Channel Preference Versus Promotional Reality: The Core Challenge Of Multichannel Marketing

One of the oldest commercial models is extensive use of sales representatives, working face-to-face with individual clients. This model, while eroded or vanished in many industries such as consumer goods or financial services, remains strong in pharma, despite well-established challenges. For decades, increasingly dominant payer power and promotional restrictions have challenged the classical model of the pharmaceutical sales rep visiting individual doctors, but it has proven remarkably resilient. The total number of reps the pharmaceutical industry employs has stayed quite steady at between 400,000 and 500,000 equivalents globally. The most fundamental challenge to the traditional sales model, however, has been more recent. The rise of digital technologies, enabling the growth of multichannel marketing, has revolutionized the commercial model in ways other trends have not, because digital simultaneously and dramatically diversifies the channels of communication and sources of information. It is also, fundamentally, customer led. Health care professionals (HCPs), like the patients they treat, have moved online to seek information, communicate with peers and to make health care decisions. Pharmaceutical companies have followed them.

The developed major markets – US, top five Europe, and Japan – account for over 85% of the first five...