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PharmaLive: Chief Technology Officer for Cadient, a Cognizant Company, Says Many Pharma Organizations Lack Digital Marketing Expertise

Bryan Hill points out that whatever is developed for pharma customers―whether HCPs or patients―needs to take into consideration that everyone these days is multitasking.

“Your patients, your healthcare providers, are not giving you 100 percent of their undivided attention,” he says. “You need to start thinking of things like ambient computing or voice-activated engagement experiences” such as Amazon Echo. With something like that, a customer is getting content they value, but in a different mechanism.

There has been an evolution over the last two years where the industry has understood it needs to pay more attention to the mobile web experience, Hill says.

Responsive web design may have come out in 2009, but Hill estimates that of the top 169 healthcare professional websites, less than half of them are mobile optimized. “If you look at other industries, [responsive web design] is the de facto standard,” Hill says.

One of the biggest hurdles in the use of apps in the pharma industry is their adoption. Hill recalls the “mini-rush” of 2012 when pharma companies were clamoring for the development of specialized apps for their brands. “It was interesting because many pharmas had sort of avoided the whole mobile web, maybe concerned about connectivity issues, so they jumped to the more vanity solution of apps,” he says. “And what we saw among pharma, and even some of the insurers such as Aetna, people jumped on board, created their apps, and there just wasn’t the adoption that maybe they had hoped for.”

“The bigger concern, I think, comes down to trust,” Hill says. “As a patient, as an HCP, if you think about apps, they are a very personal experience versus from how I’m engaging from a web perspective and that may be viewed as intrusive.”

Hill sees opportunities for pharma in other areas of mobile beyond search, apps, and mobile optimized websites. “Let’s call is 100 percent of people use text and messaging on their phone,” he says. “Everybody’s texting, everybody is using some sort of messaging app, whether it’s Facebook or Skype. We’re using these tools and you’re seeing other businesses engage, whether it’s through advertising or more content marketing experiences.”

These environments make good places to use promotional tactics because they are “more in the flow of the way people behave,” Hill says. “It’s not an interruption, per se, and you’re not trying to draw [the user] away to another property that A, they don’t recognize, or B, no time to go explore and learn what the value proposition is for them.”

According to Hill, pharma and healthcare companies need to learn how to redevelop content so that it works within the messaging environment.

Most pharma companies already have a great deal of already-developed content, but there is a combination of attitude and technology barriers preventing the redevelopment of this content for a mobile messaging environment, Hill says.

“There is a lack of digital marketing expertise within many pharma organizations, particularly the larger organizations,” he says. “From a technology perspective, you’re looking at legacy platforms that are just unable to meet the demands or expectations of customer experiences today.”

An old legacy web content management platform, for example, is not able to facilitate content that is mobile-ready. This means companies have to build a new solution or seek additional investment, Hill says.

Often, when legal and regulatory people at pharma companies are reviewing digital marketing programs, they are still coming at it from a desktop experience and are giving feedback based on that. “That needs to change, it needs to start with mobile,” Hill says. “There needs to be some education involved with the legal/regulatory teams.” These teams need systems in which they will be able to test how the messaging looks across all different devices as well as being able to provide feedback.

The main obstacle to change in general is lack of collaboration, especially when it comes to content, Hill says. “There is tons of good content around, but who owns it and how do they share it? There may be some good interactive content within the clinical/R&D side that you could potentially leverage on the commercial side, but marketing isn’t aware of it. They don’t even have the opportunity to take it modify it, and adapt it to a particular screen size, device size, what have you.” 

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