Back to the future

Social media stories are everywhere now and a lot of marketers are worried that if they don't have a social media strategy then they are losing a valuable marketing space. According to an article in Fortune almost 70% of of marketing social media programs are doomed to fail. Most pharma companies have not made the leap into social media yet for good reason: do consumers really want to engage pharma companies in conversation and can that conversation be attributed to ROI?

Let's step back a moment and look at the marketing environment. This is the worst economic period since the great depression. As a result consumers are spending less, have less to spend and going to the doctor less. According to Consumer Reports almost 70% of those patients that get an Rx are either not filling it, splitting tablets, or engaging in some other non-compliant behavior.

The growth numbers for social media are stunning but remember that people are spending a lot more time at home now, are angry and want to vent, and are using social media for to stay in touch with friends. Some marketers have a major presence on social media sites but the debate about ROI (i.e. linking to sales) is still up for serious debate.

So should pharma experiment with social media programs? Well first there has to be a fundamental change in the way pharma looks at marketing of prescription drugs. Marketing today is not about products it's about relationships and the relationship between consumers and big pharma is broken. The change from product to relationship starts with complete transparency on all levels of the organization. This is a new concept for pharma and they have to tread lightly because there are a swarm of sharks ,known as the legal profession, who would like nothing better than for pharma to admit a new side effect for drug currently on the market. Still pharma's efforts to reach out to current customers has been dismal at best. It would be easy to build a database of customers to update them on ongoing clinical trials and allow patients to share information and tips but then the legal and regulatory people would need megadoses of Maalox.

This gets me back to my original point: do consumers want to have a relationship with big pharma? The answer to that is if the relationship is beneficial then YES. How can it be beneficial? Pharma has a lot of medical expertise in the form of thought leaders and inhouse medical people. Consumers want access to these people because they don't often get the time to truly have a conversation with physicians. Chain drugs have tried to enhance the patient-pharmacist relationship but it can be embarrassing to talk about your prescription while others wait on line.

DTC marketers are seeing huge budget cuts now and they have to ensure that every dollar they have goes to drive business. They can try and educate and inform senior executives that marketing has moved from product to conversation but that discussion is always going to come back to "what's the ROI". Until senior management understands the change in marketing pharma will just dabble in social media and until they understand that it's what of value to the patient/customer not marketer that drives the conversation we'll just be headed back to the future.