What Matters Most: The Trends That Will Shape Pharma Marketing in 2023

Big concepts. Big platforms. Big words. Big decisions. That’s where we all want to play.   

It’s easy to toss big words around, though: to be provocative, to hype, to make unsupported claims.   

It’s far more difficult to be precise, accurate, meaningful. To have impact. To do good work that matters.  

In our eighth annual trends forecast, we look at five big ideas we believe are referenced too flippantly, too often, and not given the attention and action they deserve.   

Not taking them seriously enough might look like a lot of different things: inaccurately oversimplifying a concept, insisting a problem’s been solved before it has, or ignoring a slow-growing elephant in the room.  

But in whatever way these big concepts aren’t being treated properly, the result is the same: it’s not good for patients.  

It’s hard work to give them their due. These are big issues, and they can be daunting. But we’ve always believed there’s no challenge too big to cure.  

You can read the entire whitepaper here. But here’s a summary to get you started!

1. Omnichannel. We live in an omnichannel world: a personalized customer experience is table stakes. Pharma’s need to catch up to most other industries is increasing. But when the goal is anticipatory relevance, it can be hard to know where you begin. We’ve got a proven assessment, as well as a recent webinar, that help you prioritize what you need to do to evolve. But be especially aware of hidden data siloes in telehealth and patient services! And lead with the need, not the tactics: it’s not about what tool you want, but about what problem you’re solving.   

2. Economy. It’s been unusually hard even for expert pundits and guiding bodies to predict the economic volatility we’ve seen recently. But the situation warrants caution, and both your marketing budget, as well as your patients’ healthcare behavior, probably reflect that. Addressing treatment affordability is increasingly important. So is efficiency with your investments.  

3. Metaverse. The word “metaverse” has been the victim of hype, conjuring up fanciful connotations of life as an avatar in a virtual world, but the reality is little less sci-fi, and a lot more practical. You might remember the hesitancy of pharma to embrace websites in the late 1990s, or to embrace social media in the late 2000s. Web 3.0 in the 2020s is no different. Wise marketers will know not to be caught off guard, and not to lag behind customer expectations. Check out our page full of current examples of the medical metaverse (some of whom are EVERSANA partners). 

4. Equity. This isn’t a fad or a novelty, but it is a trend – a cultural movement. In medical research, in healthcare delivery, and in life-sciences companies and their partners, responsible organizations are working to uncover and address entrenched inequities. You can’t succeed without understanding and addressing these longstanding equity gaps – from the makeup of teams leading marketing initiatives, to co-creating with the communities we serve, to understanding all patients’ holistic experiences, down to the data that creates our digital ecosystems and the process of building accessible brands.  

5. Talent. Talent management today means engaging talent – finding and keeping brilliant creative minds across the world. It means training – keeping that brilliance growing, while helping managers work effectively in a hybrid world. And it means processing change – when the only constant is change, how do you remain? These are big questions that we’re helping our clients address, while addressing ourselves, in a variety of ways.

Health is fundamental. It’s what we care about for ourselves and our loved ones more than perhaps anything else. And so, the blessing and the curse of healthcare is a two-sided coin: We work in a field that matters perhaps more than any other. We have so much potential to make a difference; and we can fall so far short if we don’t. 

And so, we need these big words and big concepts that we’ve talked about here. And we need to take big action on them. 

Digital technology extends our capability to make those changes: to understand what patients need, to understand how we can help them, and to reach patients, caregivers, and HCPs with the information they need and want. 

Addressing big issues like these fully and thoughtfully isn’t the work of 12 months. It’s the work of a lifetime. It’s the work we at EVERSANA INTOUCH are devoted to alongside you.