Pharmaceutical & medical devices Industry is fast adapting to these changes at various levels of the value chain. Billions of dollars are being spent on digital transformation projects ranging from usage of AI & ML in product development, production and predictive maintenance, Blockchain in supply chain and data management & analytics in strategic decision making.
This article focuses on Omnichannel marketing, one of the key digital transformations that the industry is learning and implementing at a rapid pace.
Omnichannel Marketing: Promise and Possibilities
An industry that historically focused all their brand building and market shaping efforts through F2F meetings & medical education programs has started making giant strides in multi-channel strategy now.
A digital journey that started with an e-detailing platform has progressed fast by adding brand websites, Approved E-Mails, social media, webinars and other media effectively creating a multi-channel strategy. The only hindside to this is, all these channels work independently, expecting HCPs to find and sort out information themselves.
How had Indian Pharma responded to the challenges brought on by the Covid19 crisis and the inability to connect with doctors and other Rx influencers?
Is it back to business-as-usual or have some companies learned from their mistakes and become digital savvy?
How will Indian Pharma cope with the possibility of another lockdown and meeting restrictions looming in view of the rising Omicron wave?
The pill is now a commodity that many of these companies provide at heavy discounts, making money off everything ‘beyond the pill’. Investors are betting heavily on the potential of technological innovation to transform the way healthcare is delivered.
The Economic Times reported that in 2021, India recorded investments of $77 billion across 1,266 deals including 164 large deals worth $58 billion. While the money reduced in 2022, the reason wasn’t a lack of faith in this business model.
Meanwhile, the pharmaceuticals industry that is most affected by this quiet but rapid change, is grappling with its entrenched culture. Its current business is so profitable that everything else pales in comparison.
‘Build, measure, learn, build again’ – a mantra of the health tech industry is alien to pharma that doesn’t learn, build or measure after launching a product.
Pharma also thinks of its customers as doctors alone and does precious little to connect with patients, or caregivers. People who are not sick do not feature on their radar at all. These are cultural values that keep pharma focused on the pill and discourage thinking beyond it.
A social media poll conducted by MedicinMan showed almost predictable responses. 100+ respondents who work in the pharma industry in India were quite clearly divided. 48% of them wanted to know what beyond the pill actually meant, while 23% wanted to know how to execute it.
The rest felt that the ultra-competitive environment in the Indian generics market required very high share-of-voice tactics (19%), or that their customers demanded product information (9%).
The July 2016 issue of MedicinMan with articles by Piyush Agarwal, K. Hariram, Vivek Hattangadi, Anjali Sharma, Chandan Kumar, RB Balakrishna and Pankaj Mehrotra
K. Hariram reports on the OPPI 50th Annual General Meeting held in Mumbai on October 21. The report also features photos from the conference. Other topics covered include the role of emotions in pharma marketing, the importance in preparing much before-hand for the next level of your pharma career and the concept of the "tipping point" and its relevance for pharma marketing.