Pharmaceutical MarketingLatest insights, challenges, solutions and trends

This series will cover some of the pharmaceutical specific aspects of marketing within life sciences, providing an insight into a highly complex industry. The pharmaceutical industry operates within a peculiarly political environment in which the most frequent payer, within advanced economies, is the government. It is also one of the... read moremost highly regulated industries and as such this regulatory framework provides specific challenges for marketers.

The pharmaceutical industry is currently under severe pressure. Rising sales and marketing costs, reduced R&D productivity, diminishing returns from the traditionally representative dominated promotion model, government and insurance company cost containment measures, product quality issues and increased public scrutiny into industry marketing activities all point to a rapidly evolving and, at times, hostile environment.

Great care has to be taken to ensure that all marketing messages are consistent with regulatory and industry guidelines as well as the clinical data. Activities that used to be representative based have become the responsibility of medical affairs departments. Some direct interactions with patients are allowed in the US, via direct to consumer advertising (DTCa), but in the rest of the world great care has to be taken to avoid inappropriate promotion.

The aim of this series on life science marketing is threefold:

• To explain the specific nature of pharmaceutical marketing, its challenges and the environment in which life science marketing has to operate.

• To build knowledge of marketing strategies and tactics applicable to and used in the pharmaceutical industry, as well as highlight some of the differences seen when consumer goods marketing is taken into account.

• To advance understanding of real-time challenges in this industry