Inspired by a recent Agnitio roundtable discussion with Allergan, Ariad Pharmaceuticals, Astellas and Ipsen Pharma. Have we made any progress toward personalized communications? The prevailing situation in pharma is still not ideal – the industry continues to create digital presentations with hundreds of slides, while customers expect pharma to understand their interests and focus the communications accordingly.

1. Is pharma getting
personal enough in their
multi channel marketing
efforts?

2. Inspired by a recent Agnitio roundtable discussion with
Allergan, Ariad Pharmaceuticals, Astellas and Ipsen Pharma.
Have we made any progress toward personalized
communications?
The prevailing situation in pharma is still not ideal – the industry
continues to create digital presentations with hundreds of slides, while
customers expect pharma to understand their interests and focus the
communications accordingly.
Is pharma getting personal enough in
their multi channel marketing efforts?

3. We may all agree that the way forward is to personalize the
communication through better insight into customers’ interests and
needs, yet still the industry struggles to change, perhaps due to a lack
of trust in our customer knowledge.

4. Marketers, however, either due to lack of training or because they are
not yet accustomed to make data collection central to their brand plans,
generally have little access to data beyond rep iPad usage. Gathering
customer insights is still seen as a market research activity, rather than
something that should take place during every customer interaction.
So the question is: how can pharma better understand customer needs
and interests to deliver more personalized communications to their
customers?

5. Clearly, channels must be connected so that insights gained in one
interaction are applied in whatever channels the conversation switches
to afterwards. To achieve this, internal teams must work together to
consolidate communications so, for example, patient insights gained
from HCPs are used in future patient communications.
Making content dynamic enables a response to customer’s needs and
preferences in real time, and regular reviews of collected data allow
efficient and frequent updates based on new insights. Importantly,
analytics planning should be central to overall brand planning.
Today we still separate HCP and patient communications, due in part to
anxiety about communicating directly to the patient. Forward-looking
companies understand that a more holistic view is needed.

6. Although today pharma continues to rely heavily on market research
and published reports, we recognize that real time data gives us a
tremendous opportunity to advance.
Think big but start small
Once you know what customers want in their personalized
communications, and how to aggregate interaction data across channels
and customers, technology can systematically align content to the
individual. Your decisions will be made based on real-time customer
data, and your content will dynamically respond to individual customer
interests; customers will undoubtedly appreciate the personalized
information being shared.