The New Rules of Pharma Marketing

Basing marketing strategies on relationships with doctors won’t suffice anymore. Sea changes in the pharmaceutical industry are prompting a total rewrite of the marketing playbook.

One doesn’t need a thermometer to take the temperature of contemporary rhetoric against the pharmaceutical industry. The white-hot title of author and physician Ben Goldacre’s 2012 book Bad Pharma: How Medicine Is Broken, and How We Can Fix It says it all. Bristling with outrageous examples of slanted or suppressed research and corrupt marketing and sales tactics, Goldacre’s book paints a picture of a hopelessly wayward medical industry awash in dirty money.

“He shines a light on the more negative aspects of the industry, which do exist,” says Marcel Corstjens, The Unilever Chaired Professor of Marketing at INSEAD. “Some marketing and sales practices are unethical; some research is misused.” But the animus expressed toward Big Pharma these days is at an unfair level, Corstjens suggests. “No industry is snow-white. There are issues in the food industry, around obesity, in the tobacco industry, and in the financial services industry with the global economic crisis…The world would have been a worse place without big pharma.”

Pharma Sales Will Reach $1 Trillion in 2014

The Intellectual Property and Science business of Thomson Reuters released its annual synopsis of pharmaceutical industry trends in its 2014 Pharmaceutical R&D Factbook, compiled by CMR International, a Thomson Reuters business. The report found a number of positive trends across the biopharmaceutical landscape—including an all-time high in pharmaceutical sales and an increase in new molecular entities (NMEs) and in drugs successfully completing late-stage clinical trials—that contradict industry perceptions of a decline in R&D productivity. The CMR Factbook includes data on R&D pipeline volume, success rates, cycle times, regional comparisons, therapeutic areas, generic drugs, and other areas. 

Reuters' researchers reported that global pharmaceutical sales reached an all-time high of approximately $980 billion in 2013 and are expected to rise to $1 trillion this year. The rate of growth declined in 2013 compared to previous years, however, due to the expiration of patent protection on a number of blockbuster drugs in markets dominated by lower-cost generic equivalents.