The evolution of Searle’s marketing strategies over the past 15 years
The Challenge
As the lobby filled with aspiring candidates, all vying for a place in the highly coveted MTO program at The Searle Company Limited (TSCL), Zara was trying to find answers in the pages of the TSCL’s latest company newsletter.
‘Searle Wins Asia Corporate Excellence and Sustainability Award!’
Searle was a company of dreams! It had gained immense prominence and popularity in recent years and bagged several awards, including the Forbes Asia Best Under a Billion award thrice in a row, and the Asia Money award for the most outstanding company in Pakistan’s healthcare sector. It was the only pharmaceutical company to establish an independent WHO lab in Pakistan. These were historical times at Searle and Zara wanted to be a part of Searle’s growth momentum and its contribution to Pakistan’s healthcare.
“What would I say if they asked me to chalk out a marketing plan for Searle?” she thought to herself.
She was a class topper, with a near-perfect CGPA, and an excellent grasp of almost every concept in her marketing textbook. She knew that in the pharmaceutical industry, the path to the market is long and complex. Once a product prototype is designed, it must undergo a series of tests and approvals from various authorities, such as the FDA, EMA, WHO, and MOH, before it can be commercialized.
Also, due to the highly regulated nature of this industry, prescription drugs are not allowed to be marketed directly to consumers. Therefore, all marketing efforts are directed toward the intermediary, i.e., doctors.
Naturally then, the marketing strategy for pharma products has traditionally been built around the unique attributes of the product, primarily functional or clinical differences in chemical composition.
However, Searle was a company known to take the road less traveled. Most recently, Searle’s brand Morcet, an SSRI antidepressant, had caused quite a stir in the medical fraternity with its highly emotional and hard-hitting campaign on depression.
Morcet: Don’t Hide Your Depression Behind a Mask
By 2020, Covid-19 had wreaked havoc on people’s mental health. According to research published in the medical journal ‘The Lancet Regional Health’, depression rates had tripled within just a year of the pandemic. The brunt of it was felt by the healthcare community who were relentlessly fighting the battle on the frontlines and its impact was felt most strongly in the lives of their loved ones, especially their children.
Building on this insight, Morcet’s team designed a campaign pivoting on the mental health of the healthcare professional (HCP), highlighting how the children of depressed parents are more likely to suffer from depression in their own adulthood. Instead of single-mindedly pushing tangible attributes of the product, the campaign focused on relatability, humanizing medical professionals, and encouraging them to seek immediate treatment and support, i.e., ‘don’t hide your depression behind a mask.’
As a result, Morcet grew by a whopping 40% in terms of units and value and its market share increased by 1% within a year. By creating a narrative around self-care and convincing the medical fraternity to ‘water the tree that bears fruits for others’ Morcet had carved out a place in their hearts.
However, this wasn’t the first time Searle had taken the emotional route to doctors’ prescription notes. Morcet’s success came with a long history of trials, errors, and evolution.
Company History
Searle, a pharmaceutical company, was established in Pakistan in 1965 as a subsidiary of G. D. Searle USA. It operated as a multinational till 1993 when, as per international policy, G.D. Searle Co divested the business internationally. Searle was then acquired by the IBL Group and converted into a public limited company with 100% Pakistani ownership.
Like in every transition, teething issues were expected, and the change of ownership brought new and formidable challenges with it. Over the years, Searle had to deal with problems on multiple fronts, from an ineffective field force and low team morale to low production, low sales, and limited turnover, and resultantly, a weak and unfavorable corporate image.
These problems were perhaps also aggravated by a company culture that was increasingly becoming fragmented, siloed, and inconsistent. By 2007, despite its prominent roots, superb product line, and thriving past, TSCL was ranked 14th among pharmaceutical companies in Pakistan. The cracks in the wall had become too evident to ignore and without drastic intervention, the outlook seemed bleak at best.
After a careful appraisal of the situation, Mr. Rashid Abdullah, Chairman of Searle, decided to undertake a complete restructuring of the organization; the goal was to stop the downward spiral and make a successful turnaround. In 2008, a highly skilled management team led by Syed Nadeem Ahmed got onboarded and assigned the mammoth task of not only restoring Searle to its former glory but also carving out a sustainable path to long-term growth for the business.
Ushering in a New Era for Searle
With decades of pharmaceutical experience behind him, Mr. Nadeem knew this would be a steep uphill climb. A thorough appraisal of the status quo had revealed that the challenges run deeper than they seemed on the surface, and a multi-pronged approach was imperative to tackle them.
The management was cognizant of the fact that a good product is necessary for survival but on its own, insufficient to thrive. They also firmly believed that a company’s vision and corporate culture form the backbone of an organization and provide a framework for every aspect of the business to build upon. Until now, TSCL was primarily focused on pitching the product, making the sale, and meeting the profit bottom line, reflecting an amorphous vision loosely tethered to numbers and targets. The new strategy would require a complete deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction of the organization’s culture, people’s mindsets, and the company’s marketing philosophy.
The latest research revealed a paradigm shift in the way successful businesses operate all around the globe. While technology had automated and taken over many human tasks, products were also becoming increasingly homogenized. To stay relevant and more importantly, to stand out, businesses had to focus on the one thing that makes them unique: the human element.
In response to these new market dynamics, global leadership now laid greater emphasis on their organization’s people, purpose, and potential. Marketing management orientation was evolving from product concept to marketing concept, with the focus shifting from making the best products to fulfilling customer needs in the best possible way. Armed with these valuable insights, the management at TSCL developed a comprehensive corporate repositioning strategy to be operationalized across key contact points: company, team, and products.
On the HR front, several steps were taken to develop a positive growth mindset among team members. New HR policies and systems were devised, and a comprehensive Learning and Development Plan was implemented across organizational hierarchies. More importantly, the field force underwent an intensive training program to help them change their business development approach from being sales-centric to being more value-centric.
Searle’s Adaptation of a New Marketing Paradigm
The most significant development was felt on the marketing side of the business.
With time, especially in the subcontinent, most pharma products became largely indifferentiable. When a product’s patent expires after ten years, the market gets flooded with hundreds of generic versions of the same chemical formula, and in the process, the product loses its competitive edge, which is its ‘unique composition’ for a patented product.
Even though TSCL had a wide range of successful products in its portfolio, it was becoming increasingly hard to keep up with the numbers, especially in the face of competition from hundreds of other brands selling the same chemical composition. According to the feedback from the sales field force, HCPs were showing symptoms of a ‘paradox of choice’ - a draining and undesirable effect of too many undifferentiated products to choose from.
In a watershed moment, Searle decided to redesign its differentiation and positioning strategy to focus on emotional value and relevance rather than claiming functional superiority. The idea was to break through the clutter by defying conventions and creating an entirely new and evolved brand perception for products, one that was more personal, trustworthy and relatable.
Extor: I Need You
Extor, an anti-hypertensive drug, was the first brand in Searle’s portfolio to be marketed via the new differentiation strategy. By 2015, as rival brands flooded the market, the brand
team decided to delve deeper into the consumer’s mind to unearth insights that would allow them to rise above the competition and connect with consumers on a different level altogether.
Research revealed that hypertension is the leading cause of death in Pakistan and most prevalent among middle-aged men, who interestingly, also represent the largest segment of HCPs in the country.
Further qualitative analysis pointed out that since HCPs have extremely stressful and busy lifestyles, their families suffer emotionally, feeling left out and ignored.
This led to a campaign called ‘I Need You’, highlighting the family unit and how their well-being is directly related to the physical and emotional health of the adults or heads of the family.
Through this message, Extor was able to engage HCPs on a deep, emotional level and pull at their heartstrings; after all, doctors are also humans, with loving families who have the same needs as everyone else’s. As a result of this campaign, Extor grew from a PKR 500 million brand to a PKR 1 billion brand within a year, and to PKR 2.3 billion by 2022.
Nuberol Forte: Let’s Educate Pakistan
Emboldened by the effectiveness of this new positioning strategy, Searle decided to follow the same route for their analgesic brand Nuberol Forte. This time, the goal was to create a brand perception that resonated with people’s core values of kindness, compassion, and empathy.
Keeping Nuberol Forte in the spotlight, TSCL launched a CSR campaign called ‘Let’s Educate Pakistan’ in collaboration with The Citizen’s Foundation, a leading non-profit organization working in the education sector. Using the analogy of illiteracy as a national ‘pain point’ and literacy as the remedy for ‘pain relief’, the company conceived the Searle-TCF Story. The story highlighted Searle’s contribution and efforts toward providing quality education to underprivileged children thus enabling them to lead better, healthier, and happier lives.
The campaign was supplemented by a comprehensive integrated marketing communications plan and brand activations that embodied the brand’s values of kindness and compassion. For instance, sun sheds and umbrellas were erected in waiting areas of public hospitals to provide the public with much-needed relief from the scorching summer heat. These efforts not only increased Nuberol Forte’s brand awareness among the primary target market i.e., the medical fraternity but also indirectly established top-of-mind recall and positive brand associations in the minds of the end consumers.
Nuberol Forte was able to garner massive goodwill and build positive brand associations leading to unprecedented growth from PKR 331 million in 2013 to PKR 2 billion in 2021.
The Outcome
Overall, Searle moved up in the pharmaceutical industry in Pakistan from being #14 in terms of value in 2007 to #4 in 2022 with an annual growth rate of over 16%. In terms of volume, Searle shot past competition to become one of the market leaders in the pharma industry.
Moreover, the company migrated from one plant to nine to keep up with a growing product portfolio and increased market demand. Today the company is known as one of the most agile marketing and sales organizations in the country with footprints in more than 22 countries across the globe and joint production facilities in Switzerland, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, and Oman.
What is the Way Forward?
Zara was aware that for Searle, trying to change the narrative around pharmaceutical products was a smart but risky move. Luckily, it turned out to be a masterstroke for the company. The brands managed to break through the clutter of standard cookie-cutter messages that doctors had become habituated to and stood out prominently in an entirely new and unpopulated playing field: the doctors’ hearts! Searle had forged deeper, stronger, more meaningful connections with the medical fraternity.
Most recently, Morcet was another success story that strengthened the case for emotional branding. ‘Is this the winning formula for pharmaceutical marketing?’ Zara wondered as she heard her name being called out from behind the reception desk.
Questions to stimulate conversation on the case
- Do you think emotional branding is a sustainable strategy for pharmaceutical products?
- Find examples of complex or high-involvement products where emotional branding has been successful.
- Why is it essential for marketers to listen to customers at every stage of the decision-making process?
Links and media
Website: https://www.searlecompany.com/