Ahead of the game; breaking the mould in pharma.

Pharmaceutical industry has its typical behaviours, its intricacies, its believes and its dogmas just as much as any other industry. In this little article I intend to challenge and question some of those and maybe start a discussion with you.  Our environment and customer universe are changing. Changing in a different way than many companies believe. That means that we are most likely training our people to do things that don’t work, marketing our products in ways that don’t resonate with our customers and we ask them to do things they probably don’t want to do. Whilst we do a lot of market research and have large data mining departments trying to figure out patient pathways, we end up not really knowing what to do with the results or interpreting them in a way that fits our believes and dogmas and our ‘experience’.  Despite all the data available about prescriptions, formularies, pathways, we stil cannot work out when patients are on combination therapies. When the...

Advisory boards in pharma seem to be a subject of many debates in every company. Countless boardroom debates fuelled by many PMCPA verdicts about companies that tried to turn them into another promotional vehicle by the way they presented the data and the number of people invited or did so many of them that one could wonder how often you need to ask the same advise .... not good and not smart.  Compliance plays a big role but maybe that is because we have actually moved away significantly from the original concept: I have a question or a problem and I would like to ask your help solving it or creating a strategy. I am the first person to push the boundaries on these things but with advisory boards I want to go totally against the grain and argue for a return to proper advisory board basics (check the ' Advisory Board Architects ' by the way for a nice view on these things and a little help). Send your advisors the stuff that you want them to think about beforehand and if they...

I have created this blog in an effort to inspire all those pharma marketers and sales people out there to start doing things a little bit differently in a world where it is difficult to be original and stand out. A world where being seen and viewed should not be about who shouts the loudest. A world where every pharma company seems to be struggling with social media, websites that actually deliver value to patients or customers, decreasing access to customers, apparently increasing compliance frameworks and generally more competition. Competition from other pharma companies and also from technology companies, startups, social media, payers, insurance companies, private healthcare, shambolic imposters and fake medicines, online pharmacies and services, apps.  How do you get noticed? Do you have the ideas to get noticed? Do you have the balls to get noticed? Do you actually want to get no...