Pharma Brand Building: Criticality of Enhancing End-To-End Customer Experience

Posted on July 2, 2018 by Tapan Ray

In today’s fast-changing world, the types of medicines being developed, the way technology contributes to health, and how the value of health care is calculated, are all undergoing a metamorphosis. A wave of cell and gene therapies are bending the definition of what constitutes a drug, both clinically, and in terms of expectations of outcomes, duration of treatment and costs. Global health is poised to meet a series of key turning points, and changes seen in 2018 will mark the key inflections that drive the outlook for the next five years and beyond.

These are examples of key observations, as captured in the March 13, 2018 research report, titled: “2018 and Beyond: Outlook and Turning Points,” of the IQVIA Institute (previously IMS Institute). Arising out of these, the report envisages the following key impacts on the pharma industry in the next five years – from 2018 to 2022:

Patent expiry impact will be 37 percent larger than the prior five years, including both small molecule and biologics.
New medicines’ growth will be slower in 2018 – 2022 than the period from 2013 -2017.
Net price levels for branded drugs will rise modestly in the United States at 2–5% per year but will fall in other developed markets.
Volume for existing branded and generic medicines will remain slow, with the ongoing shifts towards newer medicines over time.
To increase access to medicinesGovernment and other payers to focus on addressing outstanding healthcare disparities or to invest in approaches to address system inefficiencies.

Such a situation, would obviously impede performance and productivity of many pharma players – both research-based and also the generic ones, across the world, including India. Against this backdrop, I shall discuss about the criticality of ‘enhancing end-to-end customer experience’ in pharma brand building exercise. The words to specially take note of are – ‘end-to-end customer experience’ and not just in some ‘touchpoints’. This would help many pharma players to navigate through this strong headwind to remain in the organizational growth trajectory.

Not a solitary finding:

Another series of articles from Bain & Company, published on June 30, 2015, May 25, 2017, May 09 and May 23, 2018, not just reflect similar core concern, as articulated in the IQVIA article. Moreover, the barriers to deliver growth from the in-market portfolios being tough, many drug companies are using even steep price increases as a key lever to achieve their financial goals. It continues to happen, despite strong criticisms both from the public and some powerful governments, such as the United States and also India, further denting industry’s public reputation.

Pharma sales reps no longer a primary learning resource about medicines?

It also came out clearly from some of these articles that ‘doctors in many developed countries have been moving away from pharma sales representatives as a primary resource for learning about medicines.’ It’s just a matter of time, I reckon, similar situation will prevail in India. So, what do the pharma organizations do now – wait for a similar situation to arise and then act, or initiate a proactive strategic marketing process, as soon as possible?

Enhancing customer experience in pharma brand building:

To mitigate this, a new concept for improving market share is gaining ground. It suggests, the intrinsic value of a brand, and its value delivery system should enhance the customer experience during the entire treatment process with the drug. Achieving this would prompt widely capturing and in-depth analysis of targeted customer expectations, preferences and aversions. Just listening to a patient or a doctor won’t suffice, any longer, for a pharma company to succeed in business.

The February 24, 2017 article, titled “The Case For Managing By Customer Episode,” published in Forbes very aptly said, ‘companies that once relied on developing new product features and improving customer service increasingly see competitive advantage rooted in the entire experience that’s wrapped around the product.’

The same point has been corroborated in several research studies, since the last few years. For example, a 2014 survey by McKinsey & Company came out with some interesting findings. It highlighted, by optimizing customer experience at every ‘touchpoint’ – ensuring a reasonably seamless customer journey, a company can potentially increase its revenue by up to 15 percent and lower the customer service costs by 20 percent.

Another research article dated May 23, 2018, titled ‘Why “Episodes” Matter for Doctors’, published in the Pharmaceutical Executive finds that about 40 percent of a doctor’s drug recommendations are linked to how effectively a firm delivers an overall experience, as distinct from product-related attributes such as clinical data. This share rises to about 60 percent for factors within the control of the commercial organization. Doctors who give high marks for their experience with a company, are between 2.3 and 2.7 times more likely to prescribe the company’s products as those who give low marks.The authors further highlighted, loyalty scores run low, both for the average firm and for many individual episodes for the pharma industry as a whole. That’s because firms have focused mostly on pushing out sales and marketing messages through as many channels as possible.

Units of ‘customer experience’ management:

Different publications acknowledge the need to have some key unit for managing customer experience. These units are described in different names by different experts, such as ‘episode’ or ‘touchpoint’.

Bain & Company said, each ‘Episode’ covers all tasks that a customer requires to complete for fulfilling a need. For each unit of ‘episode’, the clock starts as a customer feels and identifies a related need and ends when these are met with his/her full satisfaction. ‘The sum of a customer’s episodes over time comprise the entire experience of dealing with the company.’ So far as ‘Touchpoints’ are concerned, according to McKinsey & Company, these are the individual transactions through which customers interact with parts of the business and its offerings. It reflects organization’s accountability and is relatively easy to build into operations.

Difference between ‘episode’ and ‘touchpoint’ in ‘customer experience’ management:

There is a difference between ‘episodes’ and ‘touchpoints’. Whereas ‘touchpoints’ are each point of contact or interaction, between a business and its customers,‘episodes’ focus on end-to-end design of a specific customer-need of an organization, as they align management and the front line around the customer experience.

Many companies believe that customers will be happy with the interaction when they connect with their product, customer service, sales staff, or marketing materials. However, McKinsey found that this siloed focus on individual touchpoints misses the bigger, and more important picture: the customer’s end-to-end experience or the ‘customer journey.’ It includes many things that happen before, during, and after the experience of a product or service. The companies providing the customer with the best experience from start to finish along the journey can expect to enhance customer satisfaction, improve sales and retention, reduce end-to-end service cost, and strengthen employee satisfaction.

Thus, only by looking at the customer’s experience through his or her own eyes, throughout the entire journey taken – a company can begin to understand how to meaningfully improve its performance.

Focus areas to create an exemplary customer experience:

According to Bain & Company there are 5 imperatives to focus on to create an exemplary customer experience, which I summarize, as follows:

Examine the experience from the outside in – from the customer’s point of view, not the organization’s structure and processes.
Meet customer expectations consistently.
Invest to provide outstanding experiences in the areas that have the greatest impact on customer advocacy.
Use rapid prototypes to deliver new services to customers.
Develop closed-loop feedback processes, continuously refining experiences to match or exceed ever-rising customer expectations.

Conclusion:

The mediocre performance of the pharma industry, especially, since the last few years, is bothering many stakeholders.The challenges to deliver business growth from in-market portfolios, coupled with frequent backlashes for using steep product price increase as a key lever to achieve financial goals, are some of the key causal factors.

Enhancing ‘customer experience’ in the process of pharma brand building initiatives, has also caught the imagination of some players. This is commendable. Nonetheless, several research studies indicate, if these are focused on individual customer-‘touchpoint’ based strategies, which, I reckon, is rather common, the outcome may remain quite far from expectations.

What really matters, is enhancing end-to-end experience with a brand – throughout a patient’s journey for disease prevention or effective treatment or even cure. This may, for example, begin with the search for effective and affordable treatment options – participating in arriving at the right treatment – prescription of right drugs, and finally receiving continuous requisite guidance throughout the course of treatment for better management of the disease or effective cure. Thus, pharma brand building by enhancing end-to-end ‘customer experience’, now assumes a critical strategic dimension.

By: Tapan J. Ray

Disclaimer: The views/opinions expressed in this article are entirely my own, written in my individual and personal capacity. I do not represent any other person or organization for this opinion.

Leveraging Artificial Intelligence For Greater Patient-Centricity

Posted on December 11, 2017 by Tapan Ray

‘Artificial Intelligence (AI)’ – the science of simulation of intelligent behavior in computers, has the potential to leave a transformational impact on virtually everything that we see and feel around us. As many will know, the modern definition of AI is “the study and design of intelligent agents where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximizes its chances of success.”

Let me begin with a couple of exciting examples on the application of AI for general use. One such is Siri the voice-activated computer in the iPhone that one can interact with as a personal assistant, every day. The other is the self-driving features with the predictive capabilities of Tesla cars; or even the well-hyped Google driver-less car. Alongside, Google is also in pursuit of creating AI with ‘imagination’ through its ‘DeepMind’. It develops algorithms that simulate the human ability to construct plans.

Pharma’s emergence in the AI space:

The unfathomable potential of AI is being slowly recognized in the healthcare arena, as well, including pharma industry. It’s gradual emergence in the space of ‘intelligent learning’, often called ‘machine learning’, ushers in a new paradigm of learning from a vast pool of highly credible real-time data. Innovative applications of this process can fetch a game changing business performance. Its scope spans right across the pharma value chain – from Drug Discovery, including Precision Medicine; Clinical Trials; Pharmacovigilance; Supply Chain Management, and right up-to Sales and Marketing.

Pharma’s emergence in the AI space is quite evident from Reuters report of July 3, 2017. It wrote that GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has inked a new USD 43 million deal with Exscientia to help streamline the company’s drug discovery process by leveraging AI. With this deal in place, Exscientia will allow GSK to search for drug candidates for up to 10 disease-related targets. GSK will provide research funding and make this payment, if pre-clinical milestones are met.

Again, on July 27, 2017, Insilico Medicine – a Baltimore-based leader in AI, focusing on drug discovery and biomarker development, announced a similar agreement with the biotechnology player Juvenescence AI Limited. According to this agreement, Juvenescence AI will develop the first compounds generated by Insilico’s AI techniques, such as Generative Adversarial Networks in order to generate novel compounds with desired pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties.

Several other pharmaceutical giants, including Merck & Co, Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi are also exploring the potential of AI for streamlining the drug discovery process. It would help them to significantly improving upon the hit-and-miss business of finding new medicines, as Reuters highlighted. Eventually, these applications of AI may be placed right at the front-line of pharma business – in search of new drugs.

I have already discussed in this blog – the ‘Relevance of AI in creative pharma marketing’ on October 31, 2016. In this article, I shall mainly focus on leveraging AI in health care for greater patient-centricity, which is emerging as one of the prime requirements for excellence in the pharma business.

Imbibing patient-centricity is no longer an option:

In an article published in this blog on the above subject, I wrote that: ‘providing adequate knowledge, skills and related services to people effectively, making them understand various disease management and alternative treatment measures, thereby facilitating them to be an integral part of their health care related interventions, for better health outcomes, are no longer options for pharma companies.’

The craft of being ‘patient-centric’, therefore, assumes the importance of a cutting-edge of pharma business for sustainable performance.

What exactly is ‘patient-centricity’?

BMJ Innovations – a peer reviewed online journal, in an article titled, ‘Defining patient centricity with patients for patients and caregivers: a collaborative endeavor’, published on March 24, 2017, defines ‘patient-centricity’ as: “Putting the patient first in an open and sustained engagement of patient to respectfully and compassionately achieve the best experience and outcome for that person and their family.”

Thus, to deliver the best experience, and treatment outcomes to patients, their participation and engagement, especially with the doctors, hospitals and the drug companies assume significant importance.

The June 2017 ‘Discussion Paper’ of McKinsey Global Institute, titled ‘Artificial Intelligence the Next Digital Frontier’ also captured this emerging scenario, succinctly. Recognizing that health care is a promising market for AI, the paper highlighted the enormous potential in its ability. The power of which can draw inferences by recognizing patterns in large volumes of patient histories, medical images, epidemiological statistics, and other data.

Thus, AI has the potential to help doctors improve their diagnoses, forecast the spread of diseases, and customize treatments. Combined with health care digitization, AI can also allow providers to monitor or diagnose patients remotely, as well as transform the way we treat the chronic diseases that account for a large share of health care budgets, the paper underscored. This poses the obvious question: what exactly AI can possibly do in the space of health care?

What can AI do for health care?

In a nutshell, the application of AI or ‘machine learning’ system in health care generally uses algorithms and software to approximate human cognition in the analysis of relevant, yet complex scientific and medical data. In-depth study and interpretation of these in a holistic way would be of immense use in many areas. For example, to understand the relationships between prevention or treatment processes and outcomes, or various debilitating conditions affecting people with the advancement of age, to name just a few.

This necessitates the generation of a huge pool of relevant and credible data from multiple sources, storing and analyzing them meaningfully, and then garnering the capabilities of ‘machine learning’ with the application of AI. Such a process helps in zeroing-in to a series of complex, interdependent strategic actions to go for the gold, in terms of business results. Using conventional methods, as exist today, other than imbibing AI or ‘machine learning’, may indeed be a Herculean task, as it were, to achieve the same.

Invaluable business insights thus acquired need to be shared, across the various different functions of a company, for greater patient-centricity within the organization.

Moving from ‘patient-engagement’ to ‘patient-centricity’:

While making a significant move from just ‘patient engagement’ to being ‘patient centric’, one-size-fits-all strategy is unlikely to yield the desired results. The process of gathering adequate knowledge and understanding of any individual’s disease management skills, which mostly depend on complex multi-factorial, interrelated and combinatorial algorithms, will be a challenging task, otherwise.

Thereafter, comes the need to deliver such knowledge-based value offerings to target patients for better health outcomes, which won’t be easy, either, in the prevailing environment.

Considering these, AI seems to have an immense potential in this area. Some global pharma players are also realizing it. For example, GSK is reportedly engaged with IBM’s Watson in the development of AI-enabled interactive digital Apps for its cold and flu medication to provide relevant information to patients.

Conclusion:

Patient-centricity would soon be the name of the game for pharma business excellence. However, to be truly patient-centric, especially in the sales and marketing operations, pharma players would require to source, process and analyze a huge volume of relevant data in several important areas. These include, target patients, target doctors, environmental dynamics, demographic variations, regulatory requirements, current practices, competitive activities, to name a few.

In this strategic business process, AI or ‘machine learning’ will help accurately mapping the ongoing dynamics and trends in virtually all critical areas. It will help ferret out the nuances of turning around the competitive tide, if any, and that too with immaculate precision. In that sense, AI is likely to emerge as a game changer in imbibing patient-centricity, in the real sense. Consequently, it carries a promise of delivering significantly better outcomes, yielding higher financial returns, alongside.

Although, some concerns on AI are being expressed by several eminent experts, it is generally believed that on the balance of probability, it’s crucial potential benefits far outweigh the anticipated risks. In my view, this holds good even for the pharma industry, especially while leveraging AI for greater patient-centricity, better disease prevention, and more desirable treatment outcomes – improving the quality of life of many, significantly.

By: Tapan J. Ray

Disclaimer: The views/opinions expressed in this article are entirely my own, written in my individual and personal capacity. I do not represent any other person or organization for this opinion.

Relevance Of Outliers In Pharma Sales Forecasting

Posted on August 7, 2017 by Tapan Ray

Just like any other predictions or forecasting – on a broader sense, pharma sales forecasts are also a tough and tedious task. Availability of many sophisticated state of the art digital software tools and techniques, notwithstanding.

In an article, published in the July-August 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR), Paul Saffo – a forecaster based in Silicon Valley, California – expressed this point succinctly with a nice example. He said: “Prediction is possible only in a world in which events are preordained and no amount of action in the present can influence future outcomes. That world is the stuff of myth and superstition. The one we inhabit is quite different—little is certain, nothing is preordained, and what we do in the present affects how events unfold, often in significant, unexpected ways.”

At this point, I would respectfully prefer to slightly alter the last sentence of the quote as, “….and what we and (others) do in the present affects how events unfold, often in significant, unexpected ways.” This is important to me, as we may have control over what ‘we do’, but may not have much control over what ‘others do’ in the present, which may also greatly affect how events unfold, often in significant, unexpected ways.

However, the author distinctly differentiates predictions from forecasts by clarifying that prediction is concerned with future certainty, whereas forecasting looks at how hidden currents in the present, signal possible changes in direction for companies. Thus, unlike a prediction, a forecast must have a logic to it and the forecasters must be able to articulate and defend that logic.

My own hands-on experience in the domestic, as well as the pharma industry of the western world tells me that the actual sales and profit may seldom be a replica of the respective forecasts for the same. However. a reasonably good forecast is the one that is much closer to reality.

That said, it is important to note in the same context, what the above HBR paper has said, in this regard. The author underscores whether a specific forecast actually turns out to be accurate is only part of the picture. Citing a nice simile it says, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Thus, the forecaster’s one of the key tasks is to map uncertainty where our actions in the present influence the future. Uncertainty is an opportunity, he articulates.

In this article, I shall try to explore the possible reasons why, despite the availability of so many sophisticated digital software tools and techniques, the reality in most cases is much different. In a significant number of occasions, the actual sales is much less than the sales forecasts.

The criticality of forecast accuracy:

As we know, sales forecasts today are generally data pooling or consensus forecasts for better buying-in by the implementer, as there exists a critical need, just not to deliver closer to the forecasts, but to exceed the same, especially for the new products.

One will get the flavor of criticality of sales forecast accuracy from the McKinsey research study titled, “The Secret of Successful Drug Launches”, published in March 2014. It found that two-thirds of the sample group of drug-launches failed meeting pre-launch sales forecasts in their very first year on the market. The sample for this study comprised 210 new drugs launched between 2003 and 2009, for which McKinsey gathered necessary consensus-forecasts data for launch from EvaluatePharma. Three important findings of this EvaluatePharma – McKinsey analysis may be summed up, as follows:

1. Actual sales during the first year of launch as % of sales forecast one year before launch:

% of launches below forecasts: 66
% of launches on or near forecasts: 8
% of launches exceeded the forecast: 26

2. Of launches that exceeded the forecasts in the year 1:

65% continued to do so in the year 2
53% of those exceeded forecasts in the year 3

3. Of launches that lagged forecasts in the year 1:

78%continued to do so in the year 2
70% of those lagged forecasts in the year 3

In an eloquent way, this study highlights the benefits of sales forecast accuracy for a sustainable performance excellence, especially with new products.

Wide room for improvement in forecasts:

Although, my focus in this article will be on sales revenue forecasts, there is a wide room for improvement in other related forecasts, as well.

Another interesting article titled, “Outsmart Your Own Biases”, appeared in the May 2015 issue of the Harvard Business Review revealed, when researchers asked hundreds of chief financial officers from a variety of industries to forecast yearly returns for the S&P 500 over a nine-year horizon, their 80% ranges were right only one-third of the time. The authors considered it as a terribly low rate of accuracy for a group of executives with presumably vast knowledge of the economy of the United States.

The study further indicated that projections are even further off the mark when people assess their own plans, partly because their desire to succeed skews their interpretation of the data.

Such a scenario prompts the need of yet greater application of a mix of creative and analytical minds to ferret out the reasons behind general inaccuracy in forecasting, which incidentally does not mean setting out an easy target, and then exceeding it. Right sales forecasting with high accuracy, is expected to make use of every potential future opportunity in the best possible way to achieve continuous excellence in performance.

Analyzing outliers in consensus forecasting:

A recent paper deliberated on this area backed by some relevant case studies to capture the relevance of outliers in consensus-forecasting for the pharma companies.

The 2017 study of EvaluatePharma, titled “The Value of Outliers in Consensus Forecasting” flagged some important points. It also asked, are we questioning the level of agreement or disagreement, while leveraging each estimate for consensus forecasts?

However, in this article, I shall highlight only on the relevance of outliers in pharma sales forecasting, and keep aside the question on the level of agreement or disagreement while leveraging each estimate for consensus forecasts, for another discussion.

As many of us have experienced, there will always be outliers in most of the consensus forecasting process, which are usually removed while arriving at the final numbers. Nonetheless, this article brings on to the table the importance of outliers who, on the contrary, can provide an insightful view, especially in those areas with more upside potential and downside risk.

Just to recapitulate, an outlier is a data point that lies at an abnormal distance from other data points, which in this case is data related to consensus-forecast. This divergence can be either very high or very low. Which is why, outlier removal is a common practice, as it is considered as bad data by many. Nonetheless, before singling out and elimination of outliers, it will be a good idea to analyze and understand the exact reasons behind the same.

The above paper also indicates that combining consensus forecasts with the analysis of outliers will enable the pharma companies:

To better balancing risk and upside
Improving accuracy of new product selection

Conclusion:

Just as in any business, for pharmaceuticals too, sales forecasting holds a crucial importance, having a far-reaching impact. This is primarily because, many critical decisions are taken based on sales forecasts, such as internal revenue and capital budgeting, financial planning, deployment of sales, marketing and other operational resources, including supply chain, to name a few. All these, individually and collectively, necessitate that sales forecasts, especially for new products, should be of high accuracy.

One of the recent trends in this area, is pooling or consensus forecasts, though, it is not free from some criticism. The recent EvaluatePharma study, as quoted above, clearly demonstrates that this approach helps increase forecast accuracy, especially in situations with a high degree of uncertainty.

The upper and lower bounds of consensus known as outliers, may often identify potential upside or downside events that could significantly affect the outlook of a pharmaceutical company.

With this perspective, it now clearly emerges that in-depth analysis of outliers is of high relevance to improve accuracy of pharma sales forecasts, in a significant way.

By: Tapan J. Ray

Disclaimer: The views/opinions expressed in this article are entirely my own, written in my individual and personal capacity. I do not represent any other person or organization for this opinion.

Rebalancing Skill Sets In Pharma Sales And Marketing

Posted on May 29, 2017 by Tapan Ray

A disturbing trend against much needed more job creation across the world, has been well captured in a May 2016 MIT article. It concluded through several complex mathematical models that: “As more tasks performed by labor are being automated, concerns that these new technologies will make labor redundant have intensified.”

However, despite well-hyped concerns in this area, ongoing rapid advancement of technology and other related innovation haven’t yet caused any alarming level of unemployment anywhere in the world, nor it possibly will. Several instances of gradual reduction in the number of routine and traditional jobs due to such automation, are generally related to a lesser level of hard skill sets. As we shall see below, many industries require doing so in the modern times, for long term sustainability of business.

In tandem, promising high tech jobs requiring state or the art hard skill sets are getting created too, though are fewer in number. Nevertheless, the number of brilliant startups has increased by manifolds, during the same period. This change is inevitable, mostly in any science and technology driven industry, e.g., banking sector, where most of human operated bank tellers have made way to ATM machines.

A recent vindication:

Vindicating this point, as it were, on May 18, 2017, Reuters reported that Swiss pharma major Novartis, as a part of its “ongoing global transformation” initiative launched last year to create a unified operating model, will cut around 500 traditional and routine jobs in Switzerland, and add 350 in high-tech areas. Immediately thereafter, for similar reasons, the company announced the elimination of another 250 jobs in the United States.

Jobs are important to all for a living. Any job loss, irrespective of the nature of business compulsion, is indeed unfortunate. That said, whether we like it or not, such evolving trends are the stark realities, and expected to continue or even accelerate in the years ahead for higher growth in productivity, especially involving the routine and traditional tasks.

Pharma industry, though a science-based one, loss of routine and traditional jobs due to technological advancement is fortunately still much less as compared to other similar industries. This is primarily due to the continuation of the traditional business models in the pharma sector, requiring a huge number of human intervention, which call for a different balance of soft and hard skill sets.

However, crystal gazing the future, it appears quite likely that there will be a strong need to rebalancing the required soft and hard skills in the drug industry. The contour of my discussion in this article will be on pharma sales and marketing.

Skill – the ability to do something well:

The Oxford dictionary defines ‘skill’ as ‘the ability to do something well’. Similarly, the term ‘ability’ has been defined by it as ‘possession of the means’. Thus, ‘skill’ means ‘possession of the means to do something well’. It is an absolute must in all professions, including pharma sales and marketing.

Skills broadly fall into two categories – hard and soft skills. Hard skills involve specific knowledge and teachable abilities that can be defined and measured and are usually quantifiable.

Hard skills are individual proficiency in various scientific, technical, mathematical and even some artistic areas of creation, besides other related ones. In pharma sales and marketing arena of the near future, these include, among others, robust scientific knowledge-base to understand various aspects of drug molecules, content creation with astute market understanding, data generation and analysis through state of art analytics and research, software programing, digital savviness and social media expertise. Many of these skills are related to the Intelligent Quotient of an individual.

Soft skills, on the other hand, are less tangible and quantifiable, such as etiquette or personality development; work ethics, getting along with people, ability to listen patiently, overcoming objections, persuading others and a deep sense of accountability. Many of these skills are usually related to emotional intelligence of an individual.

Which one is more important?

Both hard or soft skills are useful, valuable and important. However, the mix of these two skills for high performance of any individual professional will generally depend on success requirements of a job in a specific macro business environment.

That said, it is important to note that most of the hard skills are taught and learnt mostly before a person’s entry into science, technology or various other craft or design based jobs. The related hard skills are essential for getting selected for specialized jobs. Whereas, softer skills are usually learned on the job, and through experience by all those who want to grow in the profession.

In this context, it may not be a bad idea for all pharma sales and marketing professionals to take a hard look at our own current soft and hard skill sets again, against rapidly changing demands of the business environment. Regardless of where we are now, it will be worth writing down on a piece of paper the type of each of these two skills, in order of their strengths, that we individually possess, which are good enough for achieving sustainable excellence in business performance and personal career progression. It may provide a broad sketch of where we stand today in the VUCA world.

The years ahead for pharma won’t be quite the same:

A strong wind of change has already started signaling that the years ahead for the pharma industry, won’t be quite the same as the bygone years nor like what it is today. Some, industry professionals have picked up this cue, while many are still in pursuit of replicating the traditional past with some digital tweaking here and there, whatever may be the reasons.

The current mix of skill sets of the sales and marketing professionals, quite perceptibly, tilts more towards sharpening the softer skills of the employees, as the traditional pharma business models prompt so.

Future need – rebalancing the skill sets:

To be a successful in the days ahead, pharma companies would need to dive deep into the cyberspace – just to be on the same wavelength with its important stakeholders, including, the Government.

Looking around, one witnesses many patients going digital at a faster pace than ever before. They enjoy the cyberspace while embracing the new ways of living life, such as – communicating digitally, chatting in WhatsApp sharing patient’s experience, interacting with online patient communities, and preferring data mining to know more about anything of interest. These activities also get them a sense of the differential advantages of various health care products, services and their cost, before or while consulting doctors and deciding what they can afford.

Similarly, many medical professionals are also not depending solely on the company representatives now to get relevant details on any medicinal product, device or services. Besides frequent interaction with their peer groups, they get such detail information from various websites run by independent, and credible expert groups.

Thus, one of the common arena for pharma stakeholder engagement and interaction would soon be the enigmatic Cyberspace. As the changing days come nearer, there is likely to be greater emphasis on the acquisition of talent having specialized hard skills in this area of sales and marketing.

This emerging scenario prompts rebalancing the mix of soft and hard skill sets with much greater care, and hire young sales and marketing professionals, accordingly to give shape to it. This process should commence now, as the present makes way for the future. This is so important because, the current trend of tweaking with many digital tools and devices mostly as interfaces, or for complementing in-person product detailing or for better field management, or even to draw up marketing and sales plans, may not yield the desired business results any longer, even for survival, as we move on.

Becoming digital natives?

According to the 2015 A.T. Kearney Report titled, “Time for Pharma to Dive into Digital”, pharma sales and marketing professionals must also become digital natives, providing content that is both up-to- date and appropriate for multiple digital channels. Moreover, they will have to be familiar with advanced analytics to monitor and measure actual consumption pattern, besides capturing in real time a huge sample of relevant data for deeper customer insights.

The new normal:

One of the biggest challenges would be in the approach to content development and management. Creating an interactive detailing toolbox for truly responsive customer engagement, requires a good deal of thought and quite complex coding. This would necessitate centralization of marketing content production, which is traditionally decentralized in many sales and marketing organizations. Similarly, the major focus of the sales force will shift from maximizing physician-call rates, to becoming a team of digital communication specialists, and coordinators who would ensure that the right channels are used at the right time.

As the November 2016 Accenture Report titled, ‘The Rebirth of The Pharmaceutical Sales Force’ underscores, the most successful pharmaceutical sales teams in the future will be those willing to define and servicing customers in new ways… and will use digital advances to change the conversation, and position themselves as committed to helping physicians improve health outcomes.

This expected change, I reckon, will put in place a new normal for pharma sales and marketing success in the years ahead.

In conclusion:

Young aspirants wanting to make a career in the pharma industry, may wish to take note of this evolving trend of inevitable changes. They may wish to get well-considered views on the same of a couple of experts’ having no conflict of interest, for a careful and independent personal assessment. These budding strivers should realize that the final actionable decision on developing requisite hard and soft skill sets for a successful take off in their respective working lives, should preferably be taken only by themselves, and none else.

An August 2015 article of McKinsey & Company titled, “The road to digital success in pharma” articulates that the pharma companies, though can play a central role in the digital revolution of healthcare, are running hard to keep pace with changes brought about by digital technology. But soon there may not be any other option left for achieving business excellence.

While the nation is taking strides to transform itself into ‘Digital India’, the pharma companies operating in the country can’t possibly afford to remain far behind. Willy-nilly, they will soon need to realign their business processes accordingly, as there may not be any further scope for individual pharma players to operate within the same old cocoon of tradition bound activities, and still survive.

To meet the new and tougher demands for excellence in pharma sales and marketing, the urgent need of the changing time lies squarely outside the box. To usher in a requisite transformation in the current business model, it calls for a series of well-calibrated, much researched, and bold steps – skillfully rebalancing the crucial soft and hard skill sets, achievable within a realistic and self-determined timeframe.

By: Tapan J. Ray

Digital Divide And Indian Pharma Industry

Posted on March 13, 2017 by Tapan Ray

Over the last one and half decades of this new millennium, despite making significant headway in digital literacy, fueled by consistent progress in the penetration of broadband Internet and availability of more affordable smartphones, a large section of Indian population is still not digitally literate, not even in its importance and awareness, creating a sharp digital divide in the country.

This populace with inadequate or no digital literacy spans across a large section of our society, such as those who are generally poor, many living in rural areas, or lacking in adequate digital awareness, or exhibiting strong preferences in adhering to traditional approaches of doing things, or differently abled individuals, and many elderly persons.

In the health care arena, this citizenry constitutes one of the most vulnerable segments of the society often posing serious health risks, and mostly unable to make use of various digital tools while availing several social sector benefits of the government, as and when required.

However, more concerning is the fact that this gap is not just quite significant, there does not seem to be any near-term possibility of bridging it, either, as all accompanying responsibilities now lying on the government alone. Effective measures to bridging this gap do not depend on just technology, as the issue is multidimensional in nature, necessitating participation of all the stakeholders, pharma included – for a quantum leap in the business growth too.

This should not go unnoticed and unappreciated. Addressing this scenario effectively would call for a different strategic approach – not the usual run of the mill type ad hoc measures, both by the government, and in healthcare, also by the pharma marketers. In this article, I shall dwell in this area.

What it means?

In the modern era, the term ‘digital divide’ broadly refers to the gap between demographics and regions that have access to modern Information and Communications Technology (ICT), and those who don’t or have restricted access to it. Post late 1990s, this terminology is primarily used to describe the split between those with and without Internet access, particularly broadband.

In the global perspective, according to ‘Tech Target’ – the global network of technology-specific websites, the ‘digital divide’ typically exists between those in cities and those in rural areas; between the educated and the uneducated; between socioeconomic groups; and between the more and less industrially developed nations. Even among populations with some access to technology, the digital divide can be evident in the form of lower-performance computers, lower speed wireless connections, lower-priced connections, such as dial-up, and limited access to subscription-based content. The report also points out, while adoption of smartphones is growing, even among relatively lower-income groups, the cost of various data plans and the difficulty of performing tasks and transactions on smartphones continue to inhibit the closing of the gap.

To a large extent, this is applicable to India, as well.

It’s not just a technological issue:

Bridging the ‘digital divide’ in health care is not just a technological issue. It’s rather a complex one with many dimensions. It also depends on the health literacy of individuals, or a society, or the location where they live in. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health literacy as: ‘The cognitive and social skills which determine the motivation and ability of individuals to gain access to, understand, and use information in ways which promote and maintain good health.’

This is not just the ability of a person to understand the health messages, it also involves the individual’s ability to look for the required information, and taking further action accordingly. As a December 2016 study of Michigan State University Extension concludes, those who are more likely to experience low health literacy are, older adults, racial and ethnic minorities, people with less than a high school diploma, people with low income levels, facing language issue for communication and those with compromised health status, such as chronic health conditions. Culture and access to resources also affect people’s health literacy. Another October 2016 study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, establishes the connection between low health literacy and the skepticism on health technologies.

Effectively bridging ‘digital divide’ alone, may not resolve the issue of health literacy. Neither, just addressing the health literacy can bridge the gap of ‘digital divide’, effectively. Thus, there isn’t any ‘one size fits all’ type of solution, to address both these issues, for a synergistic outcome in improving affordable access to quality health care for all.

Bridging the ‘Digital Divide’:

That said, bridging the digital divide, especially in the healthcare segment, has immense relevance in the modern days. As PwC’s Global Digital IQ Survey report of May 2016 observes, health care is arguably one of the world’s most information-intensive sectors, and the opportunities to improve quality, encourage affordability and enhance the consumer experience are vast. Wider application of digital technology can help this sector tackle many of these pressing challenges, effectively. However, the sector is currently behind the curve, the report highlights.

According to another 2016 report by PwC on Indian healthcare, the digital connectivity of the country is expected to grow from 15 percent access in 2014 to 80 percent access in 2034, with rural Internet users increasing by 58 percent annually, which presents a great potential for telemedicine and remote diagnosis in the country. This is indeed encouraging.

Can pharma industry hasten the process?

As I said before, bridging the ‘digital divide’ and improving health literacy, may be construed by many as a primary responsibility of the Indian government, through various robust initiatives backed by allocated budgetary provisions. Nonetheless, in the realm of healthcare, I reckon, pharmaceutical and other related industries can significantly help hastening the process, not just as a social responsibility, but for significant growth in businesses, simultaneously creating a win-win situation for all.

Just to cite an example out of many, various pharma companies can set up ‘digital health information kiosks’ especially in those areas where awareness and participation of the local population related to healthcare issues are poor or suboptimal. These ‘digital health information kiosks’, providing various diseases or treatment related information that a pharma company may be interested in, can be set up at convenient locations, of course, with the approval of local authorities. Such information, should encourage people to seek more and more health information digitally, explaining the whole process, and at the same time persuading them to take available disease prevention measures. and advising them to visit doctors, to initiate early treatment, wherever necessary.

I repeat, this is just an illustration, there could several other ways of achieving the same result.

Increasing relevance:

For healthcare, the above trend would mean empowering most of the population to have unfettered access to knowledge in various health related fields, especially in prevention, management and available treatment options, for various diseases, encompassing both acute and chronic conditions. Thus, this process has the potential to create a significant snowballing effect, not just on

deeper penetration of telemedicine, but also on remote diagnosis in India. In tandem, leveraging this trend early enough and in innovative ways, is likely to enable the pharma players to provide a much-needed boost to their respective business ventures.

Advantage pharma:

Rapid transformation in the complex market dynamics, coupled with increasing challenges in making productive face to face interaction with important doctors for prescription generation and consequent fast decline in the economic outcome of traditional product detailing, is likely to hasten this metamorphosis. On the other hand, this change also brings a blessing in disguise for the pharma players, by opening many new doors of opportunity based on digital platforms, and thereby paving the way for reaping a rich harvest, for all those who will choose to be early adopters.

In the above context, intimate business involvement with the digital world in many areas, such as ‘digital sales and marketing’ assumes a high priority for Indian pharma players, just as it’s being imbibed by some global players, including many in other industries. The speed of its becoming the centerpiece in pharma sales and marketing strategy formulation process ought to be directly linked to the increasing speed of broadband Internet penetration, smart phone and other digital platform usages by people of all ages with enquiring mindsets. Thus, the destiny’s call is clearly ‘Advantage Pharma’.

Key benefits:

According to a paper of April 16, 2014, published by Salford Business School, Manchester, UK, the major benefits of ‘Digital Marketing’ are as follows:

It helps businesses to develop a wider customer base as it does not rely on physical presence or interaction.
It encourages customers to interact directly with businesses.
It is not limited by conventional opening times – customers can interact at a time and place convenient for them

Calibrated increase in usage of digital platforms:

It is worth noting, traditional methods of sales and marketing, barring a few exceptions, are currently prevailing in the Indian pharma industry. In this scenario, each pharma player, must carefully evaluate its current and future product-mix, along with customer types and base, as they would decide, first to initiate, and then to scale up their sales and marketing operations in the digital space in a well-calibrated manner.

In this new ball game, the fresh entrants would need to consider only the credible research-based data, on the rapidly changing aspirational mindset of young Indians, including doctors and patients, with smart phones being a key enabler, on the one hand. While on the other, these should provide optimal digital penetration in different geographical regions or areas, together with the usage of platforms and related demographic configurations.

For example, if a region shows high smartphone usage for community or group chat within the general population, a pharma company may explore the possibility of creatively designing a smart phone based ‘digital patient chat group’ as a part of its patient engagement initiative. In this ‘digital patient chat group’, the members suffering from chronic or even acute ailments can discuss with each other the issues for which one is seeking a solution, where even the pharma companies can intervene, wherever they can add value and is legally permissible.

The effectiveness in working out a game changing crafty blend of both brand and patient-centric communication package with digital tools would separate the men from the boys. It would demand top quality cerebral inputs from the pharma marketers – a requirement that is not so easily available in the current space of pharmaceutical marketing, dominated by a wide variety of freebies.

In conclusion:

Humongous digital divide in India is a fall out, predominantly of disparate availability and access to ICT, not just between those living in rural and urban areas, but spans across several other areas such as, between educated and uneducated people, demographic and economic classes, to name a few. Nonetheless, especially, since the last one and a half decades, the country has made significant headway in gradually reducing this gap, though a lot more ground is yet to be covered in this direction.

Today in India, we witness even various political parties, which used to be very traditional in their approaches have started using a wide variety of digital marketing tools successfully by deploying astute domain experts, to achieve their goals.

For the healthcare sector, including the pharma industry, this progress throws open many doors of opportunities, both for the public, as well as for the industry. Notwithstanding this digital divide and general prevalence of an overarching traditional behavior and response patterns, displaying visible apathy or inability to embrace the promises of the emerging cyber era, several doctors and patients have already started reaping the benefits offered by various digital platforms, tools and media. The regulators governing this sector, are also not lagging far behind, with their presence visible in the digital space too, including social media.

This challenge of change should be effectively leveraged by all stakeholders in healthcare, reaping a rich harvest. Like many other constituents in this intricate, yet interesting ball game, pharma industry too needs to assume an active, pragmatic and proactive role in several innovative ways.

Flooring the gas pedal to move into the digital space of healthcare, would provide significant competitive and commercial advantages to the early movers, more than ever before. When political narratives can be made more productive by embracing the digital platforms, why not the business narratives of the pharma industry in India?

By: Tapan J. Ray

Multi-channel Engagement: A New Normal In Pharma Marketing

Posted on December 26, 2016 by Tapan Ray

The 2015 Report of AffinityMonitor reconfirms that access to important doctors for pharma Medical Representatives (MRs) continues to decline. Now, fewer than half of all doctors are truly accessible to the MRs, down from nearly 80 percent in 2008. In other words, though MRs continue to be the best way to engage the average physician, this “best way” is steadily getting worse.

However, for physician engagement, all digital channels put together to rank the second highest. These include both digital “push”, such as, email or alerts sent to a physician’s smart phone – followed by telemarketing, direct mail; and digital “pull”, such as content that doctors can access on their own from the Internet, and peer interactions, like webinars.

With the new digital channels emerging, pharma companies will have a wider range of promotional and engagement channels to reach out to not just the doctors, but also other important stakeholders. Additionally, various non-personal marketing channels could also help pharma companies overcome the declining trend of restricted access to physicians for MR.

No single channel works for all physicians:

Although, no single channel works for all physicians, as each doctor has a unique preference for how he or she wants to receive information across various channels, most doctors will engage with pharma players in some way. The findings of this report are based on data compiled from more than 100 pharma brands, including engagements with 632,000 physicians across a wide range of specialty areas, and more than 123 million individual physician interactions.

The report suggests that by understanding those channels on a physician level, and targeting their marketing and promotion accordingly, pharma companies can hone the effectiveness of each physician engagement, and thereby improve sales and marketing productivity considerably, for excellence in business.

Similar trend in India with varying degree of difficulty:

Similar trend, though with varying degree of difficulty, can be noticed in India, as well. Over the past several years, many top pharma companies have been already experiencing the steadily declining quality of access of pharma MRs to many important doctors.

This is primarily due to the number of patients coming to these busy practitioners is fast increasing, and as the doctors are trying to see all these patients within the same limited time that was available to them, as in the earlier days. In tandem, their other obligations of various kinds, personal or otherwise, are also overcrowding the same highly squeezed time space.

Thus, an increasing number of MRs, which has more than doubled in the past decade, is now fiercely competing to get a share of lesser and lesser available time of the busy medical practitioners. Added to this, a gross mismatch between the inflow of doctors with similar prescription potential and ever increasing inflow of patients, is making the situation worse.

Reevaluating traditional marketing and sales communication models:

In this complex scenario, the key challenge before the pharma players is how to make sales communication with the busy medical practitioners more productive?

Consequently, many pharma companies, across the globe, have started reevaluating their traditional sales communication models, which are becoming increasingly expensive with diminishing returns from the MR calls.

As I discussed in some other article, a few drug companies have commenced using various interesting multi-channel digital platforms, though mostly fall under the traditional pharma sales communication process.

I shall now briefly glance over the trend of responses of the Indian pharma companies over a couple decades, to meet these challenges of change.

MR based Experimentations:

With a strong intent to squarely overcome this challenge, many Indian pharma players initially tried to experiment with several different MR based approaches, in various permutations and combinations. It was initially directed to make the prescription generation process more productive, by equipping the MR with a wide range of soft skills.

Some pharma players also tried to push up the overall sales productivity through additional rural market coverage to Tier IV cities and below. Quite a few of them succeeded in their endeavor to create profitable business models around the needs of hinterland and rural geographies.

These pharma players, though quickly realized that extra-urban geographies require different tactical approaches, broadly remained stuck to the traditional marketing and sales communication models. These approaches include, differentiated product portfolio, distribution-mix, pricing/packaging and promotional tools, considering most the doctors are not as busy as their counterparts in the metro cities and large towns.

Strategic marketing based experimentations:

Several changes were also made in the strategic marketing areas of pharma business, though most of these, if not all, were imbibed from the global marketing practices of that time. These were well captured in an IMS report of 2012. Some of these strategic marketing shifts were as follows:

Strategic Business Unit Structure (SBU): To bring more accountability, manage evolving business needs and use the equity of organization for reaching to the middle of the accessible pyramid.

Therapy Focus Promotion: Generally seen where a portfolio is specialized, therapy focused, and scripts are driven through chosen few doctors; generally, in chronic segment.

Channel Management: Mostly adopted in OTC /OTX business; mature products with wider portfolio width.

Hospital Task Force: Exclusively to manage the hospital business.

Specialty Driven Sales Model: Applicable in scenarios where portfolio is built around 2 or 3 specialties.

Special Task Force: Generally adopted for niche products in urban areas, such as fertility clinics or for new launches where the focus is on select top rung physicians only.

Outsourced Sales Force: Generally used for expansion in extra-urban geographies or with companies for whom medico marketing is secondary (such as OTC or Consumer Healthcare companies).

Pharma MNCs did more:

In addition, to increase sales revenue further, many pharma MNCs engaged themselves in co-promotion of their patented products with large local or global pharma companies operating in India, besides out-licensing. A few of them pushed further ahead by adopting newer innovative promotional models like, Patient Activation Teams, Therapy Specialists, or creating patient awareness through mass media.

Realizing quickly that patients are increasingly becoming important stakeholders in the business, some of the pharma MNCs started engaging them by extending disease management services, along with a clever mix of well-differentiated tangible and intangible product related value offerings, such as, Counseling, Starter kits, Diagnostic tests, Medical insurance, Emergency help, Physiotherapy sessions, and Call centers for chronic disease management, to name a few. Concerned doctors used to be reported about the status of the patients, who were not required to pay anything extra for availing these services from the MNC pharma companies.

Nevertheless, despite all these, declining productivity of the traditional pharma sales communication models continued, predominantly from the extremely busy and very high value medical practitioners/experts/specialists, as mentioned above.

The critical point that remained unaddressed:

At that time, pharma sales communication kept focusing on customer/market types and characteristics. Most companies missed the emerging order of unique customer preferences towards the medium of sales communication, and differentiated message requirements for each doctor. Not many pharma players could probably realize that MR’s quality of access to doctors for productive sales communication would emerge as one of the most critical issues, and become increasingly complex.

Leveraging technology for an effective response:

Amid all these experimentations with pharma sales and marketing models, a few companies did ponder over leveraging technology to chart a novel pathway for effectively addressing this emerging challenge. They tried to ascertain:

Whether the traditional sales approach would continue to be as relevant as opposed to digitally customized sales applications?
Whether MRs would continue to remain as relevant in all areas of pharma prescription generation process, in the years ahead?

First major venture in e-marketing:

Towards this direction, in 2013, Pfizer reportedly started using digital drug representatives to market medicines, leaving the decision in doctors’ hands as to whether they would want to see them.

Prior to that, in 2011, a paper published in the WSJ titled, “Drug Makers Replace Reps With Digital Tools” stated that pharmaceutical companies in the United States are downsizing their sales force with increasing usage of iPad applications and other digital tools for interacting with doctors.

Lot many other fascinating experimentations with pharma e-marketing have now commenced in several places of the world, many with considerable initial success. However, most of these efforts seem to be swinging from one end of ‘face-to-face’ sales communication with doctors, to the other end of ‘cyber space driven’ need-based product value sharing with customers through digital tool kits.

Blending the right communication-mix is critical:

Coming back to the AffinityMonitor 2015 Research Report, today pharmaceutical and biotech companies have at their disposal more than a dozen of promotional channels to include in their strategy, spanning across, from traditional methods to digital ones.

Some physicians still want to interact with MRs, others restrict MR detailing, as they prefer to get the required information from various credible websites, directly, and from their peers. One doctor may prefer to regularly use a mobile application for product information, while another similar physician may rarely wish to surf the Web for information to achieve the same purpose. Some others may simply not engage with any sales communication no matter what the channels are. Although overall accessibility to MRs is getting more restricted, some doctors are still more accessible than others, the report finds.

Segmenting doctors by their accessibility to personal promotion, such as, MRs and by non-personal promotion like other channels, including digital, allows pharma companies to identify potential gaps in their marketing approach.

For example, of the 54 percent of doctors who are less accessible to MRs, 15 percent show good accessibility to other channels. In other words, those doctors haven’t closed the door for good, just yet. Pharma companies can still reach them, provided they use the right approach, the report suggests. Drug companies would, therefore, require gathering specific information doctor-wise, and customizing both the medium and the message for effective brand value delivery, accordingly.

Sales and marketing avalanche too isn’t working:

This study revealed that a pharma company’s top 100 doctors receive as high as 423 contacts a year, and the top 10 doctors receive more than 600 each year. Given such volume, it’s easy to imagine how doctors can start to get buried under an avalanche of sales and marketing. It’s also easy to see how even the right message, in the right channel, to the right doctor, could get lost in all the noise, and may even create a bad customer experience for many physicians, the report concludes.

Conclusion:

The decline in pharma MR’s quality of access to physicians for brand communication is now well documented. Moreover, ‘one size fits all’ type of message, delivered even by the best of MRs, is unlikely to be productive in the changing macro environment.

Therefore, the right knowledge of whether a doctor would prefer to engage through traditional marketing and sales communication methods by meeting with an MR, or would just prefer to get his/her required information through any digital medium, is critical for success in the new ball game. This in turn will help generate the desired level of prescription support for any pharma brand.

Still, a majority the doctors’ choices in India would, possibly, involve MRs, while a good number of other important doctors’ choices may probably be independent of them. Nevertheless, from this emerging trend, it’s clear now that multi-channel engagement would be a new normal in pharma sales and marketing, sooner than later.

By: Tapan J. Ray

Relevance of Artificial Intelligence In Creative Pharma Marketing

Posted on October 31, 2016 by Tapan Ray

Keeping pace with the challenge of change globally, the macro environment in the pharma business is also undergoing a metamorphosis. This includes areas, such as, strong product pricing pressure, dwindling new product pipelines, increasing operating expenses, stringent regulatory requirements, rising stakeholder expectations, and several others. All these developments collectively, are making the drug companies, both global and local, feel the tailwind of various intensities, in their efforts to achieve the corporate financial goals, more than ever before.

Despite this continuous change, most pharma players’ overall strategic business models to meet with the increasing economic expectations of the shareholders, other investors and the stock markets, have hardly undergone any path breaking, radical, or disruptive advancement, just yet. This includes even the most critical interface between an organization and the consumers – pharma sales and marketing.

That said, it is not uncommon, either, to witness some sporadic initiatives of major business process reengineering with sophisticated digital applications. Interestingly, all these measures are mostly replacements or for realignment of the same age old, and traditional strategic pharma sales and marketing models. Most of these are aimed at adding more speed and accuracy to the same business core process, along with ensuring greater management information and control to support the decision making process.

Despite this palpable environmental shift, general inertia within the pharma industry to respond to all these, with commensurate strategic game plans of surgical accuracy, is glaring. Currently, the general response to this transformation is mostly reactive and traditionally defensive in nature, rather than proactive, as the overall business environment around the industry keep becoming increasingly demanding. Most pharma players may not, but the time keeps galloping ahead, offering a mind boggling rapid advances in disruptive technological innovations – the potential game changers for its several business domains.

In the midst of such all-embracing changes, yet another disruptive technology – ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI)’, is prompting many business leaders to step on to a brand new paradigm, making use of AI to the extent required, especially, while preparing a detail strategic roadmap for the business with high precision.

A clear intent to seize this moment is now visible in many industries, though in varying degrees and scale, but surely it is happening. This is vindicated by the gradual increase in demand for AI, across a wide variety of its application areas.

Marketing to turn upside down?

On October 26, 2016 an article published in ‘The Huffington Post’ on how AI could ‘Turn the Marketing World Upside Down’ indicated its disruptive impact on the way innovative marketing strategies are conceived, created and implemented on the ground.

The article gave an interesting example of how paradigm shift follows a predictable pattern of development that starts with substitution, followed by augmentation, modification, and finally redefinition.

For example, the evolution of today’s smartphones also followed the same pattern, as follows:

First replaced simpler landline phones
Then adapted with the addition of a camera
And finally redefined “phone” altogether, not just by replacing cameras, pagers, and many functions of personal computers, but by being able to perform with great precision an incredible number of various other serious requirements, well supported by related digital apps.

With the application of AI in marketing, the conventional ball game right from conception, to charting out and execution of marketing strategies, will be catapulted to a new and fascinating orbit altogether. I have no intent to romanticizing it. This is going to happen sooner than later, as we move on.

Artificial Intelligence (AI):

In a simple and commonly understandable way ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI)’ can be explained as the theory and development of computer systems, which are able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as, machine learning, visual perception, image processing, speech recognition, decision-making, and language processing, besides many others.

In the Hollywood film industry, several sci-fi movies have already been made, based on AI as the core theme. Some of these international blockbuster films are ‘The Terminator’, ‘Transcendence’, ‘The Matrix’, ‘Ex Machina’, ‘Ex Machina’ or even ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, among many others.

Some concern, but…:

Alongside, a serious concern has also been expressed by some global icons, that the evolution of AI could reach a dangerous threshold, where mankind will no longer remain in control of the creation of its own progeny, besides other living beings. This could, as they believe, jeopardize the continuity of an entire civilization, at least, in its present form.

In 2014, globally acclaimed Professor Stephen Hawking commented in an interview with the BBC: “Humans, limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded by A.I.”

In fact, in July 2015, Professor Hawking reportedly joined Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and many others, warning that AI can potentially be more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

In the same year, even Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, reportedly expressed his concerns, saying, “I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence…”

On the other hand, despite such apprehensions, AI based technology keeps evolving at a rapid pace, with the funding in AI research taking giant leaps forward. The technology has already found its cutting edge extensive applications in several warfare. We now hear almost every day about unmanned drones not just doing defense surveillance, but destroying strategic targets with jaw-dropping precision. Or for that matter, use of robots has become rather common to diffusive explosive devices of various kinds, intensity, and planted in important places to kill people. As reported by the media, ‘autonomous and self-aware robots to diminish the need for human soldiers to risk their lives.’

Google’s driverless cars also use similar AI technology offering advanced analytics-based algorithms, machine learning and deep learning processes, which could well be another game changing example in this area.

The benefits far outweigh the risks?

Be that as it may, the benefits of AI seem to far outweigh the risks, in various areas. This includes its strategic applications in the pharma industry.

This gets vindicated by the February 2016 research report of ‘Markets and Markets’ (claimed as the world’s second largest firm in publishing premium market research reports, per year), which estimated that AI market would record a turnover of around US$ 5.05 Billion by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 53.65 percent between 2015 and 2020. This market is currently dominated by the ‘Machine Learning’ technology, as it provides the computers with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed, and are capable of updating themselves when exposed to new data.

Some of the key players operating in the artificial intelligence market are IBM Corp. (U.S.), Microsoft Corp. (U.S.), Google Inc. (U.S.), IPsoft (U.S.), FinGenius Corp. (U.K.), Rocket Fuel Inc. (U.S.), Mobileye N.V. (Israel), Kensho Technologies, Inc. (U.S.), Sentient Technologies (U.S.), and Zephyr Health (U.S.), the report revealed.

AI in pharma:

Over the last decade, AI is being increasingly used by various industries, as a key support to the strategic decision making process, in various areas of business. Understandably, in pharma its use has been rather limited, as on date. Nevertheless, there are several key domains within the pharma industry, where effective use of AI has the potential to be a critical performance enhancer. These areas include, not just in discovery research, or in clinical trials, or in sales and marketing, but also in setting the right strategic direction for the company.

However, in this article, I shall focus mainly on the application of AI in pharma marketing.

AI in pharma marketing:

Although AI is now being sparsely used, it is expected to be more widely used in pharma research and development. It also shows tremendous potential in developing creative sales and marketing strategies, with great accuracy.

So far, pharma marketing strategies are based more on the qualitative data, some traditional quantitative data, and a huge dose of marketers ‘gut feel’. It continues to happen, when the world, including India, is moving towards innovative data driven decision models. If one chooses to, now a pharma marketer also can make effective use of an abundantly available wide variety of quality data to feel the pulse of the markets, consumers and any identified issues, with great precision. Thereafter, based on these real life hard facts, the team needs to put in place for implementation, with an open and innovative mind, a creative sales and marketing game plan, to achieve the set goals.

Would that mean, a pharma marketer should necessarily be an expert in a huge volume of data analysis? I don’t guess so. ‘Machine Learning’, ‘Deep Learning’ and other analytics-based processes of AI can help them enormously to do so.

AI based analytics has now been proved to be far more reliable than any human analysis of the humongous volume of different kinds of quality data. Doing so is even beyond the capacity of any conventional computers that a marketing professional generally uses for this purpose.

The prime requirement for this purpose, therefore, is not just huge volume of data per se, but good quality of a decent volume of data, that a state of the art analytics would be able to meaningfully deliver, that is tailor made to meet the specific requirements of pharma marketers to create a cutting edge marketing strategy.

Areas of AI use in pharma – some examples:

AI will be extremely useful to arrive at the most effective strategic options available, with pros and cons, to achieve the core sales and marketing objectives of the organization, both long and short term.

It can also add immense value right at the decision making stages to determine the key ingredients of an effective strategic plan in a number of critical areas, such as:

Arriving at the optimal product-portfolio-mix with the right expense tag attached to each brand
Deep learning about market dynamics, customer behavior and their interplay
Matching unmet customer needs with enhanced and differentiated value offerings – both tangible and intangible
Effective bundling of brand offerings and associated services for each patient segment
Selecting the right mix of communication channels, including social media, to ensure maximum productivity in reaching each category of the target audience
Detailed strategic blueprint for each type of stakeholder engagement, along with related value offerings
Arriving at the best possible resource-mix with the available budget
Real-time monitoring of each strategic action steps, consistently, making quick changes on the run, if and when required

Pharma AI platforms are already available:

There are a number of AI platforms now available for the pharmaceutical companies, across the world. For example, in September 2015, by a Press Release, Eularis – a leading provider of next-generation advanced marketing analytics to the Pharma industry, announced the release of the E-VAI, the latest development in sophisticated machine learning technology delivering next-generation analytics and decision making for Pharma marketers globally.

Another recent example of AI in this area, as well, is ‘Salesforce Einstein’. It delivers advanced AI capabilities in sales, service, and marketing, and enables anyone to build AI-powered apps that get smarter with every interaction. According to Salesforce, it will enable everyone in every role and industry to use AI to be their best.

Conclusion:

The use of AI in pharma is still in its nascent stage today. However, for a sustainable business excellence in its various domains, AI is increasingly proving to be of great relevance, now and also in the future. Sales and marketing is one such domains.

With the passage of time, both the macro and micro pharma business operating environments are changing fast, primarily driven by changing expectations of stakeholders, the public at large, and disruptive algorithmic technical innovations, based on advanced science, statistics and mathematics.

The scope to effectively utilize the full potential of advanced algorithmic technical tools, is huge. It is easier now to capture a massive volume of pharma related high quality raw data of different kinds, for tailor-made innovative analysis, with the help of AI based analytics, while creating cutting-edge strategic game plans.

Nonetheless, pharma players apparently continue to chart the same strategic frontier where there are many footsteps to follow. Many of them have restricted themselves to no more than digitally re-engineering the same overall business processes that they have been already following, since long. Just a few of them are making use of the leading edge analytics involving AI, such as ‘Machine Learning’, ‘Deep Learning’, ‘Visual Perception’, ‘Image Processing, besides many others, which can be more ‘patient-centric’ and at the same help deliver a strong business performance.

Thus, quicker adaptation, and thereafter continuous scaling up applications of high quality AI based analytics in creative pharma marketing, are not just of immense relevance today, they also bring with them the commensurate potential for sustainable excellence in financial performance of the organization, fueled by critical early mover advantage.

By: Tapan J. Ray

Declining MR Access to Doctors Prompts Increased Digital Engagement

Posted on October 3, 2016 by Tapan Ray

The trigger point for a disruptive change in the pharma marketing playbook now seems to be not just on the horizon, but could soon move to a countdown stage, in India.

On Friday, September 16, 2016, at a seminar on the Uniform Code of Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices (UCPMP) organized at Bengaluru, Sudhanshu Pant, Joint Secretary (Policy), Department of Pharmaceuticals (DoP), India, reportedly said that the mandatory UCPMP is now in its last leg of clearance with the Union Government, after incorporating the inputs received from the pharma industry and other stakeholders.

He clearly articulated in his address, once a level playing field is created with mandatory UCPMP, both the pharma industry and the medical professionals will be restricted to offer and receive freebies, respectively, which is the in-thing today to generate prescriptions from the doctors.

“Our intent is that the new code should be followed in letter and spirit. It is not a draconian law, but penalties are stringent. We are enforcing fines. The violation of this code could also lead to suspension of product marketing,” the joint secretary further clarified.

Signals a forthcoming change:

Effective implementation of the mandatory UCPMP across India, could catalyze significant changes in the allegedly dubious pharmaceutical marketing process in India, revolving round ‘give and take’ of enticing ‘freebies’ to the prescribers. According to several reports, some of these practices are followed in the guise of ‘brand-reminders’, and several others fall under ‘events associated with Continuing Medical Education (CME), mostly arranged in various exotic places around the world, with associated hospitalities and equivalents. Besides, there exists a host of different kinds of ‘carrots for prescriptions’ of numerous types, forms and costs, as highlighted frequently by the national and international media.

Nevertheless, it is widely believed by many that Medical Representatives (MR) in India are having virtually no access barrier to meet the doctors, as a large number of both the receivers and the givers of the freebies have allegedly financial interest ingrained on meeting each other.

This scenario, I reckon, will change in India with the strict enforcement of mandatory UCPMP by the Government, curbing any possible misadventure by any stakeholder in the space of ethical pharma marketing practices that would impact the health interest of patients, directly.

Drawing a similar example:

One relevant example for India could be drawn from what happened in the United States (US) in this area, relatively recently. To contain wide-spread unethical pharma marketing practices in the US, President Obama administration enacted the Physician Payment Sunshine Act, effective August 1, 2013. This new law, that requires detailed disclosures from both the physicians and the pharma players on giving and accepting the freebies, limited the financial interest of the prescribers to meet with the MRs several times in a year, for face to face product detailing. Consequently, MR access to prescribers for the same started becoming increasingly more challenging.

A number of studies indicate, a large number of doctors have now started considering the delivery of a frequent barrage sales message an avoidable noise, when alternative highly user-friendly platforms are available to keep them up-to-date on various brands.

In the same way, as the new mandatory UCPMP will come into effect in India, it is quite likely that pharma companies operating in the country would start facing similar challenges with MRs visits, especially, to the important busy doctors and for similar reasons.

Digital channels are gaining strength:

With MRs access to physicians gradually declining, many pharmaceutical companies are trying to make the best use of a gamut of customized, innovative marketing approaches pivoted on various digital platforms. These initiatives are primarily to supplement effective engagement with the doctors to generate increasing prescription demand, and in a more user-friendly manner.

The latest study on trend:

There are many studies in this area, but I shall quote the latest one. According to a 2016 study of the global sales and marketing firm ZS Associates: “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.”

Analyzing the data from 681,000 health care providers who actually engage with pharmaceutical and biotech manufacturers across promotional channels, and more than 40,000 pharmaceutical sales representatives (MRs), the study reported, among others, the following:

44 percent of physicians are “accessible” (that is, they met with more than 70 percent of sales reps who try to meet with them). This is a decline from 46 percent in 2015 and nearly 80 percent in 2008.

38 percent of physicians restricted access (that is, they met with 31 to 70 percent of reps who try to meet with them).

18 percent of physicians “severely” restricted access (that is, they meet with 30 percent or fewer reps who try to meet with them).

More than half (53 percent) of marketing outreach to physicians now takes place through “non-personal” promotion, such as email and mobile alerts, as well as direct mail and speaker programs.

The remainder of marketing to physicians (47 percent) still takes place through in-person interactions with sales reps (MRs).

Today’s physician estimates that he or she already spends 84 hours per year – about two full work weeks – interacting with pharma companies via digital and other non-personal marketing channels.

Around 74 percent of the physicians use their smartphones for professional purposes.

Another interesting point also emerges from the report. Despite the fact that non-personal communications, including digital, comprise 53 percent of marketing outreach most drug companies still allocate around 88 percent of their total sales and marketing budget to the sales force.

Increasing ‘online professional networks’ for doctors:

Keeping pace with this change several online professional networks for doctors are coming up. One such example is Doctors.net.uk. This is claimed to be the largest and most active online professional network for all UK doctors. Each day over 50,000 doctors make use of Doctors.net.uk to network with colleagues and view information.

This particular online facility provides the doctors with a range of free secure services including an email service, clinical forums, accredited education and medical news, which help them to keep up to date, and to easily maintain their Continuing Professional Development (CPD).

Some digital initiatives of pharma companies:

Here, I would quote just a couple of interesting examples out of several others:

For continuous online engagement with doctors:

In January 2013, the top global pharma major Pfizer launched an online digital platform for the doctors named ‘Pfizerline’. It provides access to the latest information on Pfizer products ‘when, where and how’ the doctors want it. As claimed by the company, ‘Pfizerline’ is regularly updated and forms part of the company’s ongoing commitment to keep the doctors informed about their products and services.

Some say that with ‘Pfizerline’, ‘Pfizer has begun using digital drug representatives to market medicines, leaving the decision as to whether they want to see them in doctors’ hands.’

For new product launch:

According to the Press Release published by PMLive, the first in the pharmaceutical industry ‘digital marketing only’ campaign was launched by Abbott for its Low Dose HRT brand, in November 2013.

The campaign reportedly reached to 9,000 doctors, 45 percent of the NHS population of obstetricians and gynecologists, and nearly 23 percent of GPs who engaged with Abbott’s Low Dose HRT brand via professional network Doctors.net.uk.

According to Abbott, as quoted in this report, the digital campaign, which included interactive case studies, clinical paper summaries and an ask the expert section, helped increase the brand’s market share, with a continuous month-on-month growth in sales in 2013.

I am quoting these two examples, just to illustrate the point that serious experimentations with digital marketing for serious business initiatives, such as, doctor engagement and product launch, have already commenced.

Conclusion:

For better physician engagement, while preparing for a likely future scenario in India, any effective brand marketing strategy on digital platforms would call for in-depth understanding of the target audience preferences on the specific information needs and marketing channels. This customized approach needs to be harnessed to deliver the right message, to the right customer, through right platforms, and at a time of preferred by each prescriber.

The ball game of pharma marketing is gradually but surely changing. Clear signals are now coming from various Governments to the pharma companies to jettison the widely perceived unethical practices of alluring the drug prescribers with ‘freebies’ of different kinds and values, against patients’ health interest.

Unless various third parties come-up just to camouflage continuation of the same unethical marketing practices of many companies, at a cost, getting unfettered MR access to busy prescribers is likely to be increasingly more challenging. Otherwise, effective enforcement of mandatory UCPMP is likely to usher-in this change in India, sooner, just as what the ‘Physician Payment Sunshine Act’ did in the US. The countdown for the new paradigm in the country is expected to commence soon, as reportedly articulated by the Joint Secretary (Policy) of the Department of Pharmaceuticals, recently.

However, there are a couple of points to ponder. It is also widely believed, even today, and also in the US that, while various digital platforms offer never before opportunity to effectively engage with ‘difficult to meet’ prescribers, their use should be prudent and well thought of. Any mass-scale and imprudent general switch to digital communications, is unlikely to fetch the best outcome, to meet with this evolving challenge of change, at least, in the foreseeable future.

At the same time, if pharma companies continue increasing investment in less expensive digital communications sans diligent homework for scaling up, the prescribers may feel so overwhelmed that they will start ignoring them, just as what’s happening with frequent MRs’ visits. Hence, for sustainable business excellence while confronting with forthcoming disruptive changes, the notes of the pharma marketing playbook need to be recomposed, afresh.

By: Tapan J. Ray

PILMAN

A Tapan Ray Website

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