Julie guesses that she, funded by her pharmaceutical company, would spend upwards of $3,500 per month on supplying free breakfasts or lunches to hungry medical professionals.
And she was not the only one. Everyday sales representatives from competing drug companies brought an array of gastrointestinal delights and white gloved them to a doctor’s Anywhere USA doorstep. Julie says in one doctor’s office, free lunch every day (supplied by reps) was listed as a hiring perk on signing documents.
For most of Julie’s stint as a pharma rep, her standard sales tool kit consisted of food (to get in the door), dosing guides, assessment sheets, brochures, giveaways, samples and more. But flash forward to today. And all that’s left to sell with is a rep’s therapeutic and scientific knowledge as it relates to a particular disease state, scientific and educational materials and his or her charming personality.
With chicken salad sandwiches and promotional pens off the table, the pharmaceutical industry must now figure out a new way to connect with physicians and patients by relying on communication techniques like pharmaceutical content marketing.
By definition, “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
The two most significant words here are “relevant” and “valuable.” Relevant and valuable content stands above all others, plus it begins to build a trust between the consumer of the content and pharmaceutical company creating it. Clearly, there is an imminent need (now more then ever) for companies like Contrast Creative who understand how blending strategic integrated content across multi-channel communications can increase brand engagement, brand loyalty and cost efficiency in an industry facing multiple barriers notwithstanding regulatory issues alone.
So How Did We Get Here?
It’s true that prescribing physicians, who are increasingly strapped for time with pressure to see as many patients as possible, are less and less interested in spending one minute let alone five minutes meeting with a pharma sales rep. But the issue is not time alone. With the advent of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, manufacturers of drugs, medical devices and biologicals that participate in U.S. federal health care programs must report certain payments and items of value given to physicians and teaching hospitals.
Most payments or gifts in excess of $10 made to physicians must be reported on a yearly basis under the Sunshine Act. Those payments will be available to the public for review starting September 30th 2014. And this has some doctors very concerned.
Physicians are worried that the publicly reported data could be incorrect, since they will not be the ones reporting the information to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The reporting is solely in the hands of the drug companies. The reality of this situation is making some physicians feel at risk of having records misconstrued or misrepresented by the public and CMS.
Some physicians, as a protection mechanism, are starting to think it might be best to cut off all communication with pharmaceutical companies and their sales reps, but this is dangerous too. Doctors could lose out on receiving valuable product safety and labeling information that would benefit their patients.
Drug companies like GlaxoSmithKline are beginning to make drastic changes to their sales and marketing approach with GSK becoming one of the first drug companies to end paid-speaker programs as of December 2013, which essentially paid doctors to promote its products, a practice that was criticized because it could potentially lead them to prescribe medications inappropriately to patients. Additionally in 2015, Glaxo will no longer pay sales representatives based on the number of prescriptions doctors write.
Glaxo has said it will pay sales reps based on things like their technical knowledge and service quality provided to clients to improve patient care, which become intangibles especially if a sales representative no longer has the ability to even have a fleeting conversation with a physician.
With the free bagel left stale on the shelf, the conundrum is clear. How can the pharmaceutical industry legally promote and communicate the on-label use of their products to physicians and patients? And what emerging media channels and platforms will work best to engage and feed their information-hungry customers? We look forward to meeting the challenge with targeted pharmaceutical content marketing.