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Chris Kadas
Senior Manager, Customer Transformation, PwC Switzerland
The pharmaceutical industry is experiencing a transformative shift in its marketing strategies, driven by digital advancements and evolving customer behaviour. In the digital era, customers expect content relevant to their needs and seamless personalised experiences across all channels. While the creation and approval of content takes long as a process and it is a relative expensive component of customer engagement, we identify a disconnect between the content produced and its utilisation across multiple channels, mostly by customer-facing employees during interactions with healthcare professionals (HCPs). In parallel, there is a slow pace in digital channel evolution in terms of services offered online and limited interconnection between channels of engagement.
Pharma companies’ historic focus on customer-facing employees (CFEs) interacting face-to-face with physicians to provide product information and characteristics is shifting.1 With multiple new pharma stakeholders – including payers and healthcare providers – now involved in decision-making, physician-only engagement is giving way to broader stakeholder management. In parallel, pharma companies are investing in digital capabilities, services and content to equip their CFEs with the right tools to increase engagement. This all began with the COVID pandemic and has advanced since then:2
+%
YoY increase of commercial content volume
%
of HCPs want virtual to be part of the call mix
+%
YoY increase in the number of emails sent by CFEs
Yet the majority of CFEs still struggle to use digital content during their interactions with HCPs. Notably, in 61% of their meetings, field teams don’t use digital content. 77% of content created is rarely or never used by CFEs, despite content creation increasing by 20% from 2021 to 2022.3 There has also been only limited personalisation of content to targeted audiences, and customer interactions have not been integrated across marketing channels.4
Digital customers expect more
Major changes in customer behaviour have forced the pharma industry to rethink its marketing mix strategy away from the traditional ‘4Ps’ of product, price, place and promotion. In their place we’ll see commercial strategies move towards a ‘4Es’ approach. which emphasises customer-centricity and engagement5:
- Experience: a positive and sophisticated end-to-end customer journey.
- Exchange: the value a customer gets from engaging with a personalised experience.
- Evangelism: the power of word-of-mouth to turn customers into brand advocates and ambassadors.
- Everyplace: marketing accessible at all relevant touchpoints across channels.
As HCPs become more digitally savvy, they increasingly expect more tailored and engaging experiences from pharma companies that match their patients’ and practices’ needs6. While the industry is still exploring the best way to use digital channels, 36% of HCPs expect educational content from pharma companies to have a “higher influence on prescribing and product decisions”7. But there is a mismatch: 70% of HCPs feel that CFEs using digital content don’t understand their needs and expectations.8
In response, pharma companies need to adapt their engagement strategy depending on the portfolio, stage of product lifecycle or market archetype. New products and indications should launch with a hybrid (digital + CFEs) and/or digital-only go-to-market model. Additionally, companies need to bridge any data gaps, further integrate channels, and deepen their understanding of customer behaviour.
-90%
For mature products, virtual calls are almost as efficient as physical ones
+%
increase in new patients starts by CFEs sharing digital content during meetings
%
of HCPs want to learn more after having engaged with industry content digitally
An omnichannel engagement approach aims to help CFEs with a data-driven framework, coordinating communications across offline and online channels. Three pillars are critical to its successful implementation:
- Integration: seamless integration of capabilities and harmonised business processes
- Personalisation: data-driven and dynamic predictions of customers’ current and future needs
- Orchestration: planning and coordination of the customer journey through interconnected channels and modular content across the customer lifecycle.
Such an approach can transform pharma companies’ commercial models globally, regionally and locally. It does this by deploying analytics-enabled omnichannel engagement, improving the orchestration of touchpoints and content personalisation. This, in turn, adapts content creation by harnessing user experience, campaign management and the right channels to reach every HCP.
To reach this point, pharma companies will follow different journeys depending on their data and analytics maturity. The majority start by building their core data capabilities, eliminating any data gaps and deploying the right capabilities step by step. Others that are more focused on external collaboration will follow a different path. They will build partnerships with consulting firms and agencies so that – while they build their omnichannel minimum viable product (MVP) using outsourced resources – they will continue to mature their own digital capabilities.
Pharma companies’ ultimate aim? To incorporate Next Best Action (NBA) methodologies that increase customer engagement and grow the ROI of marketing campaigns. An NBA strategy requires a deeper understanding of HCPs’ online behaviour to maximise impact at every touchpoint. This, in turn, enables businesses to determine the most effective engagement action. Personalisation like this helps to make information really resonate with HCPs and, in doing so, increase their engagement.
How to accelerate the omnichannel journey
The appeal of NBA solutions is clear. So why hasn’t every pharma company embraced them already? We see two reasons. First, many players don’t see the urgency to change and are happy to think about it as a future option. Second, the orchestration of such a transformation is complex and demands a clear vision and a well-defined approach requiring roles and capabilities that many companies currently lack.
So how should they make progress and transform their commercial model? By following a four-phased approach:
- Conduct maturity assessment to gather insights into the marketing-tech capabilities and data ecosystem. Companies should also review their operating model and assess their organisation’s readiness for the transformation ahead.
- The vision and strategy phase defines the desired future state of the organisation and its operating model.
- During roadmap development, companies will review and finalise their organisation and operating model based on the insights gained from the previous phases. They will define and prioritise workstreams and thoroughly examine the new organisational setup, ensuring its alignment with the vision and strategy.
- In the implementation and scale-up phase, the recommendation is to start small by launching a prototype and testing the effectiveness of the proposed changes. Continuously iterating and scaling up will be the key focus during this phase to ensure the successful implementation of a company’s marketing-tech transformation.
When it comes to running the transformation, we suggest using the scrum framework and agile ways of working for project management, MVP development and deployment. This empirically based approach helps cross-functional teams collaborate efficiently on complex projects and ensures that workloads are managed effectively.
Advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques will further facilitate the transformation and evolution of the commercial model. This might start, for example, with better segmentation of the customer base by developing data-derived personas determined by HCPs’ digital behaviour. Predictive analytics can generate likelihood to churn/engage and, hence, derive potential NBAs to allocate resources optimally. AI campaigns based on triggered activity and content consumption can be automated.
Finally, as the omnichannel journey implies changes that involve stakeholders across several business units, broad adoption is key to achieving the desired results. The aim is to drive positive change through a people-centric approach, rather than by forcing people to change.
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