New customer experience challenges for the pharmaceutical industry with Covid-19

Eric Dépinay is Research & commercial development manager at GIM France and has 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. In this article he shares his insights on the challenges Covid-19 poses for the customer experience of pharmaceutical companies.

 

By invoking resilience, President Macron shows his ambition: to come back, as our own body naturally does for its microbiota, to a state of balance close to that of the beginning. Is this a step backwards? On the contrary, the challenge facing the laboratories that contact me today is how to recognize the changes that containment has brought about, which is already seen in the attitudes of patients and healthcare professionals.

The new challenges in pharmaceutical marketing

The coronavirus crisis has highlighted the major place that sharing information has taken in the model of health economy:

• There has been an increase in the massive and diversified exchange of scientific data, that was made accessible particularly via digital tools , opening up relations between health professionals and general population.

• We have the ultrarapid implementation of scientific measures that are shaking up the traditional models of long-term innovation in Pharma, to satisfy a need for solutions that are expected earlier than ever.

regarding all the new data on their targets, marketing teams must now:

• collect and analyze them quickly and easily, but also to structure them

• respond pertinently to everyday problems and needs,

• understand societal phenomena

• capture emerging trends.

Agile and reactive marketing

The challenge for pharma marketing teams is to move from mass marketing to more refined marketing, resolutely focused on the individual, especially when there are 67 million people who will be confined until May 11 or maybe more... "In France, customer experience is not yet a real business discipline" (Forrester 2019 study). Until now, the data studied was mainly linked to the time of the prescription or purchase act, with pharmaceutical marketing favouring the classic customer-brand link. Today, the analysis can go further upstream of this process and follow the day-to-day life of patients far beyond that, and thus refine the understanding of patients, the role of prescribers or dispensing, and the place of digital technology in the relationships between these communities. The relationship between doctors and patients is being transformed, with a more organized care pathway, more emphasis on prevention and an increasingly "expert" patient. The targeted marketing approach now goes beyond the product or brand domain to encompass a multi-channel approach and requires the pharmaceutical company to improve its customer knowledge. If you fail to make a lasting impression on the minds of customers, you have failed to deliver a distinctive experience.

There's no better care than to take care of yourself.

It's a fact that in patient-laboratory-physician relationships, the former show more independence:

• Isn't the "pharmaceutical lobby" mentioned all over the networks when we talk about the right to use chloroquine?

• Patients are increasingly turning to outside advice (family and friends, opinions on the Internet) rather than to "marketed" advice from laboratories.

• Mistrust of allopathic drugs is serious, fuelled by repeated polemics (distilbene, mediator, Livre des 4000 médicaments utiles, multiple vaccines, etc.) and affects a growing proportion of the population.

• The digitisation of the purchase of health products in particular, and not just comfort medication, is accelerating.

• The boom in telemedicine, as opposed to the deafening emptiness of consulting rooms, is shaking up the practitioner-patient relationship.

• The first trends perceived during the pandemic show an increased desire for prevention and naturalness in health products. Health claims have never been more sought-after, and alternative medicine niches have never been so subject to scientific research.

It is clear that practitioner-patient-industry relationships will continue to change. The more marketing teams are prepared for these issues, the more consistent the strategies will be with the targets.

 

CONCLUSION

The world is constantly changing and the coronavirus disease crisis will disrupt our economy and change our outlook, new projects are being born and others are yet to be invented. Our capacity for resilience and adaptation is incredible. We must continue to create, to project ourselves and, for some, to anticipate the recovery.

 

Don't hesitate to react, all ideas are good to share.

 

To help you in your efforts, write me at E.Depinay@g-i-m.com .

 

Eric Dépinay

-Research & Commercial Development Manager-