Today's competitive market conditions call for only for one form of marketing!
IT IS 'THINKING CAP MARKETING'!!
ABOVE ARE COUGH SYRUPS IN PET (TOP) BOTTLES AND GLASS BOTTLES (BOTTOM)
Tablets in aluminum strip foil
Tablets in blister strip packaging
Tablets in Alu-Alu packaging
BELOW: EVOLUTION OF PACKAGING CONCEPTS OF MILK
Milk bottle
Milk in sachets
Milk in Tetra Pak packages
WHAT IS NEXT?
Marketing breakthroughs: this is what every company is on the hunt for! All companies are continuously working at creating marketing breakthroughs. The traditional pharma method is to invent new molecules: Atorvastatin and sildenafil citrate (Viagra) were such marketing breakthroughs for Pfizer. Marketing breakthroughs can come from various other concepts too. Even the unique shape of a tablet can create a breakthrough for a pharma marketer!
Marketing breakthroughs in pharmaceuticals can come from new generics with better therapeutic benefit or improved convenience (like Cifran OD ie., ciprofloxacin once daily)(a novel drug delivery system) or they can also come from improved convenient packagings. This can in fact 'reboot' the market for the product.
Milk (a nonpharmaceutical product) is an interesting example, which started off in cans. Then came the milk bottles for retailing milk, this was next replaced by plastic sachets ... and now Tetra Pak packages are making inroads in to the milk retailing market.
If a company can help invent or visualize the NEXT big thing ... then the company has a marketing breakthrough on its hands.
There are two ways of marketing: One is the ME-TOO approach. If a there is a successful brand of a generic, then avid pharma marketers launch me-too brands and take a share of the cake! In fact, in a protected market where the product patent was not applicable, and it was more of a seller's market, such an approach was OK, it made business sense and people made good money too!!
Now the market picture has changed with increased commoditization of pharmaceutical brands. Talking points are copy cat points, there are no real brand USPs (Unique Selling Prepositions) to differentiate pharma brands in a convincing way. Emotive differentiation too has limitations, prescribers are not easily won over today!!
So which way out?
The only way out is creating marketing breakthroughs in products. Something that truly differentiates the pharma brand from the clutter on the chemist shelves; products that can get a mindshare very easily from target prescribers.
Marketing breakthroughs need not mean new molecules, they can also represent new packagings or new ways of representing the product or new dosage formulations ... so on.
Thinking cap marketing
So what is required is a lot of thinking cap marketing across the organization to help create marketing breakthroughs!! Today only ' thinking cap marketing' works in the pharma industry!! AMEN!!
Marketing breakthroughs in pharmaceuticals can come from new generics with better therapeutic benefit or improved convenience (like Cifran OD ie., ciprofloxacin once daily)(a novel drug delivery system) or they can also come from improved convenient packagings. This can in fact 'reboot' the market for the product.
Milk (a nonpharmaceutical product) is an interesting example, which started off in cans. Then came the milk bottles for retailing milk, this was next replaced by plastic sachets ... and now Tetra Pak packages are making inroads in to the milk retailing market.
If a company can help invent or visualize the NEXT big thing ... then the company has a marketing breakthrough on its hands.
There are two ways of marketing: One is the ME-TOO approach. If a there is a successful brand of a generic, then avid pharma marketers launch me-too brands and take a share of the cake! In fact, in a protected market where the product patent was not applicable, and it was more of a seller's market, such an approach was OK, it made business sense and people made good money too!!
Now the market picture has changed with increased commoditization of pharmaceutical brands. Talking points are copy cat points, there are no real brand USPs (Unique Selling Prepositions) to differentiate pharma brands in a convincing way. Emotive differentiation too has limitations, prescribers are not easily won over today!!
So which way out?
The only way out is creating marketing breakthroughs in products. Something that truly differentiates the pharma brand from the clutter on the chemist shelves; products that can get a mindshare very easily from target prescribers.
Marketing breakthroughs need not mean new molecules, they can also represent new packagings or new ways of representing the product or new dosage formulations ... so on.
Thinking cap marketing
So what is required is a lot of thinking cap marketing across the organization to help create marketing breakthroughs!! Today only ' thinking cap marketing' works in the pharma industry!! AMEN!!
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