How Farmers Outmarketed Pharma

When you think of potatoes, where do you want them to come from? Idaho

When you think of citrus, where do you want it to come from? Florida

When you think of US wine, where do you want it to come from? Napa Valley

When you think of generic drugs, where do you want them to come from? [company?, geography?]

This vacuum is a big problem in terms of commoditization. People don’t think of Teva or Ranbaxy or some other generic company. The average consumer probably doesn’t know who they are. And, they’ve competed based on price for years. If I was the CEO of Teva, this would be the number one challenge I would pose to my staff which was how do I get consumers to ask for my generic version of the drug. The next question should be what would we do to justify this?

For the first time, I think that they have a similar problem that brand pharma does which is how to create an offering not just a pill. The quote below from the CEO of Novartis, tees it up well.

“I also started to shift our business away from a transactional model that was focused on physically selling the drugs to delivering an outcome-based approach to add value beyond just the pill. I really believe that in the future, companies like Novartis are going to be paid on patient outcomes as opposed to selling the pill.”

And, I think this reflects what Sanofi has been experimenting with in terms of diabetes for several years. They launched their iBG Star Blood Glucose Meter to get into the meter space. Sanofi also has heavily invested in social media to give them direct engagement and feedback from consumers. Both of these begin to create more consumer branding for them as an entity.

I’ve talked about this several times over the years based on a book that one of the E&Y partners wrote when I was there called BLUR which was about blending products and services to create offerings. I think this notion combined with the lessons learned that commodities like potatoes have gone through in branding their products offer some insights into what pharma has to do to shift their positioning in the value chain. This is part of what I’ll be discussing at the upcoming PBMI conference where this shift to outcomes based contracting and focus for the industry is critical to long-term survival and differentiation.