Pharma marketers are ever so keen on social media. Patients are out there talking about their conditions, and their medications. Pharma would love to join, and no doubt influence, the conversation.
But Pharma has a problem. It’s starting out with a huge trust deficit.
Take the headlines around GSK’s Avandia from about a month ago. Just like with Vioxx is appears that a major Pharma company has suppressed or muted reports of fatal adverse events. The result, as a recent blog post relates, is “An example of everything that’s wrong with pharma,” which is a complete lack of trust. And unfortunately, this trust deficit is the current starting point for pharma.
To get a sense of what brand trust is all about and how low on the scale pharma sits, its useful to think about the current situation with Toyota. This company has been acting much like pharma with regards to their products safety issues: hiding evidence in order to put revenues and expansion and share value above customer and end user safety.
The thing to point out is that the long fall from grace that Toyota has undergone is pretty much the same distance pharma already is from the top of the trust ladder. That is a long hill to climb.
This doesn’t mean pharma should ignore social media. But it does mean some pharma co’s needs to think more holistically as customer-first marketing organizations, and less like greedy, sales-at-all-cost machines. That type of mentality only deepens the trust deficit with customers and makes the marketing job that much harder.
