Pharmaceutical brands fail to react to patient websites and blogs

by Alison Donnelly, Marketing 26-Jun-08, 12:14

LONDON - Healthcare and pharmaceutical brands are failing to embrace digital promotion and marketing, despite the rising popularity of patient websites set up by individuals and groups outside the industry, according to the findings of a survey by Millward Brown.

The report, which surveyed GPs across the UK, highlighted that healthcare and pharmaceutical brands were failing to respond to the growing numbers of user-generated websites, many of which reported negatively on patient care and prescription drugs.

Fergus Hampton, chief executive of Millward Brown Precis, said that with more patient websites appearing every day, healthcare and pharmaceutical companies needed to realise the word-of-mouth value that blogs and online patient-support groups bring. 'Healthcare and pharmaceutical brands need to listen and measure what is being said about their brands offline and online. Even though more than 80% of word of mouth still happens offline, when it's online, it's magnified.'

The report showed that the sectors were poor when it came to exploiting digital marketing despite the fact that GPs are receptive to engaging via the channel as they spend more time than they used to working online, turning to blogs, social networking sites and websites for information and advice.

About 97% of the GPs questioned said they use the internet at least once a day and for an average of 12 hours every week.

Comments

charlie robertson - 27/06/2008

The more people are able to self diagnose and arrive at GP better informed the better.

June Dawson - 28/06/2008

think anyone involved in digital pharma marketing recognises that there is enormous value associated with word of mouth comment from blogs and non pharma groups. The challenge for the pharmaceutical industry is the regulatory guidelines that it abides by. The guidelines discourage proactive monitoring because of so called adverse event reporting. There are companies considering how processes and procedures can be modified to remove this barrier. Until this happens the legal and regulatory teams in pharma will be very sensitive to proactive engagement in this area. But I for one believe this will change in due course.