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Defining Omnichannel Marketing in Pharma
Part One of a DHC Group Project
It’s Already an Omnichannel World from the Customer POV. Getting it Right as a Brand Requires a Mix of Data, Tech, and The Most Important Skill … a Culture of Integration and Sharing
In Partership with
Mark Bard
DCH Group
The Omnichannel Marketing (and Customer) Experience
The Omnichannel Marketing (and Customer) Experience Most marketers and industry experts seem to coalesce around a shared description of omnichannel marketing – a seamless experience for customers across all channels with a consistent brand experience. However, pulling that off requires a teamwork mentality across the brand and the organization. Successful omnichannel requires taking a customer-centric view of the customer in a world where many pharmaceutical companies (and even brands) are still organized and mobilized by tactics (or audience) – and not the customer.
Something else that often gets lost in the omnichannel marketing conversation and debate about omnichannel success is the concept of simplicity – from the customer point of view. The most complex omnichannel marketing system and approach misses the mark if it ultimately confuses (or loses) the customer. It’s not about the number of channels, it’s really about the seamless and simplified nature of how easy a customer can move through those channels over time in a fluid fashion. There should be no perceived gap between the channels – it just works. In the end, it’s about making engagement and the overall experience easier for the customer.
Furthermore, pharmaceutical marketers, and their partners, must not only understand and meet the needs of their customers in the market today – they must accurately anticipate their needs in advance in this new world of modern marketing and customer experience. The continued explosion and integration of available first party data along with third party data sources is allowing innovative brands to not only react in real-time to customers but also predict what channel, content, and experience the customer wants (or needs) in the future.
The Omnichannel Marketing (and Customer) Experience Most marketers and industry experts seem to coalesce around a shared description of omnichannel marketing – a seamless experience for customers across all channels with a consistent brand experience. However, pulling that off requires a teamwork mentality across the brand and the organization. Successful omnichannel requires taking a customer-centric view of the customer in a world where many pharmaceutical companies (and even brands) are still organized and mobilized by tactics (or audience) – and not the customer.
Something else that often gets lost in the omnichannel marketing conversation and debate about omnichannel success is the concept of simplicity – from the customer point of view. The most complex omnichannel marketing system and approach misses the mark if it ultimately confuses (or loses) the customer. It’s not about the number of channels, it’s really about the seamless and simplified nature of how easy a customer can move through those channels over time in a fluid fashion. There should be no perceived gap between the channels – it just works. In the end, it’s about making engagement and the overall experience easier for the customer.
Furthermore, pharmaceutical marketers, and their partners, must not only understand and meet the needs of their customers in the market today – they must accurately anticipate their needs in advance in this new world of modern marketing and customer experience. The continued explosion and integration of available first party data along with third party data sources is allowing innovative brands to not only react in real-time to customers but also predict what channel, content, and experience the customer wants (or needs) in the future.
Meet The Experts
We would like to thank the following experts and thought leaders below for contributing their time and insights to this industry brief. What follows is a summary and highlights of the collective conversations with these experts.
Irene Coyne
EVP, Group Client Director
CMI Media Group
Joyce Ercolino
Director
Harmony Biosciences
Jose Ferreira
EVP, Product Strategy & Innovation
CMI Media Group
Justin Freid
Chief Media & Innovation
CMI Media Group
David Salmon
Global Head Innovation
AstraZeneca
Steven Xie
Director
Biohaven
Defining Omnichannel
Based on interviews and roundtable discussions we conducted, it is clear that if you look across our industry, each company, each person is defining ‘omnichannel’ a little bit differently. It is often described as the entire user experience an individual has with a brand. That can go from the upfront work and data analysis and audience segmentation through person-to-person contact, whether that’s a sales rep or a patient working with a clinical advisor, all the way through to how they engage with media and content. But there’s also some skepticism as to whether real depth exists behind the catch-all.
"It's such a buzzword, but what does that mean? I think every individual and every organization defines omnichannel differently. I think omnichannel ultimately is really about creating meaningful customer engagement with the most contextually relevant content. I'm looking at omnichannel through the lens of this rapidly evolving consumer media consumption behavioral change. When you think about today, how much time you spend on your phone, how much time you spend on streaming TikTok outside of linear TV. I think omnichannel is about understanding where your customers get their information, identify the moments that lead to decision-making, lean into these moments with content that resonates with them and ultimately drive the intended action."
Steven Xie
Director, Biohaven
"Omnichannel is one of those terms -- there's no single shared definition. It's one of those trendy terms that because it's not especially understood, but also somewhat hot, it goes through a bit of semantic collapse. It gets used repeatedly in organizations until it ceases to have any actual meaning. It becomes an envelope that you stick, whatever project you want to stick into it."
David Salmon
Global Head of Innovation, AstraZeneca
"I think of omnichannel as a fully connected, dynamic user experience; meaning everything we're doing is building off something else, and dynamic in the sense of it is ever-changing based on the reactions, or the performance of what is happening in real-time. When I think about multi-channel, and the difference from omnichannel, multi-channel is the use of multiple channels at the same time to achieve a goal. So, in omnichannel, the full orchestration of those channels is interdependent. Whereas multichannel can be somewhat independent, omnichannel is interdependent, dynamically changing based on a user's preference, a user's performance, or the trajectory that we've laid out for them."
Irene Coyne
EVP, CMI Media Group
Defining Omnichannel Continued
As it often the case, it’s helpful to define something against other known and accepted terms. In this case, many of the experts we spoke with wanted to ensure a distinction between multi channel and omnichannel. Their insights are important in driving us towards a more widely agreed on sense of what omnichannel is – and how it can become a meaningful part of our industry’s work, especially with regards to improving the customer’s experience.
"The way I interpret it is omnichannel has the focus on the customer experience. Multichannel has more of the focus on the channels. It’s about customer engagement. It's not that you're not looking to have a good customer experience, but it's more about engaging the customer versus omnichannel is getting more towards, in a perfect world, delighting the customer."
Joyce Ercolino
Director, Harmony Biosciences
"What is the difference between omnichannel and the multichannel? Omnichannel is not just about the ubiquitous brand presence, but strategic media mix design that really helps your brand maximize media efficiency, brand resonance, and customer activation."
Steven Xie
Director, Biohaven
"There is a difference between multichannel and omnichannel, omnichannel is more than media. It's any way an individual can interact with a brand. There are a lot of things that happen from the patient side conversations that occur in social media platforms, about treatments. One of our big things we've started to do more and more is make sure we're leveraging social listening to understand the conversations that are happening on Twitter, Reddit, etc, between patients to then understand the types of engagements they want or the questions they have and then potentially answer them. MCM is a part of the overall omnichannel workflow experience we're trying to deliver."
Justin Freid
Chief Media and Innovation Officer, CMI Media Group
"It's aligning all the various touch points for any stakeholder, any customer, to the extent that we're able to. It's essentially aligning that next engagement, the next interaction that you're going to have with a customer and is informed by all of the data that you've collected, so that you're adding value every single time you communicate or advertise to a specific customer."
Jose Ferreira
EVP, CMI Media Group
The Value of Omnichannel
With the need for well-executed omnichannel as a key catalyst for improving customer experience established, the experts weighed in on its value and integration. One key factor they all identified – the value needs to resonate for both the manufacturer and the customer. The recommendation is to not just set a blanket goal to “integrate omnichannel” but rather first identify the markets and customers where it adds value.
"Omnichannel is foundational to customer relationships. Asking if you need to operate within an omnichannel framework is like asking if you need water to live. If you’re not operationalizing omnichannel across your organization, then you’re not really marketing at the level of customer expectations. If I have the ability, and we now have the technology, to communicate to customers in a story fashion where it’s not intrusive then I’m adding value whenever I interact with them. And that value is selfevident I think. We get a lot of questions about “let’s prove out the ROI of this.” We do it all the time. We have set up test and control studies. We make sure the investment is worth the outcome. In every case that I’ve seen so far over the last three or four years we’ve seen the positive ROI above and beyond normal/traditional multi-channel media. We’ve proved it works. That’s no longer an open question."
Jose Ferreira
EVP. CMI Media Group
“In order for [omnichannel] to yield a return on investment and return on effort that is high enough to justify the work, you have to have extreme clarity on the why—why you're doing it, what it entails and more importantly, what you're not going to do.”
David Salmon
Global Head of Innovation, AstraZeneca
I wouldn't ask whether your customer wants it or not. We're very behind in terms of meeting the customer expectations. When you go to a website to purchase something, you always think about the shopping cart experience on amazon.com. When you somehow land on the pharma brand, all of a sudden you are back in the '90s. So, I think that's where I think a huge opportunity, actually, for the industry, when you think about how omnichannel can really unlock some of the white spaces.
Steven Xie
Director, Biohaven
Bringing it Together
It’s time for marketers to embrace the complexity and sophistication of omnichannel as the new age of marketing. Omnichannel—the orchestration of touchpoints working in harmony with one another—has replaced the old multichannel approach to marketing, to create the most relevant, impactful, personalized and timely delivery of messaging to customers. It involves innovation, technology, and speed along with alignment and commitment from internal teams. With an omnichannel approach, brands can move their customers through the journey from engagement to action.
Omnichannel success is ultimately judged from the customer point of view. As we continue to explore the additional facets of omnichannel in future publications we will also explore the importance of culture and how companies can invest and motivate teams to share insights, integrate data, and share the learning that ultimate success with omnichannel from the customer point of view … requires integration and shared insights across and within the organization driving that omnichannel strategy.