Pfizer has been grinding out mobile-optimized sites—ten between January and April 2012. At a Mobile Healthcare Communications summit in February, Pfizer’s director of primary care marketing, Todd Kolm, said the strategy was not about backing into mobile. Kolm told MM&M that Pfizer started with the most complex site on the list—Celebrex—and ironed out the potential hurdles at the outset, so that subsequent efforts, including Premarin, Detrol LA and Lyrica, rolled out with relative ease.
Pfizer didn’t schedule its mobile launch based on sales. For example, Celebrex saw $750 million in worldwide sales last year, while fibromyalgia/diabetic nerve pain drug Lyrica, the last of the 10 mobile sites to launch, brought in $1.1 billion last year.
Instead, consumer demand was one of two key drivers of Pfizer’s mobile push. “We saw just through looking at the data on our brand website or desktop site that there had been phenomenal growth within the traffic to those sites from mobile devices,” said Kolm.
The second critical piece was executive buy-in and a cross-marketing approach that focused on the larger regulatory needs of the brand portfolio instead of focusing on individual assets.
Kolm, who chairs the emerging-channel working group said they came up with what could best be described as a “container” that regulatory would vet before content was flowed in, so that a basic template for the company’s mobile sites was established. The “container” was partly based on consumer data, which clarified the patient perspective of what they need and when they need it.
Kolm said consumers may use both the desktop and mobile sites, but a key difference is that mobile users have a single need and need the answer immediately. “The question,” he said, “is, how are we removing barriers?”
All of Pfizer’s primary care brands now have mobile-optimized sites, the company said. Expansion of those sites will be considered on a case-by-case basis, said Pfizer’s Kolm.
From the April 01, 2013 Issue of MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media
