FiercePharma | Beth Snyder Bulik
Pharma and healthcare aren't
just thinking about patients anymore. They're thinking about customers.
It's a shift similar to
what happened in the tech world in the late ‘80s, says Scott Rabschnuk, who
leads Hill Holliday Health. He worked in technology industry marketing in
the ‘90s, when tech companies still called the people they served “end users,”
a patronizing term that suggested an industry dominated by experts with
little interest in the humans at the end of the line, he said.
For pharma and healthcare
marketers now, the tech industry's evolution from treating customers
as a faceless mass of end users to considering their input as consumers can be
translated to the shift these days toward addressing patients directly.
Yesterday's patients, who only got pharma information filtered through their
doctors, are today’s informed consumers who actively participate in their own
healthcare—and shouldn't be ignored. Pharma marketers have had to become better
at creating more consumer-marketing customer relationships, Rabshnuk said.