Prescription for healthier data

Patricia Dowd is on a mission. A mission to track down experienced, database-savvy direct marketing talent for the pharmaceutical industry. An executive recruiter for the past 18 years and the first one to specialize in database marketing, Dowd has seen a variety of industries – from financial services to telecommunications – benefit from an infusion of top-tier direct marketing talent. She thinks it’s time for pharma to join the party.

“It’s been my experience that many pharma companies would rather promote from within their organizations than hire direct marketing specialists from outside the industry,” says Dowd. “But it’s a lot easier for a good direct marketer to get up to speed on the pharma business than for a pharma product manager or sales rep to learn the direct marketing business.

“As a result,” she says, “these companies aren’t benefiting from high-end database marketing because they simply don’t have the people who know how to do it. Certainly, some of the larger pharmas have embraced the tools and the technology, but I think that for the industry at large, database-driven direct marketing is pretty much an untapped resource.”

The database marketing specialists we spoke to agree with Dowd. “Many pharmas seem ready to implement the technology but have yet to do so,” says Ed Allburn, President and CEO of DataDelta, a data optimization company in Greensboro, North Carolina. “When they do, I predict they’ll enjoy rapid gains in the effectiveness of their marketing efforts – cost savings, improved ROI, higher response rates or whatever metrics they want to use.

“One area of database marketing that’s been getting a lot of attention lately from forward-thinking pharmas is CDI – customer data integration,” Allburn says. “CDI is combining all your data sources to build a single, accurate customer view – which in pharma’s case means both the patient and the physician. A company may have just made a major investment in improving data quality, but if that data isn’t linked together properly it can produce information that’s wildly inaccurate.”

CDI could prove to be especially beneficial to an industry that’s as heavily siloed as pharmaceuticals. “One drug company can have five different reps hitting the same doctor,” says Jack Speyer, Director of Client Services for Epsilon, a database management and strategic consulting firm. “Each drug can have its own sales force, marketing team, phone reps and, of course, its own database. So the company has no economies of scale, no sharing of knowledge across brands, no corporate branding.”

When a pharma company succeeds in knocking down those silos and centralizing its data, positive things happen, observes Chuck Drake, former Director of Consumer Relationship Marketing at GlaxoSmithKline. “I was the first person to take this approach at Glaxo,” he recalls. “My first project was a centralized, three-tier database that enabled us to collect and process information across more than 13 different prescription drugs. We could slice and dice the data any way we wanted, so we could implement targeted campaigns, and manage consumer opt-in preferences and privacy in a highly disciplined manner.”

“We started with over 1.5 million records across all those brands, all in one database, and we learned some amazing things,” Drake says. “We found a significant number of people who had two or more related diseases, such as asthma and allergies. We also did some householding work, much like banks do, and we found a lot of overlap. Zyban, Flonase and Flovent, for example, were frequently being taken by different people in the same households. The whole world opens up when you start thinking: that’s a Glaxo household.

“Up until then, one brand’s marketing team would never collaborate with another’s because they never saw any reason to. But they began to realize they were both in there with the same patients. We were able to increase patient Rx compliance as well as patient enquiry for new products.”

A data integration program run by experienced database marketers can be a potent marketing force, and the smart pharmas know it. “Amgen is one of our clients here at Epsilon,” Speyer says, “and they’re thrilled that I don’t have a pharma background. There’s a growing realization that direct marketers with non-pharma backgrounds tend to offer more strategic options and have a broader knowledge of tactics and techniques.”

So where does a pharma hiring manager, who may have little or no experience with job candidates from outside the industry, find seasoned direct marketing professionals willing to offer their skills to a pharmaceutical company? “They’re definitely out there if you know where to look,” says recruiter Dowd. “With its regulatory restrictions and its need for a two-pronged, doctor-patient approach, pharma marketing presents some unique challenges. It also offers many opportunities for innovation and success. I know many excellent database marketers who would welcome the challenge as well as the reward.”

 

Patricia Dowd was the first recruiter to specialize in database marketing, placing all levels of database marketing professionals since 1988. Previously, Patricia served as a practitioner in the direct marketing industry for the Lincoln Mint as Creative Director, and Advertising Director for Secretaries, Inc. in Chicago; the Lawrence G. Chait Agency in New York as an Account Supervisor; co-founder of the first direct marketing agency in San Diego (DRM) and Account Supervisor for Smith Hemmings Gosden and Krupp Taylor in Los Angeles.

She established Patricia Dowd Inc. in 1992, following four years as a search agency specialist with Search West and Search Associates in Los Angeles. Her practice has evolved to include the functional expertise and disciplines of customer relationship management and business intelligence. Not only is this evolution logical, it has provided a renewed passion and heightened awareness for the growing sophistication in top tier companies that is shared by both candidates and clients.