Summary
The executive leadership of a leading global pharmaceutical company recognized that developing a variety of proprietary, standardized, and globally implementable platforms for marketing to Healthcare Professionals (HCPs) would increase the market share and improve competitiveness.
Situation
A multi-channel marketing (MCM) globalization strategy was envisioned as a key strategic capability for cost-efficiently growing the company’s reach, while reducing dependency on external service providers. These changes would reduce the cost per interaction with HCPs, and increase customer engagement with key brands, thereby driving greater profitability.
An aggressive roll out strategy was required to meet the goal of deploying MCM in 23 emerging markets in less than 2 years, which included 10 priority markets by end of the current year. With such a pressing deadline at hand, the client lacked staff with specialized knowledge to set up and implement the project. A failure or delay in implementing this initiative would lead to missed opportunities for customer engagement and foregone cost savings, potentially leading to diminished market share.
Our team was invited to manage all aspects of the MCM initiative rollout – from local strategy development through the transition to business as usual in order to meet the aggressive deadlines.
Satori Solution
We combined our firm’s expertise in Project Management, Strategy and Advisory, and Organizational Effectiveness to provide a successful solution to the client. We carefully chose engagement consultants who possessed skills in cross-functional areas, such as knowledge in technical marketing, change management, corporate strategy and project management, which was essential for the project.
The main challenge we faced was the need to simultaneously design and implement the MCM initiative – essentially “building the plane while flying it.” In particular, this meant establishing procedures and organizational structure to support this nascent initiative in the long run. Cross-training in multiple areas was essential, because our team of only two consultants performed the work that eventually would be carried out by a global team of over 15 people.
Over the course of working on the initiative, we used our expertise in Project Management to establish MCM capabilities in each market, followed by deploying these new standard channels to realize efficiencies and integrate local MCM channels and tactics with global ones.
By the end of the engagement, we had created and trained a new organizational structure consisting of full-time Country Leads and Regional Leads. Additionally, we developed a structure for interaction among country, region and global teams.
Results
Within a year of working on the initiative, we established the MCM channels and organizational capabilities to go live in 10 priority markets. Additionally, operating plans and budgets were established for key brands in 13 additional markets included in the second rollout wave the following year. The MCM initiative is expected to save the client several million dollars annually and expand the company’s marketing reach to hundreds of thousands more physicians and health care providers each month.