The New Leadership Marketing
By Louis Garguilo, Chief Editor, Outsourced Pharma
Marketing today centers on the demonstration of active leadership and its promotion.
This traces back to the (still-practiced) art of “product and category leadership” (exemplified by Jack Welch at GE), which itself has coalesced around the progressive concept of “thought leadership.” You, your brand, and your company are only as good as the ideals you instill in your products and services, and deliver to your customers, markets, and society.
But that’s not enough nowadays. Moreover, thought leadership is regressing to a form of self-parody, practiced by reading into ubiquitous “word clouds,” rushing us towards narrower consumer-feedback loops on which to base broad strategic direction, and enlisting more advertising platitudes.
Yes, always focus on and listen intently to customers and markets. Yet these customers – general consumers, patient groups, supply-chain partners, society overall – are asking for more than to be heard. They crave leadership clarified through the actions of the individuals asking them to purchase their products and services, and the companies vying for their brand loyalty. Words alone don’t work anymore; listening isn’t leading.
Leadership Marketing
This isn’t a condemnation of thought leadership. It’s an attempt to move it from a state of stagnation. Thought leadership needs to drive authentic action. And these actions shouldn’t be left to speak for themselves (although they do at times): leadership-driven behaviors should be promoted. The behaviors themselves and their skilled promotion combine to positively impact today’s discerning customers, if indeed both clarify corporate intent and direction.
At the forefront of all this is the acceptance of market risk, and the fortitude to take sides on matters of society, industry, science and technology, and on behalf of consumers. (Doesn’t all corporate leadership include such calculated risk?) Here’s a recent example:
Whether you agree or not – and a lot of us disagree, wherein lies the risk in leadership – Apple stuck by its decision not to assist the U.S. government in hacking into a terrorist’s iPhone to gather intelligence. The company is sincere in actuating its thought leadership. If today, to brand effectively is to show why you exist for customers, Apple demonstrates how it both serves and leads through its products and services, and the actions surrounding them.
In our biopharma industry, demonstrating leadership has meant deciding ahead of others to build-out a state-of-the-art facility, because you believe in a new technology and new drug category for patients. It has meant enacting controversial, corporate-level decisions that impact the entire industry, and send a message to governments/politicians on matters as diverse as international trade, regulatory practices, product pricing, and tax policy. It has meant expanded collaborations with competitors – or the entire healthcare industry – to understand and apply important scientific breakthroughs, and shared best practices for overcoming new challenges to product reliability and consumer safety.
More simply, leadership marketing might be demonstrated by a name.
Leading With A Name
A recent event I attended in Manhattan was a catalyst for (finally) setting down these thoughts on leadership marketing. Actually, this goes back to an article from July of 2014 with then newly appointed AAIPharma/Cambridge Major Labs CEO Stephan Kutzer. In the article, I wrote that if anything, the new company was in need of a new name (i.e., branding). Some twenty months later, Kutzer was staging a public relations event to unveil the choice, at the famous Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Plaza. The event included an initial press conference, an impressive party for a cross-section of the biopharma industry, and after much detailing of process and meaning, the literal unveiling of a new name and logo: Alcami.
What’s the importance here? First, Kutzer recognized that his new leadership would not have been embodied in the trotting out of a new name and brand until after he was confident his company was fully integrated and strengthened, and would live up to everything envisioned for it. Next, he believed revealing the name warranted the time, money, human resources, and occasion to personally explain the creation of the new brand – Alcami’s COO, CFO and other executives were in attendance, available for discussion and on the record – and how it portrayed their intended leadership of the entire outsourcing industry and its individual customers.
I’ll leave here with this aside: The event had the authentic feel and purposefulness of the public relations I learned to practice while studying the field at university nearly 35 years ago. Perhaps the “new” leadership marketing isn’t so new after all.
Conferences Left Behind
Another catalyst for this editorial has been building over time, and is part of the stagnation I mentioned earlier: the status of our industry’s well-known conferences and exhibitions.
If leadership clarified by authentic action and adequately promoted is the new marketing, you won’t fit the bill anymore by attending massive conferences and their accompanying seller-buyer exhibitions. Today, long hallways of shiny booths appear more as artifacts of a past era than symbols of commerce.
Leadership nor marketing is enacted by sitting through voluminous PowerPoint presentations, or participating on pseudo-panels that are little more than brief afterthoughts to those presentations. So here’s a judgment for which I’ll certainly receive a degree of censure: In their current state, many of the conferences of the biopharma industry that we’ve attended for years are not a part of today’s leadership marketing.
The good news: Other conferences and meetings are arising, forming more intimate and impactful leadership communities. This is where authentic discussion between panelists is equaled by the energetic participation of attendees. All involved are leading by calling out inauthentic practices and calling for more enlightened activities. At these new venues, for example, pharma and biotechs engage directly, at times provocatively, in dialogue with contract research, development and manufacturing organizations.
We’re leaving the caverns of booth barkers and getting down to business with leaders … and the new business of leadership marketing. Perhaps we’ll see you there soon.