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Omnichannel, move out of the way!
In 2024 a whopping 77% of senior-level life sciences executives “cited a lack of success with their omnichannel engagement strategies” (1), despite the industry spending a projected $44.56 billion globally in 2025 (2). This disconnect has puzzled me since joining pharma in 2018. How can an industry with such resources and a clearly defined customer base struggle so profoundly with its omnichannel effectiveness?
I know many (or most) people are asking this question. Let me share my analysis.
Go-to-market model
My background is not pharma. I’ve spent more than a decade working with a range of industries from finance to telecom, energy, retail and more. And I found a fundamental misalignment at the core of pharmaceutical digital or “omnichannel” marketing which I haven’t seen anywhere else:
the go-to-market-model in pharma is not responding to how decisions and influences are made in the health care ecosystem
The common pharma go-to-market model applies an over-simplified fast-moving consumer goods or retail based approach to an ecosystem that works in a very different way.
Physicians aren’t paying, using or experiencing the product based on their own preferences and needs — as you would if you were buying sneakers, muffins or make-up.
In our case the e.g. payer pays, the institution decides (guidelines), the physician analyzes and discovers, the pharmacist distributes and the patient uses (depending on market). At the same time a pharmaceutical company offers services through its medical, market access, marketing, sales and policy departments.
It’s not a difficult ecosystem to map out, most people I’ve worked with when asked the right questions readily have most of the insights available to create a map of the influences affecting their desired goal.
But we don’t ask these questions. We think of physicians as ‘customers’, and customers buy products, ergo our job is to sell (or talk about) our products.
Calling physicians ‘customer’ and thinking a marketing strategy is ‘to create attention’ (which is a marketing tactic, not a strategy) is stopping us from delivering to the capacity of our own expertise and provide value to a health care ecosystem that is pressing for it.
I know we like to keep things simple. But too simple also produces unnecessary costs and waste.
Too simple also produces unnecessary costs and waste
Relationships and trust
Pharma is an industry historically steeped in the relationships between its sales representatives and physicians. What started as a need to keep physicians updated on medication and scientific evidence developed into personal relationships, conversations, physicians getting energy from learning or just the needed five minute break from the constant stream of patients and journaling.
But how did the digital marketer interpret this relationship? As nothing more than human email, seeing it from the perspective of the transfer of information and not through the human lens of relationships. As we’ve exchanged our relationships with email addresses we’ve also removed what mattered.
In every other industry I’ve worked with there has been onboarding, customer, loyalty, churn programs etc.. In the pharmaceutical industry I haven’t found a single one .. yet.
Instead there is a trend to exchange what every other industry knows: the importance of building trust based relationships through the mutual exchange of value. With an NPS-measure assuming it can accomplish the same by simply adding a survey at the bottom of emails.
Measurements
When research tells us: “100% of [senior-level life sciences executives] said they faced challenges around measuring the success of their digital products and strategies” (1). We know there is an opportunity for improvement.
The challenge with measuring omnichannel is that we are not measuring what we should be measuring. Instead we are measuring engagement.
Engagement does not equal business value, it equals engagement.
Engagement is critically important, but we shouldn’t pretend it’s something it’s not. The only people who need to see engagement metrics are people designing channels. It’s a channel performance metric. For anyone else we need to measure if the content and experience created the opportunity to deliver value to the customer (3), and if this leads to a behavior that brings value back to the business.
It’s a simple chain of four measures that every go-to-market strategy should include.
Given the missing returns on investment from omnichannel the industry has turned to Customer Experience for answers (good call ;), but from a CX SME-perspective I need to ask: are we skipping over both the ‘customer’ and the ‘experience’ part?
Getting Customer Experience right means starting (insights) and ending (measurement) with the customer. But I’m not seeing either.
Let me recommend three ways to fix things:
- Stop, take a step back. We’ve got all the resources we need, but the wrong approach. It’s not about information and content anymore (for the last 20 years physicians have found their information somewhere else), but what people are using the information for and what they are trying to achieve. Stop treading water at the surface, dive in: find what you want to help your customers accomplish differentiating you in the market place. Don’t underestimate the value of a high quality strategy and holding people accountable to it (which is the only time it works).
- The retail based marketing model we are copying needs data the industry is not allowed to have. It’s a Gordian knot (impossible to solve). We need a marketing model fit to the data we can use. Stop thinking about customers as people and think of them instead as needs and situations: “customers don’t buy products, situations and needs do” (4). ‘People’ don’t show up to our experiences, they show up in a situation with a need that motivates them. If their name is Patrick or Patty doesn’t matter to anyone. What matters is if their are looking to validate a monitoring decision or looking for material that can help them communicate better with their own patients.
- Pharma is a relationship industry, but doesn’t have what every other relationship industry has: onboarding, loyalty, customer, churn programs etc.. Motivating people to “sign up” is discussed as a technical design / form-issue not a customer value issue. We certainly need our own compliant relationship-program types, but our omnichannel marketing model needs to think through the lens of decades of knowledge about how to nurture digital / physical relationships and not impulse purchasing.
The opportunities for the pharmaceutical industry are truly endless, but they need to be unlocked with a new mindset. This is the transformation the industry is asking for but not doing. Luckily these changes are not difficult, but the first step needs to be to lift the omnichannel bucket of our heads and move on.
Sources:
(1). Graphite, Disconnected pharma, https://www.graphitedigital.com/insights/disconnected-pharma
(2). Health Union, Why Pharma and Healthcare Advertising Spending Continues to Rise, https://health-union.com/blog/digital-ad-spend-increasing-in-healthcare/
(3). Gene Cornfield, The most important metric you are not tracking yet, https://hbr.org/2020/04/the-most-important-metrics-youre-not-tracking-yet
(4). Customers don’t buy products, situations and needs do, https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/customers-dont-buy-products-situations-and-needs-do-520b5491f8d1
