Pharma’s content conundrum

So, how do pharma’s primary customer group, HCPs, experience the industry’s content? Looking back at the customer experience (CX) picture that emerged post-COVID-19, there was a solid performance for pharma content overall. Industry information was generally well received, for the most part earning a ‘good’ rating in our research into the experiences the industry provides, but that masked some notable misses, and an ‘excellent’ rating is where content starts to make an impact.

For example, the content that HCPs reported receiving most often delivered subpar experiences. In particular, the high volume of prescription and dosage information that was sent their way tended not to delight HCPs and it then also faced further struggles to connect with the intended audience when only digital channels were used to deliver it.  Another of the ‘standard’ types of content that pharma produces, formulary information, faced more pronounced difficulties, with HCPs judging it just ‘fair’ at meeting their needs.

Alongside this, other issues occur. HCPs also often reported not receiving the content they wanted from pharma companies. In our 2022 global CX study there were notable content gaps around new clinical data and new indication information, where at least half of HCPs surveyed said they had not received these types of content, but nine of ten would have wanted to do so.

Naturally pharma companies can’t afford not to focus on their products, and marketers should love their brands. However, content is often created for its own sake and plugged into a tactical plan that can be very campaign focused. Needless to say, this doesn’t quite equate to taking a holistic view of the customer experience.

‘Commercial organisations must look past brand-centric approaches and produce the content that HCPs actually want and need’

Instead, commercial organisations must look past such brand-centric approaches and produce the content that HCPs actually want and need, and to the standard they expect. Anything less will continue to hold back companies from becoming more customer-centric.

As companies travel along their own paths towards being more customer-centric, they will face pressing and mounting problems with content. One of these will be issues with content volume and there are already warning signs of this. Increases in digital engagement will see companies become less and less reliant on a single preeminent engagement channel, requiring them to execute customer-based planning that starts with the customers and think about their journey.

Those customer journeys will, by their nature, involve more touchpoints. Where pharma engagement typically is skewed towards a small handful of channels, HCPs – as a whole – have far more wide-ranging tastes, with individuals having preferences across the full spectrum of engagement channels. From a customer experience perspective this is a huge challenge for companies, requiring consistently high levels of CX across all the channels they use. Moreover, the experience will typically be managed by more than one team. Another variable is that different customers have different content needs. So even within a single journey, three different customer groups could still require three different content experiences, because they fall into different persona groups. This adds further pressure to the teams behind these experiences.

However, global pharma operations are often not set up to manage the looming exponential expansion of content needs. For companies pursuing a global-to-local model of content production, this can create tensions at the affiliate level, where those tasked with delivering content to the end customers often can’t create the volume required under current structures, or perceive the content as not ‘local’ enough. Factor in the need to streamline the medical, legal and regulatory process, accelerate content localisation, increase content reuse and speed up content creation, and the scale of the challenge starts to emerge.

Working out where to go next requires a clear-sighted review of a company’s content model and maturity. This should assess global-to-local processes, and analyse the content life cycle and its enablers, such as taxonomies, claim libraries, business approval rules, tier reviews and content systems. The implications of such a benchmarking exercise go far beyond content and can also positively impact approaches to data, channels and indeed anything that is customer-facing.

The interlocking needs for increased content quality, volume and structures also have a significant impact on pharma companies’ digital transformations.

Although the management and coordination of content are core capabilities for pharma organisations, in our research they consistently have one of the lowest levels of maturity.

Put simply, content is difficult and it seems to be getting more difficult. This is perhaps not helped by it often being easier to focus on the immediate needs of the ‘on-stage’ engagement channels pharma uses. There’s an ease to visualising how to use email, webinars or websites that can become far more nebulous when considering content, despite those channels being useless without it.

November 2022 was AI’s ‘big bang’ as the public launch of ChatGPT brought generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) into the pharma mainstream at unparalleled speed. The appearance of technology that could be applied to business tasks while also having simpler consumer applications ignited a groundswell of general enthusiasm for Gen AI.  Now, after a year or more of running pilots, pharma companies are starting to refine where they will place their bets on how to really put Gen AI to work.

Marketing and medical content, and their associated processes, will help prove the case for Gen AI and the hopes are it will tackle several of the issues outlined above. These should include:

• Volume: greater content in and of itself cannot be the aim. Instead, organisations should target content that is purposeful and right for the audience
• Personalisation: differentiation for pharma has been a struggle, with no one company yet taking the lead in how it customises its use of content to an individual HCP. AI will offer tools for personalisation and even hyper-personalisation
• Content workflow: from content creation, transcreation, delivery and performance to creative personalisation and beyond, it is possible to have a full Gen AI-powered content factory
• Approvals: the bottlenecks faced by medical, legal and regulatory (MLR) reviewers could be alleviated by using AI to assist their content approvals, which should in turn lead to faster speed-to-market of content.

Ultimately, pharma’s content conundrum is how to create more content, better content and faster content. This will need a re-evaluation of the campaign-driven engagement approach – which is generally used across the industry because it is simple, relatively streamlined and gives content purpose. It certainly isn’t the only way to run content operations and it may not be the right way to do so.

However, the root cause of pharma’s content problem sits in the fact that actual customer-centricity has not been fully realised.

Companies’ omnichannel planning and customer engagement frameworks can translate content into campaign plans and flows, but the company that has fully reduced silos – geographical or departmental – and has everyone looking at the same customer data and following optimised content approval processes comfortably would be a rarity.

A concrete step towards customer-centricity would be for companies to stop targeting their customers with unwanted content assets and look for ways to reduce the burden of content ‘chores’ that brand teams face through effective content strategies that can transform the entire content life cycle.

For all the rhetoric around customer-centricity, it is going to be a slow journey away from product-centric messaging towards fully relevant content that customers want, but it’s a vital one if organisations are going to fulfil their omnichannel ambitions. Within this, content excellence should be seen as an enabler of omnichannel marketing and one that can provide the key piece of the ‘right customer, right channel, right content, right time’ mantra.

But, unless pharma can anchor its conception of ‘content’ in cold hard reality, it will continue to take an insubstantial approach that produces ephemeral results. Solving the content conundrum will require a healthy dose of technology, new process and bringing people together on a journey of change.

Dominic Tyer is a Research Director at DT Consulting, an Indegene company