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When you hang out a shingle as a full-service healthcare communications company, you must be prepared to offer fully integrated marketing and communications products and services. That translates into some fairly block-and-tackle kinds of offerings, including an ability to provide online and traditional off-line promotional solutions that work synergistically to meet an objective. Also, the agency must be compliance-ready, armed with an up-to-the-minute understanding of FDA promotional guidelines.

In our line of work, three things matter: patients, speed, and transparency. Ultimately, everything we do is about patient care. Whatever the medical condition, our work encompasses mobilizing health professionals for the good of society. Our level of responsibility to that patient care mission must never be compromised. At the same time, we live in a make-it-easy world, dominated by information overload, and our charge is to deliver the important health imperatives in a timely and accessible manner.

Marketing biologics is smaller, leaner, and more data-driven than traditional pharma. With the focus often on specialist physicians and on patient populations in the tens of thousands-or even thousands-direct and digital media are the primary outreach channels over advertising and print. In our experience with biologics, advertising is a low priority compared to the Web, medical meetings, and alternative media. Sometimes there's no advertising at all.

Relationship marketing can be a platform for doing lots of different things. It can be your platform for messaging to multiple constituents. So you can have a relationship with physicians, with the allied healthcare professionals in the office, with the consumers, even with managed care. And if you're smart, you can weave those together into a more cohesive plan. You can do integrated marketing communications via relationship marketing because it has so many abilities and different touch points. You can do online, off-line, call center, direct selling, whatever. So you can really have a more holistic view of your customer and your communication strategy. It's a springboard for the whole promise of Web 2.0 and the communities and advocates. Relationship marketing is perfectly suited to trying to build that kind of stuff-consumer-directed content.

Everyone wants to be a market leader and innovator, but no one wants to take a risk that could cost them their job. While there is a tremendous interest in strategies that leverage Web 2.0, we have yet to see the kind of traction one might expect given the surrounding media frenzy and accompanying client demand. Most of it is very safe, and does not fully take advantage of what Web 2.0 is all about-collaboration, community, and consumer-generated content.

The expectations I had of agencies when I was a client and those of our clients today are very similar. The agency was expected to be a partner in determining the best overall strategies and positioning, which drove the creative executions. However, many agencies today seem to be searching for a growing range of services to offer their clients. As long as the services are communications-focused, they will be seen as complementary and will be appreciated. If they are not communications-focused, then the challenge for the agency will be to demonstrate value and avoid diluting the core capabilities upon which it was founded.

Trust is one of the great intangibles in the agency–client relationship. It probably affects the choice of an agency in the first place. With trust comes loyalty, and with loyalty comes a willingness to take the kinds of risks that lead to truly breakthrough ideas, without fear of penalty and failure.

To paraphrase a candidate from a long-ago political season: It's the science, stupid. Yes, access to good (hopefully great) creative is still a baseline expectation of clients. But it's just the beginning, and the distillation of insights into effective creative can carry agencies and brands only so far these days. In this environment, there is an enormous burden of proof that must be met to build belief and sustain confidence in new and existing products. That burden can be met only with a broad-based, intensive focus on science and medicine. That places a premium on the work that has traditionally been the domain of strategic science and medical education agencies. The difference for agencies today is that they must embrace new creative approaches and multichannel technologies to deliver solid science programs in a digital world. The product visual aid isn't dead, but it is diminished and simply can't shoulder the weight it has in the past.

When was the last time you met with an ad agency that was asked to participate on boards for biotech and in assisting commercialization initiatives? When was the last time you sat down to have a drink with your agency, and they told you about the next generation of bone morphogenic protein clinicals and the marketing opportunities it will provide tomorrow? An agency will never hold the industry knowledge that those in the industry personally hold. But the agency to invest in should likewise be investing in you ... working to understand your complex industry, not just the audience.

Imagine a wheel with the patient at the hub: Surrounding and connecting the patient is the drug itself, wellness information, the physician, and the patient community. Promoting a brand effectively and responsibly means weaving a product into the community so that it plays a role in the patient's life beyond the drug. This sense of responsibility to the ultimate well-being of patients creates long-lasting trust.

How do you convince a brand manager to try a new or unproven approach? Who will be the guinea pig and invest in Web 2.0, or any of the other programs like online sampling and virtual speaker programs? New programs may get a lot of buzz, but implementing them takes a client willing to assume some risk. When a client really needs to focus their resources, we advise them to first do what is tried and true. There is a time for innovation, but there is also a time for doing what you know works.

Pharmaceutical and healthcare marketers must relinquish greater control to the user; this is a seismic shift in thinking. As an industry, pharma must regain credibility by allowing users to guide their experiences with branded and unbranded content. By using digital communications as a tool to increase transparency and stimulate patient advocacy, healthcare marketers are able to be increasingly innovative in their approach to community interaction and information delivery.

There are some pretty basic tenets for a successful agency–client relationship: Underpromise and overdeliver with your customers (physicians, managed care organizations, etc.); Take the time to do your homework before rushing to production; Don't compare your results to the most recent market-maker; Be realistic yet aggressive in your expectations for your brand.

The healthcare advertising industry has been slow to respond to the evolution in the needs of pharmaceutical companies. In many ways, we still have a one-size-fits-all approach to contracting with our clients. This has made it easy for the procurement departments to standardize scopes of service, compare one company to the next, and cut off the outliers, thus resulting in lower fees.

Companies have spent a lot of money over the past 10 years on banner ads, Web sites, e-media planning and buying, but the big payoff-pens to Rx pads-hasn't been there. Companies are looking for someone to solve it. Someone to say: "This is how you build a virtual relationship with a patient." "This is how you build a virtual relationship with a physician." And finally, "This is how you make these relationships work for your brand."

What clients really want is to be able to control the message. And the message is hard to control when a lot of different touchpoints are manipulating a brand. Agencies can open the door to social media, but they have to be advised on the pluses and minuses.

Creativity isn't just defined by the "campaign." Creativity needs to be applied holistically across all aspects of the clients' businesses. That can include improving efficiencies and coordinating sales messaging, as well as programming across an entire portfolio and ensuring new media channels are used effectively.

Evidence-based science will always trump marketing fluff. Companies should invest their resources into developing initiatives that will uncover the science. That's what truly differentiates their products. Marketing campaigns developed around evidence-based science are viewed as more credible, and the companies behind them are perceived as acting more responsibly. Pharma companies should explore tailored, one-to-one communication to introduce brands, enhance compliance, and build loyalties.

New Pharm Exec Europe supplement explores how sales reps' thinking and behaviour can really be changed.

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Keeshia Muhammad

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