The Future of Pharma Marketing Operations
By Hope Massey
As COVID-19 has proved to the world, disruptions and rapidly changing market conditions require new strategies to win.
In recent months, there has been a shift in consumer buying patterns. According to a recent McKinsey & Company report, there has been a 30 percent growth in online shopping during the pandemic across categories, while the share of wallet spent online continues to grow.
The key challenges that many organizations face appears to flow back to one pretty simple thing, which is the need for what seems like an infinite amount of marketing content to be created quickly but managed by a very finite set of resources.
Money has been leaving marketing operations for many years now and is being reinvested into things like marketing technologies and marketing strategies — forcing companies to be more effective and efficient with their operations.
Generally, companies are being targeted to explore all areas to release capital and the areas that you will see most savings is within functions of operationalisation, such as the supply chain. But as the pressure continues to mount and efficiencies are gained in these areas, it is forcing companies to look into their business processes, where marketing operations has become an increasing focus for many.
In a lot of cases, this has been heightened by the pandemic. Those companies that will be successful are focusing efforts on turning existing and new obstacles into opportunities. Companies that are able to quickly identify the inefficiencies in the way that they currently create their branded content — across all platforms — will be best positioned to come out of this storm with an improved, efficient and cost-effective operating model.
Keeping up with the consumers.
The way that your brand is manifested on the physical and digital pack remains to be one of the most important mediums to target consumers. As people look to minimise social contact due to the pandemic, it is unsurprising that we are seeing accelerated growth in e-commerce.
This shift is not a new trend has been exacerbated by this pandemic. We are seeing exponential change in how consumers shop, as people start to establish new habits and we see older demographics that have previously been disengaged with online buying moving to that as their new norm.
There is an argument to say that we may see some drop off post-pandemic, but we believe that this situation will set a new pace for e-commerce moving forward.
As we think about this ‘new norm’ it is important to recognize the need to assess your pharma packaging content ecosystem as a whole to identify opportunities to increase speed and agility to position you to win.
Below, we offer three steps to get started:
- Integrate your physical packaging content supply chain with the digital packaging content supply chain
- Leverage lean principles and emerging technology to drive speed and agility across your physical and digital shelf
- Identify areas to unlock hidden capital within your operations
Capturing, reviewing and analysing key process metrics is critical to ensure that you are able to understand the baseline health of your packaging graphic supply chain enabling you to identify action areas to drive efficiencies.
Watch our on-demand pharma webinar “Measuring the Efficiency of Your Packaging Content Ecosystem” to take a deep dive into healthcare industry best practices as well as best in class metrics to understand the size of the opportunities relative to others and develop tailored solutions to realize greater efficiencies within your operations.
Are you ready to rethink how you measure the performance of your pharma marketing content ecosystem?
About Hope Massey
Hope graduated Law and is a Prince2 Practitioner, Lean Six Sigma qualified and Change Practitioner. Most recently, Hope has served Bayer, J&J & SCJ to deliver efficiencies within their global graphic supply chains. Hope has also worked on key projects including a major business change initiative incorporating Asia outsourcing, process improvement, financial analysis & modelling, cost reduction & business restructuring.
