Specialist Healthcare Marketing

Change happens quickly in China. On 12th April a Chinese student suffering from cancer posted an angry blog after paying around Rmb200,000 (~GBP20,000) for an (unsuccessful) experimental medical therapy. He found out about the drug after viewing a paid listing on Baidu and much of his anger was directed at the Chinese search engine company. [...]

My twin girls are five now and for the past year or so, one of their favourite refrains has been “ask Google, Daddy”. They are at that stage when they are curious about everything. The cynicism of later childhood years has yet to creep in and each day is met with a barrage of whys, [...]

The buzzword “Multichannel” has been thrown around in pharma marketing circles for a few years now and it has always irked me a little. What marketing isn’t multichannel? Exactly who are these brand managers that choose their one channel for the year and stick with it? “This year it’s just print ads for us!” “Nothing [...]

There will probably come a time when many of us will routinely monitor, track and record an array of health metrics on a daily basis. Medicine may start to become an exercise in the manipulation of big data, where a rich record of diagnostic & lifestyle information harvested from smart devices dotted about our person [...]

Pharmaceutical companies in the US, and elsewhere, have been nervously hovering around the fringes of social media for a number of years now, trying to figure out how to engage with a medium that has ensnared millions across the planet. The companies’ products are being endlessly discussed, by patients and doctors alike, in blogs and [...]

Industrial strategy has been a key focus for David Cameron’s UK coalition government from day one. Almost the first words uttered by the new Prime Minister in his first major speech1 as leader (in Yorkshire at the end of May 2010) were “Can we inject new life into the private sector, so that enterprise can [...]

There is a big debate going on in the pharmaceutical industry at the moment and it’s a ‘big data’ debate. The topic of the moment is transparency: clinical trial data transparency, regulator transparency, and transparency from marketers. In the UK, the debate has been turbo-charged by the publication of Ben Goldacre’s book, Bad Pharma. Whilst [...]

Given the amount of resource that companies plough into websites and online initiatives these days, it is beholden on any healthcare marketer to take an interest in the browsing habits of doctors. Two recent surveys from the US have come to some similar conclusions. Manhattan Research’s regular “Taking the Pulse” survey (of 2950 practicing US [...]

It has now been nearly a year since Facebook’s initial public offering valued the company at $104billion, and ever since the market has being trying to decide whether that figure was wise or wishful thinking.From an IPO high of $38, the company’s share price has dipped as low as $18 in September, before climbing back [...]

PME MASTERCLASS FEATURE-  APP fever seems to have gripped the healthcare industry where product managers feel somehow out-of-touch if they don’t have a phone APP in development. In this article we’ll look at reasons why you might want to develop an APP to support your product, cover some of the practical issues to consider when [...]