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What Pharma Can Learn from CPG

Why pharma marketers should borrow a page from the CPG market research playbook.

Picture of Bob Klein
Bob Klein
Chief Insights and Experience Officer

Note: This article originally appeared in the Quirk’s Media April/May 2019 Issue and can be found in its entirety here.

Let’s say you are a marketer and your target audience is made up of middle-class female Boomers. You would not develop a brand or consider crafting a strategy for how and when to reach these women without fully understanding their motivations, their attitudes and behaviors. But so often in the pharmaceutical industry, that’s exactly what marketers do. This is particularly true on the R&D side of pharma, where getting enough qualified patients to enroll in clinical trials is the primary barrier to getting a drug to market.

What success would pharma find if it treated potential patients more like traditional consumers, taking cues from market research and brand tactics routinely used in consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketing?

As our notions of “consumer” and “patient” continue to converge into the singular “human” perspective, the inextricable links between CPG and pharma marketing can’t be ignored. Disruption across the pharmaceutical sector has shifted the industry paradigm from blockbuster drugs to generic products, placing people back in the center of the equation.

Accepting that market research across CPG and pharma is indeed more similar than different opens the door to learning from the past, optimizing the present and ideating the future. When we see past the labels, we can unearth a new world of insights by confidently juxtaposing retailers to clinical trial sites, influencers to KOLs, products to medications and consumers to patients.

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    About Continuum Clinical

    Continuum Clinical is a global clinical trial enrollment company that has been providing fact-based patient recruitment solutions since 1993. We have built and maintained long-standing relationships with pharmaceutical and biotech companies around the world, including 10 of the top 20 global Sponsors. This experience led Continuum Clinical to become the industry’s most trusted partner for clinical trial engagement, recruitment, retention, and analytics.