Pharmaceutical Scientists Could Teach Us A Thing Or Two About Marketing

The invention of penicillin has be one of the top 10 medical breakthroughs of all time. But no matter how significant of a breakthrough it may have been, antibiotics have had to be constantly changed and updated because bacteria continuously mutate to the point where they're no longer neutralized by an old antibiotic concoction. So, pharmacists are constantly researching the latest mutations and even building algorithms to forecast what could happen next - just to stay one step ahead and keep patient's healthy.

Imagine if throughout history, though, that as the bacteria mutated to become stronger and more resistant to antibiotics, doctors and drug companies saw this and thought like today's advertisers - "I'm not sure we want to try something new. We've never done it before and we don't know if it will work." Meanwhile, patients would be getting more and more sick.

It's the doctors' and pharmacists' jobs to stay one step ahead in this race because it's their business to protect human life. It's the advertiser's job to keep pace with consumer's changing media habits and respond to these changes with the newest media "medicine" required to drive their business. Pharma does this because their business - patients - could die. Without change, won't your business die?

New media adoption by consumers and their subsequently altered lifestyle should be on the docket at every agency/client meeting during this fast-paced time of change. By and large, it's not. Just like the bacteria in the analogy, consumers are changing their media habits every day without any regard to whether or not advertisers are keeping up with them. What if advertisers thought, "forget about my comfort zone, let's go get the consumers wherever they are"? Then, finding consumers who are ready to buy might be much easier than trying to find a bacterium 1/1000 the size of the period at the end of this sentence.