Today’s increasingly digital society is causing an evolution in pharma marketing strategies. Numerous digital channels have sprung up due to technological advancements, and they are changing doctors’ and patients’ habits. Digital platforms such as emails, digital ads, and paid search are available for pharma companies to target doctors based on their preferences.1 These channels are not deployed to substitute traditional channels, but as part of a synergistic multi-channel marketing strategy, to complement them.2
The Life Sciences analytics industry is progressing each day with AI/ML driven technologies and the exploding healthcare data, which is expected to cross 2,314 exabytes by 20201. New databases are emerging from sources like patient claims & electronic medical records (EMRs), social media, and digital channels. Stakeholders’ preferences are evolving as well, with pharma sales reps finding healthcare physicians (HCPs) more challenging to reach.
The flavour of the season, nay the flavour of the year in India is heavy discounting. If you look at online retail, there are deep discounts being offered on goods and services. The discounts are no longer restricted to FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) ones alone, but span across healthcare products, consumer durables, consumer electronics and even fashion accessories. If you look at modern retail stores – they indulge in full page advertising in newspapers with details of item-wise discounts to entice consumers to descend in hordes, often stretching their fragile systems and processes to points of near breakdown. There is a mob mentality, which has clouded the thinking of even the most rational and astute of retail strategists in the country: If there is no sale, there is no sell – that seems to be the morale of the story.
