Three Pillars of Change Shifting our Innovative Medicines Environment
- michael.reny2
- Feb 13, 2021
- 4 min read
Markets are like ecosystems – they’re complex and dynamic. And as with all ecosystems, markets are exposed to forces that shift and change them over time. The role of today’s business leader is to understand these changes and anticipate their influence to minimize risk and generate opportunity. Multiple forces are acting on our industry at all times but this post will introduce what are, in my opinion, three of the most important: DEMOGRAPHICS, TECHNOLOGY, and TREATMENTS. This post is intended to open the discussion on the topic while subsequent postings will delve deeper into these and related topics.
Pillar One:
DEMOGRAPHICS – it’s all about the customer.
Question:
How do millennial physicians view their relationship to the pharmaceutical industry versus baby boomers and gen Xers?
Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, are entering the medical field and will represent its leadership over the next 10-30 years. Their relationship to the world around them, including perhaps their view of the pharmaceutical industry, is very different from their predecessors. They prioritize work life balance and ability to work remotely and flexibly*. They grew up awash in technology and expect the world's information to be accessible at their fingertips. And, right or wrong, they have been taught in medical school to have a healthy distrust of a pharmaceutical industry that, in their view, carries bias favoring revenue over science. These forces are affecting how and where they seek information, which type of information they consider valuable, and their relationship to our industry as purveyors of this information. So the question is, are we still conducting traditional marketing focused on a Boomer generation’s view of the world or have we evolved to meet the expectations of millennials? How should we continue to refine and improve our approach over the next five years if we’re to maintain control over our brands’ narrative? Shifting demographics represents both a risk and an opportunity. And opportunity loves a vacuum – if we’re not there to satisfy it, something else will.
Pillar Two:
TECHNOLOGY – its growth is not linear, it’s accelerating.
Question:
Are we fully leveraging technology to improve patient outcomes and add value for our constituents?
We all know the answer… While COVID-19 has accelerated our use of online platforms for communicating – a very good thing – we are still under resourced and under skilled when it comes to (a) understanding where and how technology can act to unleash customer value and (b) what technology to use to do so. Before we can begin to harness these enabling forces, we must first understand what questions to ask. Technology can be used to improve everything from learning to targeting to connecting – three massive topics each with its own potential profound impact on value. In order to ask the right questions, we need to move back a couple of steps in the decision making process – because technology is not about strategy, it is about enabling it. So we need to start by asking, what are my goals and objectives and what are the strategies that will satisfy them? Once we know this, we can ask what enabling technologies we should use to fulfill them. Technology is critically important but it needs to be selected, refined and channeled with targeted and insightful intent.
Pillar Three:
TREATMENTS – shifting from primary care to specialty.
Question:
Has the innovative medicines industry permanently moved on from investing in chemically derived primary care medications to specialty treatments (born of biologics and gene therapy)?
According to an IQVIA report on spending in the U.S., biologics accounted for 2% of prescription volume but 37% of prescription dollars, and spending on new brands has shifted dramatically to specialty medicines, driving $9.8B of $12B net growth†. While we could quibble over proportions, there’s no doubt there’s been a significant shift away from primary care towards specialty in the last decade. This has had a profound effect on complexity – from the products themselves and their ancillary services, to regulatory approval, to customer communication, and reimbursement access. Today, most of the innovative medicines industry focuses its resources on very expensive, high science treatments, with intricate, full service patient support programs, targeting fewer physicians, specialized in treating an often highly targeted patient group. We are no longer the industry of multiple salesforce towers with overlapping product messages targeting a common set of primary care physicians, promoting our company’s statin, anti-depressant and PPI. Pharmaceutical marketing has become less about large field forces, quick product messages, colorful detail aids and sales tracks, and much more about science, patient journeys and outcomes, multiple knowledge access platforms and customer personas. We’re reshaping our thinking of what constitutes a brand, how we measure success, and where we deploy resources in the service of achieving our goals. Our industry’s evolution to ever more specialized medicines is an ongoing, exciting journey whose byproduct is human health and longevity – and what a privilege it is to be part of it. With this, our marketing approach has also evolved which carries implications for the people we hire, the marketing models we employ, and the training we provide.
†IQVIA Institute - Medicine Use and Spending in the U.S. A Review of 2017 and Outlook to 2022
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