Last week I had a chance to attend and speak in ‘6th Annual Digital Pharma Europe Conference‘ hosted in Bayer AG headquarters in Berlin. Overall it was a great event with many good learning points and I had a chance to meet with many brilliant around the world. Below you can find the interview I gave to the Digital Pharma event leaders.

Given that pharmaceutical companies are moving to more evolved business models and digital platforms – do you feel like there are any specific core competencies, skills or other aspects that are required when mapping out a strategy?

The pharmaceutical and healthcare environment is dynamic and rapidly changing. Pfizer aims to lead the pharmaceutical industry by setting the trend and to improve the access to healthcare. Today’s digital transformation in customer experience is requiring companies to rethink how they can reach patients, decision makers, HCPs and governments at the right place and right time. For Pfizer, multi-channel marketing is a priority to achieve this goal. Business transformation, customer knowledge and a good understanding of technological advancements and its integration with marketing models top the list of the most important strategic skills for many companies and executives who want to master multichannel marketing with improved use of digital channels.

How do you feel that pharma can foster improved collaboration between divisions including marketing, rand teams, compliance, MLR, IT etc in developing innovative digital initiatives?

Cross functional collaboration is the key word for the multidisciplinary team work and in Pfizer we often do that. Besides this, you also need to build a stand alone function that leads the overall innovation and drives the change in marketing. In Pfizer we do this through Multi Channel Marketing team. For example, I work in close collaboration with our division managers and colleagues who provides the customer insights for our strategies and provide advice on the medical and compliance aspects of our programs.

Do you feel we are seeing an improvement in developing customer centric marketing strategy? Are you seeing any specific and evolving channel preferences that will become more important in future customer engagement?

With the evolution of pharma industry through many aspects, we definitely observe that the industry needs to further develop customer centric marketing strategies. In Pfizer, we are right now building our marketing plans with customer journeys through different channels. We do build deployment grids for our MCM plans across the year across all the channels we are building. A good channel example would be the HCP portal we are building right now; instead of building brand centric detailing websites, we are now building customer centric HCP portals. The new portals will be enabling HCPs from all therapeutic areas to receive every information and service a pharma company can provide from a single touch point.

How do you feel that pharma can introduce digital as part of the value proposal, offer value added services and/or build value beyond the pill?

Switching from connecting with customers when we want, from where we want with whatever topic we want to let customers to connect with us whenever they want, how they want (whichever channel) and which ever topic/brand they want is probably the ultimate shift in the marketing approach and the value proposal we are trying to give to the customers. Creating quality content for digital assets that meets customer’s needs, and addresses their concerns and requirements is critical to the success of our initiatives.

Where do you see multi-channel marketing evolving in the short term?

The rise of the digital channels is very dominant in our region in EURIT. The patients search the internet about their symptoms before seeing a doctor. The HCPs has many more ways to access the information such as company portals, and international literature. The way of doing business in pharma companies have changed eternally. The transformation will continue helping to foster a better understanding of customers and their preferences, which would also lead to more customer-centric marketing programs vs. brand centric ones.

Will there be any specific challenges in identifying channel mixes and having the ability to measure the ROI within this?

MCM itself has a steep learning curve for the pharma industry as we are just starting. A very crucial but also challenging decision is how to best integrate new channels with existing, i.e. Field Force. In Pfizer, we have proven success stories of integrating webinar channels with Field Force. ROI is yet another important thing we need to better define for MCM. The biggest challenge for many markets is the customer level sales data is not available, therefore despite the fact that we have the chance to get a granular data for MCM at customer level, it is not possible in many countries to map the MCM interactions with the sales data. However, our focus will be on the commercial perspective, to meet our strategic business objectives and to acquire a measurable ROI to maximize internal resources and to drive brand performance.