PM360 DECEMBER 2010

UPCLOSE

With HARI MAHADEVAN
Executive Officer, Consulting Services and Healthcare, for Rosetta

BY JON BRULLOTHS

Hari Mahadevan, PhD, is the Executive Officer, Consulting Services and Healthcare, for Rosetta. He has over 20 years of leadership experience across virtually the entire pharmaceutical business system, including: commercialization, process/clinical development, manufacturing, marketing, and high-level corporate business unit strategy. Dr. Mahadevan also serves on the faculty of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, where he designed and teaches a class on Healthcare Marketing to second- year MBA students.

PM360: What are the main challenges CMOs and marketers are currently facing in pharma?

HARI MAHADEVAN: I’d say that there are three major challenges/opportunities facing us. First is the accelerating marriage of technology with marketing. Today’s marketer must be familiar with multi-faceted technology and how to leverage technology as an aspect of product marketing. Traditionally, Marketing and IT have been two separate business units operating with limited intercommunication, each having a very different focus. Today’s successful marketer is technologically savvy and knows that Marketing is much more than creating marketing materials and relying on the pharmaceutical field force to market to healthcare professionals.

The second important challenge is the need to broaden and strengthen non-personal promotion or multichannel marketing. Our connected world’s marketing vectors have changed! While there are more ways to reach consumers, it’s never been more difficult to connect with them. Marketers need to understand how to cultivate non-traditional messaging modes and invest in the development of multiple new messaging modalities to enable this connection. The successful marketer will be one who researches and strategizes on how best to extend the “non-traditional” still further into uncharted territories.

The third is an ever-present challenge: Marketers must successfully navigate the regulatory environment and, at the same time, implement and leverage new technology. Regulatory impacts everything else and, at this point, regulatory agencies themselves are still learning and refining their understanding of the technologies and of the technologies’ implications on the need for further regulatory guidance.

What is the current state of digital marketing, and how is it changing?

Digital marketing’s potential has increased dramatically, due to both changes in the available channels, and the technological approaches that marketers now either want to leverage, are leveraging, or are trying to figure out how best to leverage. It’s not just about creating a website anymore. We encounter frequent use of the terms “social” and “mobile,” etc., with the intimation that they’re separate —but they’re all part of the new “connected-world marketing.” People desire specific, relevant information as soon as the need arises for them. This is a wholly new technology-enabled need and expectation that a marketer has to adapt to. Rosetta sees this as a connectedness across stakeholders and channels, which encompasses all of digital marketing. This makes “web- based,” “CRM,” “mobile-based,” and “e-marketing” all one-and-the-same.

How does a digital agency differ from the traditional agency model?

The traditional agency model seeks to integrate disparate networked capabilities in service of the client or for the benefit of the brand. It requires you to integrate across different cultures, different entities, often across misaligned P&Ls, potentially across multiple geographies—all of which has the potential to create a significant “not invented here” syndrome.

Beyond the lesser efficiency and higher client cost, my issue with that model is how to meet the client’s marketing requisites in the now much more coherent and connected digital world I described earlier. We feel that our digital agency model—one agency, one P&L, and one approach—brings these multiple required capabilities together to deliver truly successful integrated, all-in-one marketing.

What skill set does today’s agency need to have?

First, any agency must have the ability to help set strategy, whether that’s on the basis of insights into differentiated customers, or of really under- standing the marketplace, a brand’s positioning within a competitive context, and ultimately the brand position in that marketplace.

Next, agencies need to take that level of in-depth, differentiated market insight and convert that into a compelling set of multi-channel, multi- stakeholder targeted creative, initiative, design, and execution. Some people may discount these as “shiny objects,” but these are the shiny objects that matter—objects developed on the basis of real and meaningful customer and market insight.

Third, an agency must be able to link all of the above with back-end technologies, in a sensible and efficient manner, to drive business impact.

The last requirement is one of measurability. Development through to final implementation has been successful: Now, one needs to ask questions. What parts are working, which are not, and which need to be tweaked? Why is it working?

What does all of this change mean for both traditional and digital agencies?

Evolve or die. In fact, we have an evolution program in place. We call it “Pilots, Inventors, and Builders.” Every one of us in this agency has to be a Pilot, someone who’s able to think, set visions, develop ideas, regardless of whether she’s the CEO, a sales rep, or the person writing program code for the field rep’s use as a sales tool. We each need to manage our thinking from this pilot’s perspective.

Our second evolutionary step is “Invention.” Invention can take many forms. Each of us has to ask himself, “Is what I am creating going to help differentiate my client’s brand, and in a way that will actually drive impact?”

Our final step we call “Build,” which is to create a tangible work product, a tangible work output. Build it so that it drives business impact in a marketing context. We tell our people it doesn’t matter what your role is: Seek to do all of these things, and accomplish them, because that’s what our world requires and what our clients need from us.

Does the rise in digital mean that other forms of marketing will ebb?

Differentiating digital from other forms of marketing is old-world thinking. Customers’ expectations are around the ability to reach content, to touch information, and to sate their needs when they want, on the device they choose, at the right level of detail—all “personalized” to them. Whether it’s a consumer looking for a cellphone, or a physician looking for drug-drug interaction information, the user expectation is for customized- on-demand information.

What this means to the pharma sales rep model is that it has to evolve. Sales rep and target communication will be more personalized, targeted, and has to reach the physician in ways other than just a sample drop or a “primary” detail.

Why is personalization in digital marketing so important?

Personalization is important because that’s what the customer demands. Customer expectations have changed. When you go to Amazon.com, you expect Amazon to know what you’ve purchased and to offer you useful recommendations. The latest Google search personalization is another great example. As soon as you begin typing in the search box, it starts offering results.

The mandate is to meet user information demands more easily and faster. This both stems from customer expectations and creates new expectations until it ultimately becomes a price of entry.

How are technology and digital marketing channels blurring the line between consumers, patients, and physicians, and what are the future implications?

Pharmaceutical companies generally have professional, payer, and consumer marketing as separate entities—with each channel tailored to the intended user’s depth-of-content expectations and communication mode scaled from simple to complex. Those boundaries are no longer sacrosanct. The stakeholder, for instance, a consumer, a patient, or a physician, now has the ability to access information that you may have intended for a different stakeholder.

The consistency of the client or product’s communication becomes paramount. You certainly still have significant control over something like the sales rep channel because a rep isn’t going to detail a consumer or a layperson. But that is more the exception rather than the rule.

Social media is the single best example of these fluid channel boundaries. Stakeholders who you never thought would meet are con- versing online via social media and are thereby transforming the nature of the dialogue and the information.