‘Tis that time again when the calendar is down to just one page. A lot of us who talk and write for a living use this season of giving for one of two purposes—we either look back or we look ahead. Looking back is too easy; even I can tell you that the Yankees did not win the World Series. A really neat trick is telling you who will win the 2012 fall classic. So, ...
Unless you have been vacationing on a remote island recently, you may have heard that Steve Jobs passed away. I did not know the man personally, but I can say with certainty that he impacted my life. As a college freshman in 1985, I can remember the exact moment when the library at the University of Rochester got a whole bunch of Macintosh computers. Looking back on those machines, they did not do ...
Determining social media’s role in pharma has been the elusive goal for marketers across the industry. With the FDA’s promised guidelines yet to appear, brands have hesitated to create Facebook pages without knowing the do’s and don’ts of social media regulation. Now Google is presenting a new challenge with its recently launched Google+ platform, a service that fuses search with social media. While Google+ is not yet available for use by businesses (no word on ...
In my last post, I wrote about some of the changes that may result when sales representatives' performance evaluations are measured against the value and service they provide to their customers rather than sales targets. According to a 3-year longitudinal analysis of IMS Health value metrics, value received correlates more strongly with physician prescribing behavior than conventional sales force effectiveness (SFE) metrics. That sounds great, but what metrics can you use to measure your ...
You have probably read about GlaxoSmithKline’s move to base their sales representatives’ performance evaluations on the value and service provided to customers rather than individual achievements of sales targets. Here’s my take on some of the ways this may change the way we — and our clients — will do business. We will see more of an account management approach to sales. What healthcare professionals (HCPs) really want is help to better manage health outcomes, ...
The word “strategy” is one of the more overused terms in pharma today. The only thing more worn-out was the hype that surrounded Kim Kardashian’s wedding. (I guess my invitation got lost in the mail.) How many times, in your dealings with agencies, have you thought that they were not thinking strategically? I think all advertising/marketing agencies have been there at least a few times, and no one wants to be labeled in that way. ...
Like many before me, I came to agency life from academia. Needless to say, I have found these worlds to be very different, but one area where I am experiencing considerable déjà vu is how both become entranced by technology’s siren song. In the closing years of the 20th Century (ok, it was 1992), the scientific world was exploding with work performed with new molecular biology techniques. These were the days when new methods such as ...
Spam filters are the kiss of death with e-mail marketing, and CAN-SPAM legislation puts more limits on reaching customers. You can rise to the challenge by challenging “that everything used to work” and working smarter. This means moving away from mass blasts to unsuspecting audiences and creating more engaging conversations with existing customers who will be receptive. Here are a few tips. 1. Segment your lists and your selling propositions When customers sign ...
This New York Times article about a disastrous set of circumstances that is now being faced by the Niaspan brand team really got my attention. The set-up: NIH stopped a large study with Abbott Laboratories’ cholesterol-fighting drug 18 months early after results showed that taking Niaspan in conjunction with a statin failed to prevent heart attacks and may also have boosted stroke risk (despite raising HDL levels and lowering triglycerides). The sum-up: The playing ...
When people say the world is getting smaller, they cannot exclude a changing pharmaceutical industry in that discussion. Years ago, if a company wanted to be a player in the drug industry, it went blockbuster or it went home. Diabetes, hypertension, depression, and other large therapeutic areas enjoyed an R&D boom during the 1990s and early 2000s. Surprisingly, there were plenty of paying patients for everyone to wet their beaks in the bath. However, in ...
