How closing the gap between Closed-loop and Multichannel marketing can bring pharma industry together?

“Multichannel marketing” and “Closed loop marketing” can be considered as most popular terms in pharmaceutical marketing these days, while the latter being unpopular as sales reps’ enthusiasm in using interactive tablets during presentations to prescribers. In Capgemini’s new report of “Vision and Reality” series, it suggests that, by closing the long sustaining gap between MCM and CLM, we can bring pharma industry together, thanks to technology it’s the time is bring them coordinated in a structured manner.

Some definitions: Capgemini defines CLM as incorporating personalized messaging, analytics to understand how messages are received and understood, and responsiveness—the ability to “evolve the conversation” to prove that the marketer is listening to the market. MCM is simply using mulitiple channels (email, tele-detailing, face-to-face and others) to interact with customers, and to bring the results of each channels’ interactions together through analytics. CLM, which has been around for a while, has lost and then regained favor as the iPad became a preferred sales tool. But in a survey of pharma execs, Capgemini has found that even today, pharma marketers rate their maturity in a 2.0-2.5 range (on a 1-5 scale) in their ability to personalize messaging, to perform analytics and to be responsive.

As per Tim Moore, Capgemini’s life sciences group, “it is the time to alter promotional materials in response to market reactions.” As most of the pharma companies have a tendency of updating promotional strategies on quarterly or semi-annual basis; however, those using CLM successfully can reduce it to 6-8 weeks. Adding to that Hala Qanadilo, insisted on pharma companies which have their sales operations around a particular brand are already missing the efficiency of using the same CLM or MCM tools across brands, and (for some prescribers, such as general practitioners involved in many different therapies) combining knowledge about that prescriber from multiple campaigns.

There are three channel where a pharma company should put their emphasis on product (brand), channel and customer, also known as pillars of pharmaceutical marketing . You can read more about this here.