The pharmaceutical industry’s way of anticipating, and building insurance against, the coming era of government-run health care in United States reminds me of the mergers and acquisitions from earlier this spring. Of course, pharmaceutical companies most be feeling the need to be more diversified beyond prescription drugs, and everything from Pfizer’s (PFE) acquisition of Wyeth, Merck’s (MRK) purchase of Schering-Plough and Genentech’s (DNA) deal with Roche all made headlines for their potential to help the resulting entities reduce costs and add new, promising drugs to company pipelines. I am however genuine interested in knowing if the board members in and between these mergers actually optimize the potential of market growth or not. We know that Pfizer, itself being a product of series of mergers with the buy of Warner-Lambert and later Pharmacia, is in a global effort to refashion a more consumer appealing Pfizer company brand. I for one am excited, since I haven’t seen a significant new corporate brand launch at a major pharma house since the launch of AztraZeneca and Novartis brands. In the short-term, corporate rebranding will likely show it self as an increased level of corporate-level marketing and promotion to support efforts to ‘brand the merger’, as much as to ‘rebrand the company’, in the eyes of customers and investors. Over the longer-term, however, I guess a philosophical shift among marketer leaders in the industry will find more productive ways to leverage the corporate brand to a broad suite of enterprise offerings and services that are increasingly the basis of differentiation amongst product brands. But I can’t help to think whether big pharmaceutical companies may actually gain more from collaborating on research and development than from mega mergers. For some reason, collaborations on research and development – as opposed to takeovers – are quiet agreements with little media attention. But it is here where the corporations actually get creative. Merck and AstraZeneca (AZN) combined two of their leading pipeline products to develop an innovative cancer therapy, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Concert Pharmaceuticals pooled pipeline assets in part to distribute risk, and Pfizer and GSK combined their HIV pipelines and marketed products into a joint venture to increase their chances of success. These deals represent new, promising ways to prove commitments, and as a strategist, I wonder why these agreements are not brand promoted on a higher level. The company brands would only benefit showing of its deepened relationship with rivals, and doing so by providing innovative platforms to retain product brand equity beyond product patent exclusivity. This is social marketing, the real future of the industry but unfortunately there seem to be a lack of insight of what is really happening and why it shouldn’t be kept away from the public light. And this is in a time when pharmaceutical branding has become so crucial to creating distinctions in the mind of patients as well as doctors.
Rana
pharmasoil
