Be Obsessed With Customers, Not Competitors

We are absolutely obsessed with beating the competition in pharma. In fact, I bet if you look at your commercial and brand strategy decks, you’ll see lots of information about market share, competitor activity and, usually, a specific objective focused on ‘differentiation’.

It’s a classic playbook that results in our marketing campaigns, content and experiences making our products, features and benefits the hero of the story.

Yet, in the pursuit of standing out, we find ourselves being ignored by HCPs.

When you are obsessed with the competition and your place in the market, it is easy to lose sight of the people your marketing is supposed to serve.

Too often, the conversation starts with our brand: what it offers, why its data is different and how it compares with the competition. But why would an HCP choose to give their attention to a conversation that starts there?

What we often overlook is the need to understand healthcare professionals, empathise with their problems, and start conversations with the challenges they face and the patients they care for.

There is an opportunity to shift from a product-first mindset to a customer-first strategy: building trust and demonstrating value before asking HCPs to engage with your brand.

Prefer to watch? 🎥

In the video below, Dan explains why pharma’s traditional strategic playbook is contributing to disengagement, and proposes changes that can improve campaign impact and help you build more meaningful engagement with HCPs.

Why does pharma marketing struggle to engage HCPs?

One of the key challenges is the tendency to focus on selling the product at every stage of the customer journey. Product features, clinical data and brand messages take centre stage, leaving little room to build a relationship with the HCP.

It’s easy to understand why pharma does this. It feels safe.

Delivering product key messages demonstrates that your audience has at least been exposed to the reasons your product deserves its place in the market. Marketers and reps can point to what has been communicated, and leaders can feel reassured that activity is supporting the brand.

But paradoxically, this can achieve the opposite of customer adoption. Talking at someone doesn’t mean they’ve listened. And being talked at doesn’t deepen your relationship with the person talking.

This ‘differentiation-first’ approach can overlook a fundamental part of marketing: earning the right to have the product conversation. Clinical data and product differentiation matter, but customers also need to trust the information they receive and understand its relevance to their own clinical practice.

There are organisational challenges too. Short-term brand planning can reward these ‘safe’ strategies that quickly get to the heart of the product value proposition. That can also encourage an emphasis on activity-based KPIs: what was delivered, how many people were reached and how often the message was communicated.

At the same time, the rush to deliver more — and the race to implement the latest pharma marketing capabilities — can leave limited time for developing the underlying marketing skills needed to use them well. Campaigns are launched and retired within months, rather than continually learned from and optimised. And even where teams adopt conversion and impact metrics, slow feedback loops can mean waiting weeks or months to understand what is actually working.

The accumulation of these challenges creates a cycle in which brands keep producing communications without learning quickly enough what their customers actually find useful. Rather than stepping back to strengthen these core marketing capabilities, it can be tempting to move on to the next new capability, channel or tactic — while continuing to push more product messages towards HCPs.

It’s a false economy.

What does a customer-first pharma marketing strategy look like?

It all starts with a different set of questions.

What is the customer thinking? What are they feeling? What are they searching for? What are the questions on their lips right now?

These questions encourage marketers to look beyond what the brand wants to say and consider what HCPs actually need to know. That means understanding their priorities, the challenges they face in clinical practice and the information that could help them make decisions about patient care.

It means spending less time pushing a solution, and more time empathising with the problem.

It is about making the message genuinely relevant and the engagement truly valuable to the customer.

The principle is simple to understand if you put yourself in the shoes of a customer. We’ve all been sold to, and we know the difference between a brand that is trying to get something from us and one that first gives us something useful.

The engagements we value are those that provide value to us. The brands we trust are those that demonstrate a genuine understanding of our problems. And we are more likely to take action when a brand shows up as a relevant solution at the right moment, rather than constantly asking us to commit before it has earned our attention or trust.

With a customer-first approach to brand strategy, rather than leading every interaction with the product, marketers can focus on providing useful information, addressing real questions and building trust over time.

Product discussions then have a stronger foundation because the customer can understand how the information, evidence and ultimately the product relate to a problem that matters to them.

This requires a shift from transactional tactics towards a longer-term engagement strategy, with value at the heart of the relationship.

 

Should pharma marketers focus on customers or competitors?

Understanding the competition remains an important part of pharmaceutical commercial strategy. Marketers need to know how competing treatments are positioned, where products differ and how other brands are engaging HCPs.

The question is not whether competitor intelligence matters. It is the role it plays in shaping your decisions, your story and your engagement strategy.

Competitor insight should inform the strategy, not define it.

Starting with competitors can lead to a cycle of reacting to their activity, matching their messages or looking for ways to demonstrate superiority. Starting with customers offers a different perspective: what needs are not being addressed? Where are existing approaches falling short? And how can the brand provide something genuinely useful?

This also broadens the discussion about differentiation. Clinical data is important, but the value of a treatment cannot be understood through data comparisons alone. Clinical context, individual patient needs and the realities of decision-making all matter.

The challenge for pharma marketers is to balance competitive awareness with a deeper understanding of the people they serve. Winning should mean more than outperforming another brand. It should also mean creating value for HCPs and supporting better decisions for the patients they care for.

A truly differentiated strategy is born from customer insight. Be the brand that has a clear perspective on a problem your customers recognise, and demonstrate how your product can become part of the solution.

The strongest brands are the ones customers think of when a particular challenge presents itself. If your brand becomes meaningfully associated with helping solve that challenge, you have a far stronger foundation for preference, engagement and leadership in the category.

 

How should HCP and patient needs shape marketing strategy?

HCPs may be the immediate audience for much of pharmaceutical marketing, but their decisions are ultimately made in the context of the patients they are trying to help. Understanding the HCP therefore means understanding much more than their attitudes towards a treatment. It means understanding the clinical environment they work within and the different patient needs they are trying to navigate.

Clinical trials necessarily study defined patient populations within controlled conditions. Clinical practice is more complicated.

The HCP has to consider the evidence alongside the reality of the individual patient in front of them: their characteristics, preferences, comorbidities, previous treatment, practical circumstances and many other factors that can influence a decision.

Customer insight therefore needs to help us understand that reality. What makes applying the evidence difficult? Where does uncertainty exist? What questions arise when an HCP tries to translate clinical data into a decision for a particular patient?

Helping customers navigate those questions can be far more valuable than simply repeating the data itself.

This is where medical colleagues, patient advocacy teams and relevant frontline experience can make an important contribution to strategy. Involving these perspectives early can help commercial teams understand how their plans translate into clinical practice, rather than bringing medical input in primarily as a final review or supportive step.

The patient experience provides an important thread connecting customer needs, clinical relevance and meaningful engagement.

For marketers, this means looking beyond the brand’s communication objectives and asking a different question: how can our work help HCPs make better-informed decisions for patients within the reality of their clinical environment?

 

What needs to change to make customer-first marketing possible?

Changing the mindset of pharma marketing teams is an important starting point, but it is not enough. Teams also need the conditions to put customer-first thinking into practice.

That means giving customer understanding a more central role in planning, creating more space for marketers to test, learn and optimise, and measuring success in ways that go beyond simply counting activity.

It also means investing in the marketing capabilities needed to understand customers properly: using insight well, identifying meaningful problems, designing engagement around those needs and learning from how customers respond.

The objectives matter too. If success is defined only by what the brand wants to achieve, customer-first thinking will always struggle to take hold. HCP and patient needs should form part of the strategic picture from the outset, helping teams connect commercial goals with something genuinely valuable to the people they serve.

This is not about abandoning commercial objectives or overlooking the realities of pharmaceutical marketing. It is about recognising that stronger commercial outcomes are more likely when those objectives are connected to a clear understanding of customer value.

 

Lead with value, not the competition

Being obsessed with customers does not mean ignoring competitors. It means putting customer understanding at the heart of the strategy and using competitive insight to inform how that strategy takes shape.

The key takeaways:

• Start with the customer problem, not the product message. Understand what HCPs are trying to achieve, where they face difficulty and what would genuinely help them.
• Let competitor insight inform your strategy, not define it. Differentiation matters, but it should be built around customer relevance rather than simply reacting to what other brands are doing.
• Earn the right to have the product conversation. Build relevance, trust and value before expecting HCPs to engage with your brand.
• Connect the product to a problem that matters. The strongest position is not simply being different, but becoming meaningfully associated with helping solve a recognisable customer challenge.
• Create the conditions to keep learning. Customer-first marketing requires the right skills, measures, feedback loops and planning approach, not just a change in mindset.

The question is not simply how your brand can stand out. It is how your brand can make a meaningful difference to the people it serves.