The Housing Dilemma for Digital Pharma Marketing

Casey Ferrell is a research analyst at Cutting Edge Information. He will be guest blogging at IIR’s upcoming ePharma Summit 2012 (February 6-8, 2012 in New York City). You can find him on Twitter or over on his company’s blog.

My research of surveyed pharma companies revealed that 58% have dedicated digital marketing groups. I think it’s safe to assume at this point that the digital revolution is real and is only going to continue to wield enormous influence over the way in which companies conduct business, particularly in marketing. In the coming decade, the percentage of companies formally codifying their digital marketing efforts with dedicated teams will almost certainly grow as they realize the efficiencies to be had from such internal reorientation.

These structures of the groups I surveyed ran the gamut from globally centralized support teams to ones situated under brand managers. There are literally as many ways to internally organize digital marketing groups as there are companies. But what is the right way, or ways? Where should pharma companies house their digital marketing groups? I admit the premise for this blog post would seem to be an answer without a question. Digital marketing lives in the marketing department. There is no housing dilemma. So what’s the problem?

Well, it turns out that only 66% of those surveyed companies with dedicated digital marketing groups house them under marketing. I know, I was surprised, too. The other locations for digital marketing included global commercial operations, eAnalytics, public affairs and most prominently, corporate communications.

The fact that companies are housing digital marketing in departments other than marketing could be an encouraging sign for the digital evangelists out there who believe that digital’s destiny is to revolutionize the way that pharma companies do business throughout drugs’ lifecycles and from the bottom of company org charts all the way to the C-suite.

Some companies find advantages in locating these groups away from marketing. As the figure above shows, a few companies’ eMarketing teams sit within corporate communications, commercial operations, or eAnalytics. These groups are often the ones sitting at the forefront of digital marketing, not only serving brand team needs, but also clinical groups’ needs and medical teams’ needs. Digital marketing can play a role in many other ways — patient recruitment, general disease awareness and patient education, for example. For groups playing a larger role in overall digital corporate communications and working with other functions beyond marketing, these alignments particularly make sense. The alignments do not, however, prevent these teams from working with brand teams to develop and deliver digital marketing projects.

But the ones that do sit under the marketing umbrella have a much more direct line of influence on brand communications and as a result, a more pronounced impact on the digital portion of a brand’s marketing. And beyond that, brands with their own dedicated group don’t have to rely on a centralized (read: distant) group to develop or execute campaigns. Nor do they have to rely as heavily on outsourcing.

So there are obviously advantages to situating digital marketing groups both within and outside marketing departments.

I would argue that virtually every company should formally dedicate resources to digital marketing (rather than laying it at the feet of existing groups and/or FTEs). But each company ought to assess its understanding of — and expectations for — digital communications before choosing where to house this effort so as to align those expectations with its parent department’s ability to deliver on those expectations.