Today's Brand Planning Puts Customer Experiences at Risk in Pharma

Digital Brand Plan Excellence Remains Elusive

As digital technology transforms customers and channels, pharmaceutical firms’ internal processes, especially brand planning, need to keep pace. Modern marketing teams must adapt and evolve their traditional methods if they hope to future-proof these processes. One way for firms to succeed at digitally optimizing processes such as brand planning is to follow best practices. To understand how well pharma firms are maximizing the digital marketing potential with customers, we surveyed thirty-one marketers about their brand plans and the process behind it. We found that:

• Marketers disregard digital brand planning. While nearly all of the marketers we surveyed found it very important to know if their brand plan maximizes the digital marketing opportunity, less than half actually know how well they’re doing (see Figure 1). When we asked marketers ten specific questions about how well their brand planning process applies to the digital opportunity—like “Does your budget take the
  post-launch optimization of digital assets into account?”—very few could answer more than one (see Figure 2). Marketers seemed most confident that their brand plan clearly represents the customer opportunities in the digital space. However, just six of the thirty-one marketers review the quality of their interactions with customers—a strong sign of complacency in their efforts to optimize their brand in a digital world (see
  Figure 3).
• Negligence threatens customer experiences. Very few of the twenty marketers who were convinced that their brand plans clearly reflect the digital opportunities actually implement any best practices to exploit those opportunities. For example, few could identify channel preferences or list their competitors’ digital offerings (see Figure 4). Challenges exist not only in brand plan creation, but also in its execution. The vast majority of marketers felt that the process to improve their current digital assets was unnecessarily elaborate; just six had sufficient resources to do so. Until these brand planning process and organizational flaws are fixed, marketers will jeopardize the digital opportunity and keep poor customer experiences alive.
• CDOs and CMOs must help marketers want to go digital There are plenty of tactics to persuade marketers to optimize digital marketing. Adding customer journey mapping and touchpoint optimization to brand planning, creating incentives and reward schemes for well-executed digital plans, and instituting training programs haveall shown good results. While these methods shift marketers’ behavior, CDOs and CMOs should also make the simplification of digital marketing execution a priority. One global oncology team found that technical and regulatory procedures hindered brand managers’ efforts to update portal content, so it analyzed every step and eliminated any that were not essential. This kind of simple analysis is a good place for any pharma firm to start.