Pharmaceutical Laboratory

The cleverness of CP+B’s “More Than Medication” campaign is 50% in the content that’s there, and 50% in the content that isn’t. Missing are the saccharine smiles, ridiculous athletic feats and idyllic dalliances of perfectly healthy people that never took the medication they’re purporting to be endorsing. Rather than portraying people who could be anyone (or, sadly, no one), these ads are the antithesis. “More Than Medication” is about life—mundane, radiant, lifechanging, heartbreaking. Through all of these milestones, Pfizer is attempting to build relationships one person at a time, and be a valuable presence in their healthy lives at their most important stages. Only time will tell if the campaign pays dividends, but as advertising strategy, it’s brilliant. Pharmaceutical companies rely on wholescale batch assembly at every stage of development, from searching for molecules as drug candidates, to researching them, to the mass production thereof. In fact, the fermentation tanks developed by Pfizer that enabled the first-ever mass production of penicillin during World War II became a national historic landmark in 2008. This doesn’t dictate that pharmaceutical ads must follow the same standard operating protocol.

Beyond “reinventing” pharmaceutical advertising, the “More Than Medication” campaign taps into an important (and growing) wellness zeitgeist being embraced by the professional and private health care sectors. Within the last few years, emphasis has shifted significantly from medication to meditation, pills to pilates, and technology to tofu. Individual preventitive care, including eating habits, exercise, healthfulness beyond chemicals, and individual responsibility, has been gaining momentum as a critical component of modern medicine, nowhere more than in how it is advertised. Kaiser Permanente’s enormously successful and popular “Thrive” campaign, recently expanded to the tune of $53 million, has echoes the welness call to arms of Canada’s “More Than Medication” spots. Internal documents indicate that the 2004 campaign was launched to combat a declining membership of 150,000 in a similarly reviled industry (health insurance). The initially modest reach has since expanded to print, outdoors, television and radio.

Pfizer supplemented their television spots with an interactive website that offers resources for individuals and their families, including eating better, strengthening mind and body, practical life tips, and places to find help to achieve these goals. In doing do, the pharmaceutical behemoth rebrands themselves as in touch, personally connected on an individual level and convey that they care about their patients’ health even if it means never having to take one of their medications.

Le groupe pharmaceutique Sanofi a étudié une délocalisation de son siège parisien à Londres ou aux Etats-Unis, un projet qu'aurait bloqué le président du conseil d'administration Serge Weinberg, écrit Le Journal du Dimanche.

MM. Daniel Cohen et Thierry Verdier,

le « business model » de la pharmacie tend à scinder de façon de plus en plus nette les différentes étapes du processus. Les innovations sont laissées à des « start-up » innovantes, les grands laboratoires prenant en charge le développement et la commercialisation de la molécule. La recherche comprend la phase d'identification des cibles, de criblage, d'optimisation des prototypes et les examens pré-cliniques. Le développement comporte toutes les phases en aval, jusqu'au dépôt du dossier »50(*).

healthcare practitioners (HCPs)

1. Managed care-driven2. Patient-driven3. Technology-driven

The following questions are being tested in industry research to better characterize the new influences and to set up more insightful metrics of brand performance: How does the influence affect the strength of the relationship between the prescriber, company, and brand?  Can relationships with HCPs be strengthened by indirect influences, such as social media?  Regular assessment of relationship strength and corresponding value delivered is critical for brands operating under new commercial models. How does the influence support or contradict the brand's value proposition?  One metric to consider is believability of the brand's message in light of new influences being exercised. For example, peer-to-peer experiential dialog via the Internet may substantiate or significantly weaken the brand's claims. A metric of "customer alignment" is required and can be quantified by mining the dialog. To what extent does the influence help or hurt company communication and education efforts, including personal promotion?  The emergence of widely accessible technologies for sharing information has the potential to spread incomplete, biased, or worse, inaccurate information, which may change the nature of discussions between reps and HCPs. Field organizations must understand and address misconceptions and objections that develop more quickly in today's highly-connected environment. At the heart of today's influences are two related goals: containing costs and understanding comparative effectiveness. Measurement programs need to consider both these drivers to effectively evaluate brand performance. Measuring the impact of a pharmaceutical