In the ten plus years I have worked in the pharma sector I’ve seen it come a long way, with the breadth, quality and impact of our marketing and communications improving year-on-year. Andrew Binns, head judge for the Communiqué Creative Excellence Award, agrees. “I get to see some of the very best, most impactful and strategic work our industry produces. Year-on-year I have seen improvements in the campaigns pharma is developing. There’s generally around 10% of submissions that fall into the outstanding category and that percentage is increasing. I’m seeing more creativity, innovation and forward-thinking than ever before.”

So what is fuelling this progressive growth in the marketing efforts of pharma and how can we bottle it and accelerate it further? For me, the gradual acceptance of a more human-centric approach to marketing and stakeholder engagement has certainly helped – a school of thought that was once the domain of a few passionate advocates, but which has now thankfully become much more mainstream within the sector. I’d even go as far to say that a key driver of this has been the steady stream of talent and experience coming from outside the industry.

Okay, so that might be a little biased and contentious, especially coming from someone who started working in health communications after ten years in the consumer and tech sectors. But I am not alone in thinking that we still have much to learn from other sectors.

Welcoming new hires from outside of the pharmaceutical industry and embracing people from different sectors and backgrounds, and the insights they bring, was one of the key recommendations of the 2019 Healthcare Communications Association (HCA) Cannes or Canned? report. Edel McCaffrey, HCA board member and one of the driving forces behind the report, said: “Our call to action was born out of frustration that we could be doing better as a healthcare sector and that communicators can take a pivotal role in helping catalyse greater innovation. We drew on experience from the worlds of banking, fashion retail, toy marketing and AI to challenge ourselves to change.”

Similarly, David Flynn, Corporate Communications Lead at Roche, has long been championing the need to better look beyond health and the need for a mix of different experiences. He said: “For some time now, we’ve been actively switching between hiring someone from our industry and then hiring someone from outside – this really helps ensure we don’t get stuck in a healthcare bubble. Not only have they brought a completely different perspective, but more importantly, it’s created a more creative culture within the team.”

While I am a big advocate of tapping into other sectors, that doesn’t mean they always get it right. We can always learn from their mistakes too. I started my career working on the account for a well-known stout brand at the height of its advertising glory. Among other things, one of our roles was to create ‘buzz’ around the new ads. To be honest, for the most part it was like shooting fish in a barrel, such was the anticipation from the media and public. Over the years, we’d see a progression of brand managers step up. Many had been through the graduate scheme. They’d watched and learned from those that had gone before them and they were all fixated on getting the chance to do ‘their ad’ and have their moment in the sun. But there was a growing problem. The ads were becoming harder to do. A mix of changes around responsible drinking guidelines, the creative bar being so high, and the emergence of new digital channels, meant that they began creating more bizarre creative concepts to try and stand out. The cultural fixation on creating the next hero ad, because that’s the way it had always been, meant that they had lost sight of the bigger picture. They’d forgotten that their job was ultimately selling pints. The real brief should have been: ‘How do we finally translate years of brand adoration into product sales?’

Getting to the heart of the brief (or even to the real brief) is probably the single most impactful thing we can do as communicators. It’s something the consumer world is often very good at and an area we should tap into. When marketers become complacent in their familiarity of a task or audience, they stop asking questions, being curious, or challenging and just ‘do what they did before’. Interrogating a brief is the start of the journey to finding our nuggets – the kind that can completely transform the way we approach a problem or challenge.

One example of this is a recent project I worked on in rare diseases. For this acute, visually debilitating and potentially life-threatening condition, a patient’s QoL and the burden of disease has always been measured in frequency of episodes. Lots per month = bad. Few per year = good. It is entrenched in clinical practice, health economic assessment methodologies and as such is the major focus of pharmaceutical product value propositions. But through exploring this further, it became clear that this totally failed to consider the reality for patients. Sure, lots of episodes are bad, but so is living in fear of one. Rather than seeing five episodes per year and saying that patient is okay, what if we looked at the impact of the 360 days of them living in fear of one? Not being able to hold down a job due to fear. Not going on dates due to fear. Never being spontaneous due to fear. Challenging the accepted reality led us to reframe the way we viewed a subset of the patient population and refocused the brief on starting a new and much needed conversation around treatment.

Better understanding audiences is an area where David Flynn also thinks we can do better as a sector. “Over the last few years, we’ve moved to ensure our approach is as insight-driven as possible. It’s involved properly investing to ensure we truly understand audiences in as much detail as possible – the issues that affect that them, their values, decisions and priorities – and tailoring our communications approach accordingly.”

The bubble has burst, health is now everyone’s business. YouGov polls have repeatedly placed health in the number one or two spot of the public’s own priorities and every aspect of health and well-being has become more mainstream. The events of the last 18 months have changed the game irrevocably too.

Suddenly, this powerful but limelight-shy industry has had to engage more frequently, with more people, from more diverse backgrounds than ever before. When the likes of Mark Ritson start penning articles on the corporate brand building strategies of pharmaceutical companies, you know it’s made it to the forefront of consumer consciousness.

Pharma, its products, its people, its politics, its practices, is now more public than ever. There are many signs that the appetite for understanding how the world’s producers of pills and potions go about their business, is here to stay.
The King’s Fund recently updated its ‘Road to Renewal’ publication, citing what it believes to be the five key priorities for health and care: putting the workforce centre stage; a step change on inequalities and population health; lasting reform for social care; embedding and accelerating digital change, and reshaping the relationship between communities and public services. While this is a UK-focused report, the issues cover common ground across many of the world’s health economies and all of them throw up new sets of communications challenges. If we are to tackle them effectively, we will need to be open to new thinking and new approaches, built around better collaboration which will require pharma to play its part.

So as the world starts to mend and repair (for those living in the richer nations, at least) maybe there’s never been a better time to genuinely embrace diversity of thought and people. Take time to understand our current realities and the barriers to change. Find external inspiration and tap into the experience of others. Invest in new talent and actively mix things up a little. You never know, perhaps it will trigger a reset in your reality and in turn, give you and those around you the confidence to step through the door.