Frankly Speaking: Jethro Marsh talks industry challenges and commercial effectiveness

May 15


In this instalment of Frankly Speaking, Bridget Ash, Founder of Frankly Pharma, sits down with Jethro Marsh. Jethro is an experienced commercial leader who has worked in a range of industries, including his recent role as the Head of Strategy and Solutions at Roche Diagnostics Australia.

Join us for this insightful conversation about industry challenges, changing customer expectations, and pathways forward to more effective commercial healthcare strategies.
You've worked in a range of different industries, so I'd be curious to know what you think pharma and healthcare companies can glean from the commercial and marketing strategies of other industries?
I think the biggest challenge for healthcare and pharma is that a lot of the time people work in those industries with a very, very strong personal connection to the thing that they're doing, which then relates to the commercial opportunities and strategies that they formulate. They have a much stronger personal investment in not just the outcome, but also in the things that are going to be done to achieve that outcome. So, I think learning a little bit more in terms of the retro process and adapting, providing constructive feedback and developmental feedback in a way that diffuses the personal connection when defining the strategy, would help the commercial strategy definition be a lot faster and probably more effective.



In a lot of ways pharma and healthcare suffer from exactly the same challenge as every single other industry that I've worked in, which is the idea that every other industry might be able to do these things in this way, but our industry is special and different.  But that's never the case.

All of our organisations are focused on servicing shareholders - that's the primary function of a commercial entity. And we do that by selling and providing goods and services to individuals for money. When you boil it down to that level, everything on top of that, all of the strategies, all of the commercial opportunities that you can take and all of the ways that you can approach communicating value to a customer, they start to make a lot more sense across any industry.
To your point about taking the personal bias out of the planning process, do you think key to that is more robust research and data to base the decisions on? Or how do you think people could remove their personal bias?
Look, it's a challenge. I can tell you at a previous company I worked in; the comment was passed down from the managing director that they don't believe in digital. Now, it's interesting not specifically because of the individual or even the phrase, but because of what it represents. So we all have perception bias. We look at something and we see it through the lens of our experience and our knowledge. The thing that breaks that perception bias and allows organisations to make more mindful decisions is data and information. I think probably the biggest challenge for anyone in a marketing or in a commercial role is to translate the things that make sense to us into something that makes sense or is relevant or contextual for the audience, for the stakeholder. But data has to be at the core of everything that we look to do, and it needs to be both lead and lag. I think qualitative feedback is always important, but quantitative feedback provides you with far more accurate information to base your decisions on.

There seems to be a lot more qualitative research that happens in pharma, because we tend to do more advisory boards and speaking directly to clinicians through the sales force. This is a really valuable source of insight, but is a much smaller sample size. 
Yes. And I think that in the data and research space, we also need to be mindful of the shift in expectation from the public who are ultimately the people who need the tests or the drugs that healthcare companies provide. There's a shift in expectations from them, and this shift in expectations has happened previously in every other industry.

For example, people were perfectly happy to wait for two days for a delivery, until you could get it same day. And then they were happy with same day until they could get it booked into a two hour slot. People were perfectly happy to recognise in healthcare that it takes years and years to develop tests and get them through all of the approval processes and so on, and to get them into the market. And the same for treatment, and the same for any kind of therapeutic drug. How comfortable are people with that same decades long process now? 
So it's balancing the need to guarantee the highest level of quality and accuracy, but also striving to meet the shift in customer expectations, which have been fundamentally changed in the industry by the speed with which we adapted during the COVID pandemic.
Yes true. The COVID vaccines, were the first time a lot of people got an insight into clinical trials and the approval process for a medicine. Large numbers of people were discussing all of that online, which you wouldn't typically see in a clinical trial.
We've seen a lot of "perception is fact" in during the COVID pandemic. We had a lot of people on Facebook talking about how it was 5G or the government implanting a chip or something, which is factually incorrect. But also, there's been a lot more awareness of the fact that yes, there were long regulatory processes in trials that needed to be gone through, but when push came to shove, actually those processes could be shortcut and could be shortened significantly. And a viable treatment was produced at the end. In fact, several were, and the same for diagnostics. So at some point, people will start to go, well, so if we could do this here, why over here are we still taking this long? Why is COVID more important than, for example, cervical screening, breast cancer or prostate cancer? Why is that we able to do it here, but not here?

It's an interesting point you raised in terms of customer and public expectations. We’ve seen people now expect the same level of communication personlisation from healthcare companies, as they would from a consumer facing business like Amazon. They want us to meet them at a time and place that suits them with highly relevant content. Pharma can't afford to ignore that customer expectation. 
No, exactly. That brings us to another thing we need to consider - our regulations when it comes to what we are and are not allowed to say direct to the public. It’s all well and good, but it presupposes this world where if we decide not to say it, that information does not exist on the internet. But people go onto Google- with its 1.2 trillion searches - a year and find it anyway, because it's available elsewhere. So I think we also need to be mindful when we approach regulatory affairs and when we approach regulation in Australia, that yes we're an island, but we're really not when it comes to information. We are a small part of a massive world, and the information is already available.

And if that information is not there from a reputable source, such as the treatment provider, it's probably going be people’s anecdotal experiences and word of mouth that fill the void.
Exactly. And you think about the rise of influencers on social media over the last few years. There's no requirement for influencers to have any particular background or qualifications. They can say pretty much what they want to say as long as it's not libelous. And people will listen and believe it because they're the influencer, it doesn't have to be factual.

The TikTok Ozempic conversation was an interesting play out of that scenario where not only did you have a huge volume of people talking about this treatment without any clinician input in that conversation, but then it also led to a whole lot of people requesting off-label weight loss prescriptions. The nuance that the treatment was approved for type 2 diabetes didn’t really make its way into a TikTok conversation for some time. 
No, it absolutely didn’t. Probably the most famous example of an influencer who is able to say something that is completely off the charts incorrect when it comes to healthcare and therapeutic goods, would be Donald Trump suggesting people inject bleach to help with COVID. That is a classic example, because there were probably people who believed that. That's quite scary, but it also points to the fact that social media and the availability of all sorts of unmoderated information globally means that some of our regulatory processes may need to be reviewed in that light. It just comes back to not kidding ourselves, we can't close the walls and say, if it's not an Australian TGA approved website or Medicine Australia approved website, no one can ever find it. That's not the reality we live in. 

In the current constraints of our regulatory guidelines, how can teams balance the desire to provide the most useful, current, relevant information and the need to keep campaigns compliant? What specific strategies or tactics can pharma marketers use to balance innovation and compliance? 
It's a real challenge. I can speak primarily from the diagnostic side as I've not been involved on the pharma side, but I think in a similar way to needing to take the individual's bias out of how we achieve the strategy - I think that organisations in healthcare might need to take themselves out of some of their go to market.

For example, let’s look at prostate cancer, and the early diagnosis and then treatment for prostate cancer. Imagine a world where the only effort that every single commercial entity in Australia, that had any relevant product or service in this space, did was devote themselves to educating the public on the importance of early diagnostics and screening for prostate cancer and then on the effective treatment for prostate cancer. We’d have a well-informed, educated population who can go and have well-informed, educated and aware (and early) conversations with their clinicians, and then have better health outcomes because they actually understand the impact of the regular screening and the treatment. In that world, it wouldn't matter whether you talk about your product or service or not.

So, if you take yourself out of it and you just talk to the patients about the things they need to know, which is why diagnostics is important, and how much of a difference it can make to their life, that's probably the most effective thing that we as a healthcare industry could do to change the game in terms of how we communicate. 

Join us for Part Two
In the second part of our interview, Jethro discusses embracing new skills and channels to elevate our communications with patients and customers

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