Over the past couple of months, I have been meeting up with CEOs and business leaders of pharma / biotech companies across the country. During the course of interactions, I get to hear several business issues / challenges / pain points:

1. Brands are flat or stagnating in sales performance, they seem to have hit a “ceiling” after all conventional marketing options have been exhausted (that includes CRM as well).
2. Brands do not seem to make any relevance to customers anymore. They are viewed as commodities, “generic” pills and nothing more. Pharma Marketers seem to be at their wits end to cut through the clutter and “Stand Out”.
3. Even the so called services differentiation through patient programs, patient services and alike seem commoditized. All appear the same with no customer connect or value creation.
4. We are faced with Life Cycle Management issues of large, mature brands with huge turnovers where mere tactical initiatives would just not do at all times.
5. We need to build a consistent, systematic, new products planning and launch excellence framework / approach in our organization and not some random, “as it comes launch” go to market approach
6. We need to urgently build sales force execution alignment on brand priorities. There has to be a uniform execution rigor, accountability and robust brand performance reviews.

All these and more seem to be occupying significant senior management time and attention. After all, these are the most important business related issues. When we think deeply, we realize that the problem lies not with our customers, but in our inability to modulate our marketing capabilities with the changing times. We seem to be flogging the old paradigm in a changed business environment and this will not work. Pharma marketers need support or coaching in a structured, customized manner to navigate these changing times. How will it work?

We offer specialized, customized brand coaching support to clients for robust business growth. We adopt a thorough brand/portfolio assessment from the scratch, build insights and a deep level of understanding of the brand, its customers and its DNA. Everything and anything that has to do with the brand passes through the rigor of our tools and frameworks for capturing the relevant information and distilling insights from them.

1. We work very closely with brand marketing teams to develop thorough understanding of the pharmaceutical strategic marketing framework, the fundamental pillars and its importance to business. This helps build a thorough understanding of pharma marketing and its nuances. This is embellished through a mix of pedagogy, pharma consulting case studies but more importantly, robust brand discussions and intense debates around the pillars. After all, constructive debates are healthy for the business. Business lies in the fundamentals and no matter how snazzy marketing may get, any weakening or lapse in the fundamentals could spell trouble for the business.
2. We deploy our proprietary tools and frameworks of brand planning to understand the brand plans built by the brand teams, spot gaps and then work on plugging the gaps. Every business is unique and so a customized approach will only work. We develop customized approaches based on the brand needs and go about building holistic brand coaching solutions. These are blended solutions aimed singularly to strengthen the pharma marketing capabilities of marketers.
3. We provide structured coaching assessment reports of all participants to Business Heads, HR and L&D so as to integrate into their overall developmental and talent management plans. Reports are factual, insightful and unbiased. Every pharma marketer is independently assessed on functional, behavioural and higher-order competencies that get used as inputs into the overall Performance Management Process of the organization. In doing so, the organization gets a clear, factual “outside-in” deep dive into its marketing teams, understands where the talent lies and what steps could be taken to plug the gaps. As always, like a typical Bell Shaped curve, 10% of coachees are outliers either way.

We have been partners to a few leading MNCs and Indian companies in this journey for the past two years. The results have been extremely encouraging so much so that we have been retained for the third year in a row by some of them. This speaks of the trust that the clients have in our abilities to work with their teams but more importantly, their own fundamental conviction in the process of brand coaching. The brand coaching intervention is an annual retainer-based model that runs for one year with a lock-in for 6 months. This is a must as it tests the commitment of both parties to the process and builds a common shared understanding that there is nothing called magic or instant results when it comes to long-term marketing capabilities building for the organization. These initiatives take time to build, are for the long-term but sow the seed of robustness that is enduring and sustained.

We believe that brand coaching support in a formalized and structured manner is the need of the hour for most organizations if they want to move to the next level of performance, build healthy brands, build robust business growths and turn around stagnation. Talk to us if you are facing some of the problems outlined in the article. Maybe a brand coaching support could be just what the doctor ordered. For more details, write into shailesh@intellectus-consulting.com or call on +91 90089 30920.

#brand coaching, #brand building, #brand management, #brand performance