Having the courage to change, predicts Otsuka’s Bob Oliver in this month’s cover story, “is what’s going to make or break a lot of companies in the next decade.”

Put another way: industry, disrupt thyself. There are too many external forces vying to do that for you. You might say we’ve taken the self-disruption theme seriously ourselves.

This month we will debut a restyled MM&M logo on our website, in a mobile-friendly, redesigned email newsletter, and on the cover of our magazine.

That logo restyling includes a more contemporary typeface, and a shorter name, now appearing without the Medical Marketing & Media descriptor.

Research among our readers showed they know us quite well as MM&M (the longer moniker will remain in usage in certain places within the magazine). Thus, to new audiences, we’ll rely solely on the three-letter abbreviation.

There are more reasons, but first, allow me to recap some of our other recent editorial changes.

Since launching two years ago, MM&M’s annual Top 40 Healthcare Transformers list has become a reader staple for its prescient look at the people facilitating this industry’s historic shift. We’ve moved the feature to May to better align with our spring conference, MM&M Transforming Healthcare, taking place May 1, 2017, in NYC.

See also: MM&M launches search for 2017 Healthcare Transformers

January 1 still marks the start of Transformers season. The call for T40 nominations has launched, and this month’s content includes three future-oriented features: a spotlight on the innovation hotbed that is Japanese pharma, health-tech predictions from the 2015-2016 Transformers, and a look at how the industry is adopting a data-science culture.

The latter comes on the heels of MM&M’s Big Data for Big Decisions: Making Digital Work for Healthcare, in December. The standing-room-only crowd heard presentations on how to avoid fraud with programmatic ad buying, and where not to advertise: the electronic health record (EHR), for one, an Eli Lilly exec declared.

Read the story: An EHR strategy can’t be measured in clicks, says Lilly exec

There are data solutions beyond what marketing can do in these areas, so we’re maintaining an intense focus on digital disruption, even causing a little of our own. Which brings me back to the logo.

The phrase medical marketing conjures thoughts of sales reps detailing doctors, backed by extant marketing and media buys. We’re proud of our heritage, but that’s an image to which younger readers — who weren’t raised on “medical marketing” but feel part of the “health marketing” scene — may not be able to relate.

Moreover, as the industry has evolved, our editors and reporters have applied their authoritative journalism coverage to a wider remit encompassing not only commercial pros working in the biopharma, devices, and diagnostics fields, but also the greater universe of stakeholders with whom our core readers interface: patients, payers, physicians, health-tech startups, and big tech, as well as nontraditional players.

The new logo, sans the spelled-out version, conveys that bigger remit. We’re now known simply as MM&M, but those three letters mean more than ever. 

Feel free to email me at [email protected] if you have feedback about our new logo, streamlined name, or email newsletter redesign. I’d appreciate your thoughts.


Marc Iskowitz is editor in chief of MM&M.