Are Pharma Marketers Going Extinct?

It seems that every time that I speak with someone in the pharma industry, the conversation touches on the fact that the role of marketer is under more and more pressure.

Just in sheer numbers there are many fewer pharma marketers today than there were five years ago. Where it used to be common that there would be multiple brand managers working on a single brand, now one marketer managing multiple brands is becoming the norm.

The role itself is under considerable pressure. Industry downsizings have meant that brand managers have less and less resources available to them. The teams that support them have been cut resulting in the brand manager having to do more and more of the daily administrative work thereby having less time for the critical insight/strategic reflection that is the core of being a marketer.

The people that the marketers report to and who would normally provide the bulk of their coaching are under incredible pressure as well due to having to manage larger teams with reduced resources. This results in their being severely limited in the time that they can dedicate to coaching their teams of marketers.

Those resource cuts also result in less investment in critical research into what is going on in the market and the customer’s mind. This reduces the brand manager’s ability to get an accurate view on their business environment.

Perhaps most importantly, resource cuts mean that marketing training is becoming more and more rare. How do you become a great marketer if you are not getting opportunities to learn and further develop your knowledge and experience?

Simple test. In the last year, how much time have your marketers spent on training that helps them to be better at marketing? Not training on the latest process or set of rules. Critical things that marketers need to develop a deep understanding of like how to build impactful brand plans, develop effective market research, identify the strategies and tactics with the best ROI and optimize innovation on their teams?

I bet you the answer is very little or no time at all.

The role of brand manager is one of the most critical to any company’s success. Much of the innovation that comes from an organization originates within this group.

If the strategic direction and tactical mix are not optimized for a given brand, the company spends a lot of resources that don’t give it the best possible ROI.

With all the pressure on the industry right now, these very important people, working in this role which is critical to organizational success are being overwhelmed with day-to-day minutia and are not able to get the time, training and support that they need to help them to become top tier marketers.

There is no easy solution for this. People have a certain amount of work that needs to get done no matter what and it is hard to scrape up the time and resources to do anything else beyond survive sometimes.

If you want to optimize the time that you have to do the marketing part of being a brand manager, the best thing that I ever did was to book time for myself every day to work on the big picture projects. I speak to this on a YouTube video that I posted here if you are interested (The One Thing That Dramatically Increased My Productivity as a Marketer).

If resource cuts mean that you can’t get professional training or mentoring, the one thing that had huge value for me as a marketer was meeting over lunch once a month with my colleagues to discuss an agreed upon problem or topic.

I won’t lie to you. It was really hard to find a time that that worked for everyone, but when we did get together, I learned a lot.

My colleagues had experience in other markets and often brought new ideas and perspectives to the table. They understood our organization and the rules and resources that we had to work with. I never walked away from one of those meetings without having learned something practical that I could use and that helped me to be a little bit better as a marketer.

The ideal is to provide some formalized training and coaching but sometimes the real world gets in the way of that. Leveraging the knowledge and experience that you have in house can be a great second option.

Will the role of pharma marketer disappear completely any time soon? I doubt it.

But make no mistake. With all the changes in the industry, the role is under incredible pressure right now. Anything that can be done to support people in this critical position will not only help them, but will have a big impact on your team’s and your organization’s success.