In the short term, the transition to compliance may seem to lose some customers who are sensitive to personal interests, but in the long term, there is more opportunity to build a broad brand reputation and customer loyalty, or to promote the development and production technology level.
Pharmaceutical industry marketers are highly sensitive to the word "compliance" and consider it an inextricably bound. Because drugs are generally paid for by the government (society) and are highly targeted to the population, there is a natural conflict between the pharmaceutical industry and payers in the use of drugs: payers want to use as little as possible, while enterprises want to use more, so compliance campaigns are always initiated by the government and enterprises are passive responses.
To a certain extent, the compliance movement is to reduce marketing efficiency, or even directly inhibit pharmaceutical marketing, because non-compliant marketing methods from the implementation effect or cost point of view, is always more economic than the means of compliance, more favorable to enterprises, such as European and American countries prohibit drug companies off-label promotion and China severely crack down on pharmaceutical commercial bribery. Therefore, the pharmaceutical industry generally believes that compliance will affect sales results, and the two are incompatible.
Overestimating the transfer of benefits
This view is realistic in the short term: enterprises that implement compliance measures will indeed experience cost increases and sales do not increase but decrease, mainly because customers are unwilling to reduce their own interests, and marketers are helpless due to inadaptation or lack of alternatives. Therefore, the phenomenon of not understanding, contradicting or contradicting compliance is everywhere, and enterprises are especially worried that their compliance and competitors\' non-compliance will lose the market.
Is compliance really incompatible with sales? To answer this question, rational analysis may be more meaningful than gut feeling.
First, we may have overestimated the role of noncompliance and underestimated its side effects. When non-compliance means become the mainstream of pharmaceutical marketing, we will find that all professional promotion methods, such as marketing strategy, brand establishment, concept promotion, integrated marketing are not as fast and effective as direct gold. Even if the management of the enterprise intends to promote professional marketing methods, the marketing team that is accustomed to the delivery of immediate benefits will often be empty to cope with, let alone adhere to for a long time. Marketing team management is in the form, everything depends on resources and interests, marketing is always in the original ecology of fighting price and fighting cost, sales are often good or bad by chance.
The short-term behavior of the enterprise, the vulgarization of the corporate culture, the existence of a huge amount of promotional expenses with gold also leaves a lot of space for the profit of the internal staff of the enterprise, and the cost and sales fraud are everywhere, which is actually the root of the marketing chaos of many pharmaceutical companies. Just like the evil martial arts in Jin Yong\'s Wuxia, the more you practice, the higher the martial arts, but the greater the harm to the practitioner himself, and eventually go into the devil, the muscles are broken.
On the other hand, we may have overestimated the impact of profit transfer on sales. For drugs with positive efficacy, after solving the problems of medical insurance, bidding and admission to the hospital, the doctor\'s prescription behavior is not mainly determined by the gold, after all, the premise of the doctor\'s prescription is the right drug. In the process of the transformation of non-compliant marketing methods experienced by several pharmaceutical companies, the situation of sales decline and marketing team turmoil that enterprises worry about basically did not appear, as long as the management can explain the benefits of transformation to employees, put forward specific new marketing plans, and ensure the handover of key customers and key regions, often the corporate performance can rebound quickly after a short decline in a few months. Until they hit new highs.
Compliance has become a social development trend
After the transformation to compliance, enterprises can turn more resources to professional marketing, implement the professional promotion that they wanted to do but could not do in the past, and change the marketing effect of enterprises from short-term and simple to brand and sustainable, which is also conducive to the establishment of an open and honest healthy culture for enterprises. Enterprises that take the lead in compliance transformation may also win more trust and support from the government and society.
With the back door to non-compliance removed, management and employees are more motivated to implement more challenging marketing methods that work better in the long run, such as product image building, treatment concept promotion, and clinical data mining. In the short term, it seems to lose some customers who are sensitive to personal interests, but in the long term, it is more opportunity to build a wide range of brand reputation and customer loyalty, or to promote the enterprise to improve the level of research and development and production technology.
In the United States, for example, a series of heavy penalties imposed by the government on pharmaceutical companies, and the subsequent reduction of sales teams and conservative marketing styles of pharmaceutical companies have affected sales, but pharmaceutical companies have changed from making a fortune by wildly promoting me-too drugs through non-compliance means to developing innovative drugs with clear curative effects. Truly breakthrough drugs such as Humira, Savoldi, and PD-1/PD-L1 sell billions to tens of billions of dollars each.
Compliance is not only a means of government management, but also a trend of social development. Barbaric and non-compliant marketing cannot survive in the era of Internet popularization. Non-compliant marketing may bring short-term benefits to enterprises, but it also brings obstacles to the improvement of marketing management and even research and development capabilities of enterprises. Pharmaceutical companies that want to develop and grow or go abroad cannot bear the economic and legal consequences of non-compliance. Compliance transformation will bring pain to enterprises, but it is also the only way for pharmaceutical companies to upgrade their capabilities and strategies. Compliance is not just some new procedure or regulation, it means a new way of doing business. It will be a sales booster, but also will be the avenue of fame for enterprise development.
Information Source: Medical Economic News