Customer Challenge
The Pharma Industry in Japan is torn between traditional and new worlds. Historic pathways for reaching Doctors and patients is changing, relying on new avenues to make prescription decisions – trusting new influencers and turning to emerging digital sources to fuel choices.
Tighter physician schedules mean it’s more difficult for MR’s to achieve face-to-face time with doctors. New channels need to be examined to build and sustain relationships to get efficacy messaging across.
To add efficiency and reduce reliance on Field Force Marketing, Pharma companies have turned to marketing technologies, including e-detailing, CRM and Webinars etc
The core motivations for Pfizer’s decision to investigate marketing technology solutions were to:
- Increase the number of physician relationships and to expand them into geographies where MRs could not be efficently deployed,
- Decrease reliance on third party, captive ecosystems
- Increase attributed prescribing revenue per physician relationship
- Specialize and optimize sales/marketing resources while increasing trust
- Automate complex processes
Solution
The decision was made to implement Marketo as the Marketing Automation platform to successfully lift and move a suite of brands into an automated environment, contextualized around the needs of both the legal and regulatory requirements of the category and Pfizer Japan compliance standards.
The approach was also to leverage this technology transfer as an opportunity to lean into Digital Transformation initiatives within the organization while meeting the stated objectives of reducing reliance on MR’s, reducing program costs, and reducing dependencies on Pharma Marketing Platforms that hold the industry captive.
The initiative included:
- Establishing a Centre of Excellence (CoE) to drive Digital Transformation around PoC success
- Change Management initiatives across cross functional teams
- Implement and stand-up the Marketo Instance
- Target capabilities across digital brand and marketing, personalisation, omni-channel experience, MR and Channel engagement
- Pilot use cases against high-cost, opaque programs such as events and seminars
Results
- Pfizer Japan benefited from Marketo’s domain experience establishing a new capability practice internally that has subsequently been adopted by the Asia Regional team as best practice.
- With the orchestration of Marketo, we were able to shorten revenue cycles, demonstrate marketing ROI, and ignite unplanned revenue growth against LoE portfolio brands
- Virtual Symposiums Initiatives produced outstanding results
- Registrants increased by 264%
- Attendees increased at a higher rate: 273%
- Cost per attendee dropped from ¥2,507 benchmark to ¥801
- Cost per Target Doctor dropped from ¥23,913 to ¥13,750
