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In the early stages of launching a new pharmaceutical product or medical device, the relationship between marketing and research and development is crucial, according to Francine Gordon, senior manager of global pharmaceutical planning & strategy at Abbott Laboratories.
“If you don’t have a marriage between marketing and R & D as early as preclinical and phase one, you’re going to have a problem,” she said. “In phase two you’re starting to do advocacy trials. If you haven’t looked at the competitive environment, how can you sell that product in the future?”
Gordon was among panelists who spoke about branding, strategy, and pharmaceutical development at Gleacher Center November 15. The event that was hosted by GSB BioPharma, a group run by students in the Evening MBA and Weekend MBA Programs.
In the early stages, companies must utilize doctors as “thought leaders” in the process, said Doug Wick, ’05, manager at Closerlook, Inc., a Chicago-based marketing communications firm. “There are a lot of physicians who are more prone to talk to us and easier to get a hold of,” Wick said. “We try to build relationships with people who don’t already have relationships with the pharmaceutical companies.”
Called KOLs, or “key opinion leaders,” those doctors go a step further, often traveling and addressing groups of sales representatives at dinners and other events, Wick said. “Often times we’ll have streaming videos of their presentations available online to extend their influence,” he said. “We pick them because they are influential and they’ve been involved early on in this process.”
Most physicians strongly value their objectivity and don’t want to feel like they’re “being bought” by pharmaceutical companies, Wick said. “There is a lot of movement in the market now, especially in teaching hospitals, where they won’t allow anybody to accept anything from a pharmaceutical rep, even a pencil or a pad of paper,” he said. “However, physicians want content. They want to learn what’s coming on the market. They want to understand the advantages and disadvantages of different products. They want to see the studies.”
The pricing systems for pharmaceuticals and for medical devices are completely disparate, Gordon said. For pharmaceuticals, prices increase by about 3 percent each year during the life of the product’s patent, but with devices, the price is dropped every year, Gordon said.
“With pharma, you’re whole life is the patent. How much can you maximize the value of what you’ve got within that life?” she explained. “But in devices, it’s not that simple. It’s, ‘When do I need to put the next generation of the product out?’ Every year some devices offer a new and improved version of the product. That’s a very, very different mentality. The device world is moving more quickly to the market, because there is such a need from this position for a next generation.”
GSB BioPharma chose Wick and Gordon to hear representatives across different disciplines within the industry, said Bhavini Shah, group co-chair. “Health care is one of the fastest growing areas and marketing is just one component of it,” she said. “A big part of the story is how these companies get innovations to market and how they get them to the end user.”
—Phil Rockrohr