Pharma marketing used to be simple. A medicine arrived from R&D, you built the brand and developed brand-focused materials, then pushed it all out via the sales force. The customer was a nebulous figure, a member of the mass of doctors you met at a congress or company event, someone who greeted your reps with a smile and happily prescribed your products. If you wanted to tailor your approach to their individual needs, tough luck; there simply was no way of getting that close. The Push and Pull of Pharma Marketing, Which Strategy is Best for Pharma Companies?
Times change. Now, marketers face a multi-stakeholder, multichannel, technology-enabled world where nearly anything is possible. Yet, just as pharma marketers glimpse an exciting future where they can get close to their customers and understand their needs, those needs change radically. Like all of us, Pharma Companies customers have questioned the value of the promotional messages being pushed at them.
In the not too distant past, push and pull strategies were strictly the domain of logistics and supply chain management professionals. However, somewhere along the way, those terms changed course and became popular terms within marketing circles. And today they can be see in marketing plans and PowerPoint presentations everywhere. But what exactly are push and pull marketing strategies, and how they can be the best for pharma companies and use them to their advantage?
Simply stated, push marketing refers to ‘pushing’ information about a product or service outwards. When done correctly, push marketing brings recognition to, garners interest in and creates demand for a product or service. However, if information is being pushed to the wrong audience, your marketing messages will mostly likely fall flat.
Conversely, pull marketing refers to ‘pulling’ or attracting customers to a product or service. Pull marketing is more efficient, because customers are actively seeking products and services, so you don’t have to spend time and resources trying to peak their interest. When an audience is searching for your particular product or service, all you have to do is beat out the competition.
The pharmaceutical industry provides an example of an evolving advertising strategy. That industry initially relied solely on a push strategy. They expended large amounts to fund advertising in medical journals and trade magazines, a large sales force calling on physicians and hospitals and distributing large numbers of samples, support of drug trials, and conducting seminars at medical meetings and conventions. These activities were all oriented to motivating physicians to prescribe particular medications. This was the classic push strategy.
Then, they launched a strategy of advertising in the mass media. Through this advertising, the public was told how marvelous particular medications were, thus the public was motivated to ask their physician to prescribe the medication to treat a condition. This was the classic pull strategy. The pharmaceutical industry was thus able to successfully implement an effective push—pull strategy to move product through the supply channel by motivating both the distributor (the physician) and the user (the patient). It has obviously worked well in this industry.
The entrepreneur struggling to launch a business must carefully develop the marketing strategy to be utilized. Funds are likely limited, and the effectiveness of those devoted to advertising is difficult to measure in the short term.
The push—pull decision parallels the discussion in our paper “The Product”. The entrepreneur must decipher the “PCC—factor” (the product, the customer, and the competition) before a successful marketing strategy can be developed.
