At the IDMA Marketing and Sales Conference in Mumbai last week, I spoke on “Using digital to create customer engagement’ - a topic close to my heart.
I began by talking about how customer engagement is a topic that pharma discusses in posters glued on office walls, on slides of senior executives and in leisure. I asked the executives sitting in the audience if I was right to assume that 30 minutes into their day in office on Monday morning, they would get lost in numbers and results and ‘customers’ would be farthest from their minds. They all laughed in agreement.
That probably explains why while consumers would feel disappointed, betrayed and upset – maybe even angry – if brands like Coca Cola, Nike, Amazon and Starbucks did something wrong, not many would express similar feelings if some of the largest pharma brands - Lipitor, Seretide, Humira and Mixtard – did something wrong.





