The increasing (?) role of digital in Pharma

It is heartening to see that Pharma marketers have finally decided to include digital into their marketing mix. Even if catalysed by Covid, this is good news. Evan Schwartz called it “digital darwinism” – a phenomenon that caused technology to evolve faster than the society which adopts it. The average Indian Pharma marketer has evolved […]

An unused tool in the marketing armamentarium

Many years ago, lived a lazy king who enjoyed a life of merriment. Finally, the good life got to him and the morbidly fat king went deep into the jungles to his guru to seek a solution. The wise sage gave him a medicine and asked him specifically NOT to think of an elephant when […]

Contemporise the Pharma Marketing Code

The code of conduct for ethical pharmaceutical marketing was not designed for a world of data, software, and artificial intelligence. Already under severe pressure from COVID-19 and the changes that will lie in its wake, it is utterly inadequate to face the four main challenges that new technologies pose. The code of conduct for ethical […]

Feedback on the Webinar Series

“Digitally Engaging Customers” – the webinar series has successfully completed one batch and is halfway into the second batch. We will complete the second batch on May 10th and begin the third batch on May 16th. For those of you who are interested in first-hand feedback of participants, here are some testimonials that I received. […]

Webinar Series: Digitally Engaging Customers

An online course on digital marketing spread out over five days. With the lockdown threatening to extend over the next few days or weeks, pharma companies are losing contact with key customers. Desperate to keep in touch, pharma is attempting a digital outreach, which sans a coherent strategy, results in random acts of digital which […]

WFH : Empathy and Experience

Work From Home (WFH) is a pretty new experience for a vast majority of the Pharma world, especially since it now involves the field force as well. This is as much a necessity as it is unprecedented which leaves one wondering how the industry will emerge when all the dust settles down. At the moment, […]

Saving lives through a digital nudge

Recently while mentoring a digital health start up that I invested in, the founder asked me a very interesting question. He was curious about the potential role/interest for pharma in the use of digital tools to hand-hold patients through their chronic diseases. This is a very important question and one that fundamentally displays the difference […]

Platforms and Patient Centricity

Today, a pharma executive said he was proud of the patient-centricity that he inculcated in his team. I asked him if his team would recommend a competitor’s brand to a patient who couldn’t afford theirs, or point the patient to a better doctor who didn’t Rx their brand? Would they walk his talk? If they […]

Data, Distribution and Discounts: E-pharmacies and Pharma

Pharma and healthcare organizations need to constantly revisit their company culture and its agility to respond to policy changes. Enabling culture to embrace such change is technology and innovation. Industry, needs to invest in and work alongside enterprising startups in order to yield strategic dividends. One such collaboration was in the news today. Although speculative, […]

Differentiation through Customer Engagement and Experience

At the IDMA Marketing and Sales Conference in Mumbai last week, I spoke on “Using digital to create customer engagement’ – a topic close to my heart. I began by talking about how customer engagement is a topic that pharma discusses in posters glued on office walls, on slides of senior executives and in leisure. […]