Along the way something happened

About the Author

Richard Meyer is a passionate Internet DTC marketer with over 15 years of progressive experience in consumer marketing who`s worked on top pharmaceutical brands like Cialis, Prozac and Sarafem, as well as two years with Medtronic Diabetes. He is currently consulting for his own company, Online Strategic Solutions, and writes a DTC column for PM 360 magazine and blogs for Eye for Pharma in addition to his own blog, World of DTC Marketing.

Some people in pharma remember the 90′s as a great time to be in pharma marketing. DTC advertising was permitted and drugs like Prozac, Viagra and Lipitor took off DTC marketing took shape. Times were good, people earned good salaries, bonuses were good and more and more money began to flow into DTC budgets as sales increased. But something else was happening as well; a fundamental shift in the way pharma thought of the business from patient centric to Wall Street centric.

I was not in DTC marketing in the 90′s but often heard stories about the “good old days”. Back then people at Lilly received 20-40% bonuses and they were proud to be working in Indiana for Lilly. In the late 90′s and early in the new millennium however Wall Street’s motto became “instant gratification takes too long”. Analysts were focused more on short term gains in stock not long term strategic positioning and pharma CEO’s became their whipping boys.

As we have read, and keep reading, in the media salesforce people were out of control. They were promoting products off-label and doing whatever they had to do to meet and exceed quota and management was not asking questions they were just taking the money and saying “look what we did this quarter”.

This is when patients began to matter less and sales mattered more. It wasn’t about doing what was right for the patient it was doing what was right for the balance sheet and not doing anything unless it added to the bottom line. It meant that the word transparency didn’t exist and that marketers could look at ways to manipulate data to their advantage rather than clearly explain product benefits.

Sidney Taurel, the ex-CEO of Lilly, even wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal where he tried to tell the Street that the preliminary leaks about their new blood thinning product were not accurate even though the Internet was all abuzz already saying that Presurgel was not going to be a big seller. Mr Taurel got so frustrated that he decided to retire shortly there after and now Lilly is forced to lay off 5,000 people to stay profitable when their stock is at $32.40 a share.

Now I as I write this I want to freely state that the environment for marketing prescription drugs is not exactly positive right now but do we really believe that the environment would be this bad if pharma had focused more on the patient and less on sales? Story after story seemed to appear week after week about data not being reported or side effects that were worse than we thought. You have to ask yourself “why did they do this”? They did it to protect sales is the sad answer.

The social media pharma conference this week had a lot of great ideas from forward thinking people but in order for these ideas to move forward a shift has to happen in pharma that focuses more on the patient and less on ROI. This does not mean that pharma should needlessly spend money it means that they believe that what’s good for patients is good for them. It means that they understand that they have to earn the trust of empowered consumers and patients and it means that transparency has to become part of organization from the CEO down to middle managers.

It’s actually quite simple: when you’re working pretend that a patient/customer is sitting besides you and don’t do anything that they wouldn’t want you to do.

Until pharma stops worrying about Wall Street, who got the country into a hell of a mess, and starts thinking more about patients and customers nothing will change. Sales people will still be compensated on new Rx’s and all of DTC will be about new Rx’s not patience compliance or persistence. Sure customized DTC materials at the physicians office would be great for patients and physicians but it probably won’t happen for a lot of reasons least of which is “what’s the ROI”.

I know big pharma can change it’s just a matter of do they want to change or have change forced on them but this is what happens when you loose your way..