In this month’s MM&M editorial titled “New dialogue, old hangups,” Editor-in-Chief James Chase talks about the reluctance of the pharmaceutical industry to embrace digital marketing.
“As an industry,” Chase says, “we’ve never been comfortable working with moving targets. We like to test things over time, not experiment on the fly. We’re far more comfortable establishing procedures than establishing relationships. We like to follow regulations to the letter, not follow conversations we didn’t start and cannot control. We like finite endpoints, not endless continuums. We often put incomes before outcomes. And while we have zero tolerance for failure by our own definition of the word, we’ve been blissfully and ignorantly failing our customers by theirs.”
That’s a lot of use of the first person “we.”
I’ve often noticed Chase’s propensity to speak as if he was or still is employed by the pharmaceutical industry rather than as a journalist or observer (i.e., third person) reporting on the industry. It reminds me of the old Mad Magazine cartoon, where the Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded by hostile native Americans. The Lone Ranger says to Tonto “what do we do, now?,” to which Tonto replies, “what you mean ‘we,’ kemosabe?”
“Big Pharma has no option other than to unilaterally change its game—and take the hit by lowering expectations on future revenue growth in China and other emerging markets. You can call it leading from behind—by being up front.”
Still, I find former “insiders” who give advice to the industry to be more helpful than those who have never worked in the industry (present company — me — excluded :-). It’s amazing too that the advice they give is pretty radical such as John LaMattina’s advice to pharma to “drop TV Ads” (see “Drop TV Ads, Says John LaMattina, Former Pfizer President of R&D“).
