heathrow” (not sure why I had to do that), and I get:
3 clicks later (no use of the back button or need to use a site menu or map) and I’m at “Complete Booking”. Total elapsed time: 23 seconds.
The Travelodge team have mapped the likely customer journey, and figured out how to get from Google search to satisfied customer as fast as possible.
A near-perfect online service. Do I recommend the Travelodge product? Of course.
Do it. It’s easy – just get your brand/therapy area content online:
- Map the customer journey, figure out what your customers want and how to give it to them on a good old-fashioned website.
- Deliver high quality, engaging, informative, relevant, interactive content and services.
- Optimise the site for search engines.
- Promote it to your target audience.
- Keep it up-to-date. THIS is your primary “conversation” with your customers. This is the conversation you have when they have come to visit you – be polite, get it right, give them what they want and need right here before you go out to meet them in social networks or anywhere else. If you do a good job of it, they’ll come back and visit again and be your friend.
Then we can talk about Web 2.0.
What will Pharma Marketing and Medcomms be like in 2020? January 5, 2010
Posted by Kay Wesley in CRM, Marketing.Tags: CRM, future, Marketing, pharma
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The media have spent a week or three looking at the ‘noughties’ and marvelling at how far we’ve come, but we ain’t seen nothin’ yet in the digital revolution.
There are massive changes happening in our society, relationships with corporations and governments are shifting in ways never seen before, ordinary people have a voice in their community that they last had in feudal times…the difference is that today, the ‘community’ is global. We have moved from the ‘information age’ to the ‘interaction age’. The human need for a voice is the driving force, but there can be no doubt that digital is the key enabler.
I wonder what Medical Communications and Pharma Marketing will look like in 2020?
Here are a few thoughts. What do you think?
- The Pharmaceutical industry will spend 90% of its marketing communications budget on digital channels and 10% on face-to-face channels.
- Physicians will have, at their fingertips, on their phone/camera/handheld device, all the clinical evidence for any drug, and diagnostic/prescribing decision-tools for the majority of clinical situations.
- Medical education will be delivered in a multi-media format (sound/video/animation/game) and will most often be consumed in healthcare professionals’ living rooms or home offices. The hardware will be televisions (which will be computers, and vice versa).
- Each major disease area will have a global online community of stakeholders (HCPs, carers, providers, patients) who will drive decision-making in that therapy area.
- It will be the norm for the pharmaceutical industry to deliver “whole products” not just medicines. These will include services and information to add value and deliver better patient outcomes.
- Sales stories in pharma will be based on patient benefit (outcomes) rather than product features (efficacy/safety). Clinical evidence to support these stories will be well-developed and readily available in a variety of formats and media.
- Thought-leadership in healthcare will be created online, through blogs, microblogs and social networks – and their descendents.
- International medical meetings will still happen, but more than 90% of the content consumption from these meetings will happen remotely and digitally.
- Pharma companies will have a seamless, integrated relationship with each customer – a single relationship from clinical to commercial, global to local, brand to brand.
- The general public will see the pharmaceutical industry in a positive light as an important player in improving human health.
A little aspirational, perhaps, but all (and more) are achievable. Pretty exciting stuff. It gets me out of bed each day, anyway.
Why pharma needs to stop saying “I can’t” December 8, 2009
Posted by Kay Wesley in Search.add a comment
One thing that irks me a little is that when I Google my name (go on, admit it, you’ve done it too) the number one result is not me, but another Kay Wesley from London. The “other Kay” is a homeopathic practitioner, whereas much of my working life has been spent in the “traditional” healthcare arena of prescription medicines and the organisations that produce them.
I’ve often observed the apparent freedom with which homeopathic remedies (presumably because not classed as “drugs”) can be promoted to the public in all countries, where drug advertising is outlawed or very limited.
This creates a very skewed picture for the patient who is Googling their condition. If I search for “cancer cure” for example, in addition to a number of sponsored links for cancer charities, the other paid links are all for “alternative” (i.e. not clinically-proven in the generally-accepted sense) treatments. They promise a great deal (NB: None are from my namesake’s responsible website!):
- “..start you on a road of recovery to restore your health”
- “..defeat this deadly disease”
- “an alternative treatment that works”
- “drugs and natural agents in low, non-toxic doses”
(This last presumably means so dilute they have no effect on the body chemistry at all…) They all, incidentally, also have very small print of at the bottom saying the equivalent of “I am not a doctor and the FDA has not approved the contents of this website”.
Cancer patients and their carers and friends are among the most proactive in seeking for help and support from any source they can, and we know that Googling “cancer cure” is likely to be one the first things they do after diagnosis.
There were no sponsored links I could see from any reputable pharma companies or their brands. Novartis, Roche, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, all the great oncology franchises are notable by their absence. Why? For all these companies (and their peers), positive outcomes for patients are their top priority:
- “Novartis puts patients first”.
- AstraZeneca: “We…improve the health and quality of life of patients around the world”
- Pfizer “Working together for a healthier world”
- Roche: “we make a difference to patients with cancer every single day”
Some of these statements seem a just a bit hollow when we are not providing any front-line support services through patients’ and carers’ chosen information channel (Google) for their chosen search term “cancer cure”. I think we all know why this is. How can you put a sponsored link on Google responding to the search phrase “cancer cure”? The word “cure” is itself generally not usable in the context of clinical evidence.
This is one example of “I can’t” that does not serve patients’ needs. There are others. Most of them seem to be connected to the legal and regulatory constraints on drug advertising and promotion.
This area is a quagmire of problems. In a global channel, what country’s regulations apply? Do you need to get approval from every English-speaking market for global content in English? How do we know if it is a patient, a provider, a healthcare professional (yes they Google too) searching and clicking our link?
Too often brand teams’ (or their medical ethics/regulatory departments’) response to all this is to do nothing – “I can’t”. Agencies, meanwhile, come up with lots of innovative ideas and then, when regulatory questions arise, we bat the ball firmly into the client’s court. Often the final programme is a very watered down version of the original idea, of limited value to patients.
But if we are going to provide the service to patients we promise, we have to work together to find a better way. We can provide disease information and support for patients in all countries. In many countries, when a patient has already been prescribed your drug you can offer them additional services related to managing their condition. The IFPMA indeed encourages this, although not covering “direct to consumer” advertising, “IFPMA and its members are committed to educational and promotional efforts that benefit patients”.
I suggest that provided we take reasonable steps to ensure content is delivered to the right audiences we are practicing legitimately. There is nothing to stop a patient buying a copy of a medical magazine, after all, but it is OK to advertise drugs in there because it targets doctors. Similarly you can have a Google ad link that says “Oncology information for Healthcare Professionals” and target HCP-type-keywords with it.
What about the “cancer cure” keywords? Oncology franchises can offer information and support to patients about cancers and their therapies, I suggest, including responding to this search term, but without offering “cure”.
But, offer nothing? That is not living up to our promise of “putting patients first” or promoting a “healthier world”, is it? At last many across the industry are starting to figure out how we can do a better job of this. There are some wonderful examples of content and services freely available online, such as http://psoriasisthenakedtruth.com(Wyeth), www.cfvoice.com (Novartis) , www.childrenwithdiabetes.com (Johnson & Johnson).
There is much more than can be done in meeting the needs of patients, carers and healthcare professionals with relevant, good quality services and information when and where they need it. Developing and sharing good practice will be important as we move forward. Saying “I can’t” isn’t an option any more.
