Episode Details

Today I speak with Michael Kuderka, an experienced pharmaceutical marketer. I liked what he had to say about being authentic. Michael suggests that pharmaceutical brands these days need to lock down a patient population where the brand can legitimately add the most value, and then own that market by developing strong value propositions for each stakeholder along the patient journey.

Michael says in the long run, this is a much better strategy than fighting for a tiny piece of a giant pie. Especially when the clinical differentiation across such broad sweeps of patients is rarely well-defined and even more rarely will motivate prescribers to switch up their current standard of care.

Soon after my talk with Michael, I heard a guy named Ian Altman speak on another podcast. His message dovetailed perfectly with Michael's point of view. I immediately went out and bought his book, called "Same Side Selling." Ian advises that sellers and marketers aim to be “Some Things to the Right People." He says that when a buyer senses that the seller is more interested in selling than in delivering value, trust vanishes. I can easily see how this applies to pharmaceutical brands.

0:00 - How Michael went from the defense industry to Pharmaceutical Sales and Marketing. I like a term he uses for smaller pharma … “Micro-Pharma”

2:15 - How the role of the healthcare marketer has changed: Formerly silo’ed functional teams have begun to work together and follow patients throughout their disease management journey.

3:50 - An example of what a patient journey might look like for an h.pylori patient

5:17 - How Michael’s brand team tackled the challenge to help patients via providers and caregivers by keying in on the problem perpetuated by the current standard of care … an overuse of one kind of antibiotic.

6:45 - Giving the prescriber a solid answer to the question, “I need to prescribe this brand because…” The answer needs to be compelling enough for the physician to champion the brand with payers and also compelling enough for a prescriber to break what might be longstanding prescribing habits.

10:00 - Niche strategies - from a forecast perspective, many might find it alluring