Transactional to Transformational Marketing in Pharma

by Subba Rao Chaganti

Despite its great contribution to improving the health and well-being of people and saving countless lives worldwide for over a century, the modern pharmaceutical industry has continued to fall from grace in public perception for the last ten to fifteen years.
While there are many reasons, such as ever-escalating prices denying access to many patients, unethical business practices to gain market share, and relentless focus on the bottom line explain for low productivity, they cannot be responsible for Pharma's loss of reputation. Instead, most pharmaceutical companies' transactional marketing and other unethical business practices seem to be a major, if not the only, cause of the drug industry's fall on the reputation barometer.
Increasing competition, drying up of new product pipelines, rapid genericization, and continuing cost-containment pressures are the reasons a marketer practicing transactional marketing would offer. But, then, there is often a very thin line between a reason and an excuse. Excuses, when accepted, become reasons, and reasons, when denied, become excuses.
Regardless of whether there are reasons or excuses, transactional marketing practices and unethical business behavior may give short-term gains in business at a huge cost to reputation, which is extremely difficult to rebuild. Moreover, transactional relationships are so transient, like fleeting clouds, that they cannot build loyalty for your brand or company. Only Transformational marketing practices and ethical business behavior can.Pharma needs to change its marketing practices from transactional to transformational today. The question is how? The book, Transactional to Transformational Marketing aims to show how a pharma company can do this because the cure for all current marketing ills is Transformational Marketing!