AGENDA 2015
The business of marketing pharmaceuticals today would be almost unrecognizable to a visitor from five years ago; the industry’s fate hangs on how industry leaders respond to all this change.

The move to economic value justification

The brand of a product needs to build both a clinical system outcome experience as well as consumer-patient impact. There are a broad range of mobile, social, clinical, non-traditional sites and other aspects of branding that contemporarily enable outcome optimization and decreased costs for total care. Moving away from basic demand generation through DTC over to clinical and cost impacting experiences endears the product brand to both the risk holder and to the consumer-patient investing in a therapeutic outcome expectation. Consumer out of pocket growth has exploded and introduced the concept of consumer price elasticity to an industry that has traditionally never had to consider this lever of access, beyond OTC products. Consumer information empowerment and the cost shift to them with high deductible health plans as well as co-insurance rates that can range from 10 percent to 35 percent of a product is a seismic shift for which product companies in healthcare will need to be better prepared. Provider and consumer cost attitudes and expectations of value will reshape the go to market model in fundamental ways that haven’t been seen since the days of our house calls. Like it or not, the setting of care is gravitating to the home or retail health locale, while the new access issue is all about consumer perceptions of value and the will to pay a growing HDHP and OOP cost. Is the product industry ready to convert clinical value to the patient over to economic value justification in order to earn access to the consumer?

Joe Albian, principal, PwC


Networks and Accountable Care Organizations

IDNs and ACOs are one of the primary vehicles in the execution of ACA in the delivery of patient care. They provide the economies of scale needed to rein in costs. For example, they own more than 80 percent of hospitals and 60 percent of physician group practices. More than 60 percent of physicians are affiliated with them with the majority directly employed by IDNs and ACOs. At the same time, up to 80 percent of drug volume is prescribed through them depending on geographic location and therapy area. More interestingly however, IDNs and ACOs have also been expanding vertically by entering the insurance business. ACOs by definition offer insurance coverage to their patients and at least half of IDNs offer their own insurance plans on top of accepting other insurance. From a strategic standpoint, this trend makes perfect sense. Since IDNs and ACOs are responsible for care costs, they have to own the cost side of patient care too. Prime examples of this trend are Aetna with 200 ACO deals in the pipeline and Ascension Health with a stated objective to acquire a payer business.

Angeliki Cooney, director, thought leadership, U.S., IMS H


Using tactics to create customer experiences

With the digitization of media, there are now many different tactics that a marketer can use to reach the customer, and it seems as if new tactics are being developed almost daily! This raises three questions:

1. Which tactics should a pharma company invest in?

2. Which new tactics are ready to emerge?

3. How much should be spent in each tactic to maximize promotion ROI?

A fourth question may be even more important:

4. How should these marketing tactics be deployed – for this individual?

Traditionally, marketing tactics have been deployed in silos and targeted to a broad audience. However, the digitization of media provides marketers with a new opportunity – to create and deliver a personalized customer experience based upon customer preferences and their ongoing response. Doing this well by matching to that customer’s journey is the key play, as opposed to looking for a new shiny channel. Accomplishing this goal requires two steps:

Step 1: Build Tactics and Content Most pharmaceutical marketers have already invested in a number of marketing tactics, including email, mobile, direct mail, portals, etc. Newer tactics, such as social media, will continue to become a more prominent part of pharmaceutical marketing. Additionally, new customer metrics – such as tracking customer engagement over time and across tactics and measuring ROI for a campaign, not individual tactics – will become more common. These new metrics will guide marketers to determine the optimal mix of tactics for specific customers. To enable these new metrics, it is critically important that tactics and content are “connected” and not siloed, meaning that it is possible to follow customers as they engage across tactics. From this foundation, the customer journey can be developed.

Step 2: Delivering the Customer Journey Customer journeys are a series of linked tactics and messages tailored to the customer’s preferences and delivered over a 6-to-12 month period. Brands will begin to focus on these journeys, which are not the same for each customer. They will also need a way to predict the customer’s preference (for channels and offers), and a way to dynamically alter how to engage the customer depending on where the customer is on that journey. Leveraging data and analytics will provide the right sequences in the tapestry that lead to good outcomes. This will then need to be combined with the automation of campaign management, so as to achieve scale.

Pete Mehr, principal, ZS Associates


Making big data “digestible”: the agency’s opportunity

Big data is the fundamental consequence of living in the digital world. But having big data doesn’t necessarily lead to better marketing. It’s what we do with data that brings opportunity knocking. The opportunity occurs when pharma is able to dissect big data into new environments that turn them into small data, making them more accessible, more relevant, and more flexible.

Thanks to technology, we now live in a digital world where every interaction, reaction, and response is captured as a data point—and because we’re constantly innovating, we “ain’t seen nothing yet.” As wearables become ubiquitous, the inclusion of physiological data (e.g., blood pressure, EKG, EEG, oxygen levels) will only add to the throngs of data we’ll have to cull. The opportunity lies in our ability to dissect big data into “digestible” and categorical buckets that can then be generated into reports and populated into dashboards to give us a better picture of what story the data are actually telling us. The good news is that as devices become more advanced, pharma’s ability to cull data gets easier because devices are creating centralized data repositories. The Apple HealthKit is an example. All that physiological data Apple will be able to collect becomes fodder for marketers.

It won’t be long before pharma begins relying on its agencies to not just develop the brand messaging for their products, but also to collect, analyze and disseminate data reports to enhance their brand marketing. The future is rosy for agencies with strong expertise in making sense of big data.

Jose Andrade, VP, director of interactive technology, AbelsonTaylor