The Lifestream of Jon Moss

How Marketing with Meaning Can Save Pharma — Part 1

October 2 2009, 9:28pm

You know that I love hyperbole-sounding titles for my posts and today’s certainly appears to be no exception. But it is an exception. This isn’t an exaggeration. There’s no question that pharma is in trouble. There seems to be a scandal a minute (whether real or created). Billion dollar fines seem to be the norm instead of billion dollar products. Sales growth has stalled for many and workforce cuts seem to come everyday. That’s all pretty bad, but it doesn’t even capture the number one problem and it won’t come as a surprise to anyone: public opinion of pharma is terrible. Not just bad, terrible. As a regular user of Twitter, I use Tweetdeck and one of my columns shows every tweet with the word “pharma” in it. Today, I noticed this tweet:

I thought it was maybe just one anti-pharma zealot. Then I saw it again. And again. And again. In fact, after searching, I realized there were hundreds of this exact same tweet (see for yourself). Hundreds of tweets all with the same message: a pharma conspiracy. Pharma conspiracy theories aren’t new, but this one stood out for me. For those not familiar with the story, Natalie Morton was a 14 year-old in the UK who received a government-mandated injection of the cervical cancer vaccine and died hours after receiving it. In the UK, it’s mandatory for all teenage girls to receive the vaccination. For good reason too, it prevents a leading form of cancer, cervical cancer. A vaccine to prevent cancer. Imagine that. Back when Nixon declared a “War on Cancer” in 1971, how thrilled would be to know we had a vaccine to prevent one form of cancer? Instead today, it’s not seen that way at all. It’s just another pharma conspiracy to get more profits. Back to Natalie’s sad story. Immediately after Natalie’s death, several news organizations jumped on the story. Here’s what Huffington Post ran. It appeared to every anti-pharma person that they’d finally been vindicated. Here was big pharma’s vaccine killing a perfectly healthy girl. Of course, none of them mentioned that 1.8 million girls had already received the vaccine without a single death similar to Natalie’s reported. Of course, the anti-pharma outrage should have stopped today, when an autopsy was performed and found that Natalie died from complications of an undiagnosed tumor. The medical examiner reported the following: “The heart was heavily infiltrated by a tumor which extended to the left lung. It was so severe death could have arisen at any time. The role of the immunization appeared to be minimal.” End of story, right? Wrong. That’s when the tweets started. Rather than concede that the vaccination didn’t cause this girl’s death, she was used to infuse a little emotion into the anti-pharma zealots’ rhetoric. Yes, it’s really easy to fake a massive chest tumor during an autopsy. Why is it like this? Instead of praising pharma companies for potentially eliminating the approximately 11,000 incidences of cervical cancer each year and preventing about 4,000 deaths in the United States alone, “big pharma” gets beaten up. Why? No doubt there are countless reasons, some of which the industry has brought upon itself with some questionable marketing tactics and scandals followed by massive government fines. But this isn’t the only reason. People are very passionate about the cost of the medications (but not very passionate about the costs of the other aspects of their helathcare). Since most people don’t know what an MRI costs and many don’t pay for a dime of the cost of one, they don’t get upset when their insurance company gets the bill. But when you pick up your prescription at CVS and have to shell out your cash, it’s a different story. That makes people mad. Clearly, I’m not going to be the one to solve that problem. I’m not going to tell you I know how to completely fix all the PR issues pharma has. But I think we can make a dent. So, let’s look at three major pharma problems:

Horrible PR and public perception from  marketing tactics perceived as questionable No public belief in the cost to value equation for pharma products (i.e., people don’t think they should cost so much, which means they think the products aren’t worth it) Falling sales and profits

Question: Can Marketing with Meaning improve all three of these? Answer: Not overnight, but yes, it can. Question: Does pharma really need this now with all of its other challenges to worry about like patent issues, healthcare reform, and increased government scrutiny? Answer: Because of these challenges, there’s no better time. Interested? In part 2 of this post, I’ll tell you all about how Marketing with Meaning can do all this. In the meantime, you should read up on what Marketing with Meaning is all about. You can also register yourself for the upcoming E-Patient Connections conference where I’ll be presenting this concept (in 6 minutes and 40 seconds). If you do register, use promo code jr500 to get $500 off. Finally, a perk from this blog.

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