I recently sat down with Erica Taylor, PhD, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Genentech, to talk about the future of biopharma marketing and creating more meaningful content. In Erica’s role, she sets the vision, strategic enterprise leadership, and direction for the marketing function at Genentech, covering the company’s full commercial portfolio. She has over 15 years of experience in the pharmaceutical/biotech industry and across a variety of different functions including strategic analytics, sales, and marketing. I asked Erica about how to build a foundation, bridge across teams, and leverage technology to better reach customers.
Pooja Ojala: How do you approach marketing to adapt to today’s healthcare landscape?
Erica Taylor: Marketing has always played a significant role within Genentech where we develop therapies to treat serious illnesses from heart disease and cancer to the flu. Commercialization has become an important part of our operations, albeit with a new set of challenges.
Today, the timeline to bring drugs to market and educate customers is reduced. We used to work with three- to five-year timelines to prepare, deploy, and reach steady state in our commercialization. Now, due to the highly competitive environment, the process is truncated to 12-18 months. Building a solid content foundation is crucial, as we need to deliver more educational material to HCPs and patients that is simple and digestible, yet also compelling.
Marketing is key to adding that layer of storytelling. Then, when data or a statistic is attached to a story, people remember it. We view marketing as a discipline that we need to excel at to support our content transformation journey, which includes modular content and personalization. This will in turn help the long-term growth of our organization.
What is your philosophy for creating quality content with more efficient processes for use?
Once you’ve built a solid foundation, you then need to unify processes and systems across marketing and legal teams to drive greater visibility and stay coordinated. We are leveraging a digital platform to enable new approaches such as modular content. We’re creating a compliant engine that will help reach healthcare professionals (HCPs) and patients faster with content that resonates.
Implementing this new framework wouldn’t be possible without motivating everyone across the marketing organization to embrace change. Even with the right technology and processes, it’s crucial to shift mindsets and explain what the end goal is. It’s about helping people understand the “why” behind how marketing operations will change day-to-day and how we can drive an even greater impact on patient outcomes.
Once you have all the hearts, minds, willingness, and excitement to drive that change, adding in any new technology is easy. It even becomes fun.
What roles will agencies play in this next phase of accelerated content, especially with modular content?
Finding the right agency partner is crucial. However, how agencies and marketing teams work together will experience a shift.
As we know, collaboration matters. What’s important for us at Genentech in moving our marketing organization forward is picking the right partners who want to be on this journey with us. This includes initiatives such as modular content and customer relationship management (CRM) integration to create what we need for a marketing foundation.
Agencies collaborating with our internal teams and media partners as well as medical, legal, and regulatory representatives help provide a full understanding of capabilities and regulations. This setup will help guide more effective creative decisions that personalize content around each customer’s journey.
Today, it’s important to share personalized stories, pulsing out one story at a time across different channels—and an agency can help with that. Having partners that think this way and understand how to segment will make a big difference.
It’s also key to our success to have partners that are willing to experiment with new innovations in the future, while at the same time having an intimate understanding of our organization, how we work, and most importantly, how we make decisions based on what’s best for patients.
Recent Veeva Pulse findings show that while 20% more content is being created, 77% is rarely or never used. Is this the case for your team and how are you approaching it?
We’ve learned that although we’re making more content, we’re not using most of it. This is true across the industry, and we need to focus our content strategy on developing fewer assets that are proven effective in advancing relevant engagements with HCPs.
Technology as well as data and insights can help us to decide what we should and should not use. I love the concept of a content survey to understand what works and what doesn’t, even if it’s imperfect. This means shifting away from simply relying on technology that allows us to create more content, ultimately creating too much that dilutes its original purpose and ends up not being used. Instead, we need to look closely at the data to distinguish what content is most relevant to that audience and be intentional about what we put out there.
What can data help uncover throughout the content lifecycle and how do you incorporate it in marketing strategies?
Data is key to helping prioritize the content that will drive the greatest impact and the best ways we can help our teams leverage it in the field—across our portfolio in real time. This is where machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) can help adjudicate it and pull content out of the system.
By leveraging these key insights, teams will be able to learn something new from each customer interaction. Aggregating this information across customers and interactions will improve our understanding of how content is most effectively being used.
Ultimately, data and insights can power more effective content time and again to improve HCP and patient education.
