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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16120

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Comer B.
Don't look for the logo to boost reputation, says Pfizer PR
Medical Marketing & Media 2009 Jul 28
http://www.mmm-online.com/Dont-look-for-the-logo-to-boost-reputation-says-Pfizer-PR/article/140710


Full text:

Authenticity and earned media trump slick corporate ads when it comes to bolstering corporate reputation, said Pfizer’s Sally Susman.

Speaking at a PR summit at Pfizer HQ yesterday, Susman, SVP and chief communications officer for Pfizer, emphasized the importance of “return on reputation” and said corporate ads don’t work.

“If we pay, it’s immediately tainted,” said Susman, describing the reputational challenges Big Pharma must contend with in terms of public reception. “I don’t want my logo on things.” She noted that Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer found public trust of healthcare providers plunged this year.

As an alternative, Susman pointed to Pfizer’s “Maintain” program, which offers free prescriptions to customers that were laid off prior to January 1, 2009. The program was initiated by George Puente, a doctor and regional president of worldwide pharmaceuticals at Pfizer, who conceived of the idea and served as a spokesman for its launch. “George is not a slick spokesman,” said Susman, emphasizing the importance of authentic storytelling as a communication strategy.

Addressing the sour reputation of pharma, which the public views as “greedy, arrogant and deceitful people who care only about money,” Susman countered that Pfizer “does care about profits, but we spend a lot more time talking about science, health and prevention.”

Instead of focusing solely on ROI as a metric for successful PR, Susman suggested the addition of an ROR metric: return on reputation.

Susman was speaking at a conference hosted by ExL Pharma on July 27 – 28.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909